Design Workshops as a Tool for Informal Architectural Education

Although the design studio has formally been the locus for design education, informal education approach has gained more and more acceptance in the world. Informal education, which is the education outside the confines of curricula, includes the acquisition of knowledge and skills through experience, reading, social contact, etc. Workshops cover the essential weight of this informal education. Although the role of the design workshops in architectural design education has been very limited through overall design education’s past, many schools of architecture have taken steps to consider workshops as the part of informal learning and education. “Culture and Space in the Build environment” (CSBE) Network of IAPS have been organizing “culture and design workshop series” for graduate and post graduate students in Turkey since 2001. In these workshops, a design teaching approach based on the conceptual framework of culture and space interactions is applied. The conceptual framework developed for the architectural design education, takes three fundamental starting points for workshops as the part of informal design education: as a tool for informal design education (method), as a tool for learning & understanding culture-environment relations (content), and as a tool for awareness of different environments/contexts (scale/place). The foundation of the conceptual framework is based on the general approach that discusses the “architectural design process” with regards to environmental context and content. Within this context the aim of the paper is to discuss and evaluate the importance and the contribution of workshops as tool for informal architectural design education. These discussions will be held on the case of IAPS-CBSE Network’s last workshop “Istanbul as a Palimpsest City and Imperfection”. In the paper, the process, the method, the content and the results of workshop studies will be discussed and evaluated.

A Lifespan Developmental-Stage Approach to Tobacco and Other Drug Abuse Prevention

At least by informal design, tobacco and other drug abuse prevention programs are tailored to human developmental stage. However, few papers have been written to examine how programming has been formulated as a function of developmental stage throughout the lifespan. In this paper, I briefly define lifespan development, how it pertains to etiology of tobacco and other drug use, and how prevention programming might be constructed by five developmental stages: (a) young child, (b) older child, (c) young teen, (d) older teen, and (e) adult (emerging, young-to-middle and older adult substages). A search of the literature on tobacco and other drug abuse prevention by developmental stage was conducted, and multiple examples of programs are provided for each stage. A total of 34 programs are described as examples of each stage (five-young children, 12-older children, eight-young teens, four-older teens, and five-adults). Implications for future program development research are stated. In particular, I suggest that programming continue to be developed for all stages in the lifespan, as opposed to focusing on a single stage and that developmentally appropriate features continues to be pursued to maximize program impact.

Organizational Contexts

All leaders are embedded in a community context. In this book, the authors consider leaders in organizational contexts. This chapter provides a historical literature review of key developments with regard to academic and practitioner theorizing about organizational contexts of business leaders, the main body of the chapter being structured around organizational mission, strategy, structure, culture, and organizational lifecycle. This chapter provides an outline of the growth of the strategic planning area within organizations which typically emphasized rationality and employed analysis rather than synthesis. The key schools of thought that have evolved over the past six decades or more range from the informal design school which gradually ceded ground to the emergent and more formalized strategic planning school. There have since been a number of others such as the cognitive school, the learning school, the political school, the cultural school, the environmental school, and the configuration school.

Assessing the Consistency of the Design of Iranian Websites with Cultural Characteristics of their Target Users: An Investigation of the Hofstede Model

The influence of culture on the design of websites has been researched extensively. A group of researchers has implemented Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions as a proper framework to study this subject. The literature supports that cultural characteristics of the Hofstede model are significantly present in the design of websites. It also suggests that making a website compatible with the cultural characteristics of the target users facilitates effective interaction of the users with the websites. Building upon these observations, the present study has investigated the impact of Iranian culture on the design of Iranian university websites. We have measured the consistency of their design with the cultural characteristics of their target users and studied the possible improvements brought about by a culturally harmonious design. To this end, one sample t-test method is applied to compare the scores given by the end users for each cultural dimension, with the scores of the Hofstede model to measure the level of consistency. The results suggest that the design of Iranian university websites represents a more collectivistic and masculine culture with higher indices of power distance than what is specified in the Hofstede model and a change towards a more individualistic, elegant and informal design is necessary for the websites to improve their conformance to the cultural elements of Iranian users and improve their experience. To our knowledge, the present paper is novel in two aspects: firstly, it focuses on the case for Iran, which has not been extensively studied before; secondly, it makes a parallel study to measure the users’ preferences and compares it to the predictions made by the Hofstede model.