Materialising Gender-fluidity through Fashion

As the final year comprehensive design project for the Honours Degree of Bachelor of Design, Department of Integrated Design, Faculty of Architecture, University of Moratuwa, I have selected a project which is based upon my own clothing brand. It is an emerging ready-to-wear clothing brand based in Sri Lanka, which was launched in August 2020 through the Colombo Fashion Week named “HARID”. Currently, HARID retails at the Design Collective store in Colombo for a consumer group based upon it. The brand philosophy of HARID is to challenge gender-related stereotypical concepts. As the brand identity, HARID uses heritage craft practices.

Enterprise Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging technology widely used across multiple sectors such as human resources, healthcare, finance, accounting, manufacturing, higher education and supply chain management, etc. RPA, also known as ‘software bots’, replaces manual, rule-based, repetitive tasks humans perform. These software bots are currently in a journey, evolving to be more sophisticated, mimicking human activities and enabling humans to achieve higher-valued tasks. Hence, RPA impacts the overall operational efficiency in organisations through multiple facets by its integration with employees, existing technologies and infrastructure, and business processes. It reduces the burden on IT as it does not disturb the underlying legacy systems. It increases reliability as bots can work 24x7 effectively. It is used as a time and cost reduction technology as it reduces the size of the manual workload. The tasks performed through RPA is accurate as it is less prone to errors. It increases compliances as it follows the rules and keeps audit trails. The productivity rate of organisations increase as the execution time through RPA is faster than tasks being performed by human employees. Furthermore, RPA is introduced as a low code technology that uses drag and drop functionalities with little to no programming knowledge [1].

Enhancing the power of understanding

Power of understanding is a rewarding cognitive capacity required for all of us from early childhood to the highest level of intellectual settings. Among other things, the concept of understanding plays a vital role in education. When I was a second-year undergraduate, I was so curious to know why some of my colleagues could understand subjects much faster than the others, and this curiosity compelled me to research on how understanding manifests in our minds. My literature review revealed that the ultimate happiness/truth stated in Buddhism is a matter of understanding the world differently from the way we do it generally. Literature also showed that many people in Buddha’s time understood the ultimate truth while listening to the discourse of the Buddha. Those who could not understand a matter then and there had to develop certain cognitive skills through various cognitive tasks such as further listening, discussing, thinking, and meditating. This is equally applicable to our educational settings as well because some students understand the subject matter during the lecture itself, while the others need involve in additional reading activities, discussions, tutorial work, and so on.

Microalgae: A promising bioresource for a sustainable future

Microalgae are highly diverse unicellular photosynthetic organisms found in aquatic environments. Microalgae produce oxygen during their proliferation, contributing to nearly 50% of the total oxygen production in the world. Concurrently, microalgae consume carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thereby serving as carbon sinks to alleviate the effects of global warming. In comparison to terrestrial plants, microalgae exhibit rapid growth rates, higher photosynthetic efficiency, shorter harvesting time and higher biomass productivities. Moreover, they do not require arable land or potable water to facilitate their growth, hence becoming a more sustainable feedstock as compared to conventional crops. Altogether, microalgae have been identified as a bioresource with great industrial potential due to their ability to accumulate commercially valuable metabolites that can be extracted and subsequently processed into diverse bioproducts such as biofuels, pharmaceuticals/nutraceuticals, biofertilizer and animal feed.

Consumption of chilled water stored in a PET bottle multiple times: are we quenching thirst or gulping phthalates?

The statistics forecast that the production of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles worldwide in 2016 was about 485 billion, and the same in 2021, has been approximately 583 billion. Although such productions in many countries have the ear of prominent political and social leaders, high production rates still reign the global market. In parallel, revered scientists globally conflate plausible and incontrovertible medical canons against the use of PET bottles for the protection of public health. Nevertheless, unwashed masses worldwide dislodge or disparage such public health doctrine but face a myriad of health hazards. For many years, mainly beneath the public’s ignorance, the solid collective rhetoric expressed by PET-bottle manufacturing companies has not let such medical dogma take hold in the society, instead purposefully manipulated the market with conflating pure baloneys or fallacies.

Curating Kandyan traditional clothing in the UNESCO world cultural heritage in digital paradigm

Historical notions of cultural values in the heritage sector have been identified by holders of curatorial expertise based at institutions with large collections of artifacts. However, the rise of new digital technologies has facilitated not only active two-way engagement with heritage, but also a broadening of what we mean by heritage and how it can be accessed, through the co-production of exhibitions, oral histories, and other forms of display and archive based on personal remembrance, recollection and interactivity.

Impacts of the first COVID-19 Lockdown on Mobility and Consumption of Households in Sri Lanka: Results of a Survey

Sri Lanka was introduced to an unnamed virus on 27th January 2020 when a Chinese tourist was diagnosed with it [1]. Within 8 weeks, the virus named COVID-19 had begun infecting the local population, and the government was taking measures to prevent its spread in Sri Lanka. The government imposed an all-island curfew on 20th March 2020 [2]. Starting from 20th March, the government encouraged Work-from-Home (WFH) and allowed agricultural activities while imposing restrictions on all physical movements [3]. With curfew, the government allowed the distribution of essential items and goods transport through issuing curfew passes. In spite of these measures, people faced many hardships during this time. The department of Transport and Logistics Management, Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa, conducted a survey on 12th April and completed on 20th April 2020, during a period that the country was having curfew almost all the time. The purpose of this survey was to determine the immediate impact that the government’s steps had on the people’s lives and their impressions on the future. Over 1100 respondents from all districts of the country took part in the online and email survey. As this would return a biased sample, we normalised the collected data across the districts and by educational profile to make the representation as accurate as possible [4]. The analysis led to the following 3 noteworthy findings that would be useful for any future emergency or return to curfew if the need so arises.

Is cues of contagious diseases in advertising a friend or foe?

Dr (Mrs.) Achini Ranaweera, a Senior lecturer from the Department of Textile and Apparel Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Dr (Mrs.) Amali Wijekoon, a Senior lecturer from the Department of Management Technology, Faculty of Business in collaboration with two international researchers from Australia and the UK are all geared up to examine if cues of contagious disease in advertisements can influence consumption behaviour by eliciting negative emotions such as anxiety, disgust, and fear.

Cognitively Intelligent Models for Human-Robot Interaction with MIRob

This research explores how a robot should gather knowledge upon a scenario between a robot and its user and then generate appropriate intelligent responses towards its user. Therefore, cognitive models were developed to act as a robot’s intelligence or the brain to make situation-specific decisions. Such insightful decisions will help the robot act in a social environment without disturbing its user or other humans around.

Increasing the Political Involvement and Political Literacy of Sri Lankan Youth: A Communication Design Aspect

Majority of the younger generation of Sri Lanka in particular have a very low regard for the whole subject of politics. The reason for this has been the political dysfunction that they witness in their day-to-day lives. The most common dialogue they hear concerning politics is one where the older generations acknowledge that the political landscape is an utter mess.