This thesis applies a design programming process to users with multiple, severe disabilities. The goal is to increase independent functioning, self-efficacy and competency through design. The example used in this thesis is the design of day program facilities for adults with multiple, severe disabilities. The existing state of disability in the United States is analyzed. This includes the models of disabilities, historical aspects of the disability movement, the design professions' response, multiple disabilities and day program facilities. Hershberger's Value-Centered programming process is discussed. Its' determinants of architecture are applied to day program facilities and the consumers who attend such programs. Generalized values and issues are presented as background information and applied to a hypothetical design project for a day program facility. Future applications and research are recommended to facilitate the process of including users with special needs in the design programming process.

<p> Clothing serves as material evidence of the mental space we occupy. My designs are inspired by the man-made landscapes that surround me and I apply those patterns to the landscape of the body.</p><p> Like graphic design, fashion is a medium employed to convey messages and ideas. It is an expression of identity that is established through color, form, pattern and texture. My work seeks to synthesize human geography with graphic design in order to clothe the body and thus, fabricate identity.</p>

<p>With the advent of ubiquitous computing, interaction design has broadened its object of inquiry into how smart computational artifacts inconspicuously act in people's everyday lives. Although user-centered design approaches remains useful for exploring how people cope with interactive systems, they cannot explain how this new breed of artifacts participates in people's sociality. User-centered design approach assumes that humans control interactive systems, disregarding the agency of smart artifacts. </p><p> Based on Actor-Network Theory, this research recognizes that artifacts and humans share the capacity of influencing society and meshing with each other, constituting hybrid social actors. From that standpoint, the research offers a triadic structure of networked social interaction as a methodological basis to investigate how smart devices perceive their social setting and adaptively mediate people's interactions within activities. </p><p> These triadic units of analysis account for the interactions within and between human-nonhuman collectives in the actor-network. The <i>within interactions</i> are those that hold together humans and smart artifacts inside a collective and put forward the collective's assembled meaning for other actors in the network. The <i>between interactions</i> are those that occur among collectives and characterize the dominant relational model of the actor-network. </p><p> This triadic approach was modeled and used to analyze the interactions of participants in three empirical studies of social activities with communal goals, each mediated by a smart artifact that enacted &ndash; signified &ndash; a balanced distribution of obligations and privileges among subjects. </p><p> Overall, the studies found that actor-networks exhibit a <i>social viscosity</i> that hinders people's interactions. This is because when people try to collectively accomplish goals, they offer resistance to one another. The studies also show that the intervention of smart artifacts can facilitate the achievement of cooperative and collaborative interaction between actors when the artifacts enact the dominant moral principles which prompt the <i>preservation of social balance</i>, enhance the network's <i> information integrity</i>, and are located at the <i>focus of activity. </i> </p><p> The articulation of Actor-Network Theory principles with interaction design methods opens up the traditional user-artifact dyad towards triadic collective enactments by embracing diverse kinds of participants and practices, thus facilitating the design of enhanced sociality. </p>

Forced migration caused by violence affects the city development. It affects the facility to have public services, pushes the problem of dwelling and extents the zones of marginal urban settlements. In Colombia, these displaced people have moved toward the big cities, especially Bogota. The new population has been concentrated in the south part of the city beyond its limits and the population is to expand towards the mountain. This displaced population has been settled in the lower part of the mountain, in the zone between the historic center (urban) and the mountain (nature). The mountain is an important natural resource that surrounds the city and serves as a transition between city and nature. This allows enjoying different activities and different scenarios within a close proximity to the city. The new settlements have affected the area due to the inappropriate systems and methods used to build their new houses, consequently the lack of design and infrastructure have brought natural repercussions. Land erosion, is the biggest problem and represents a threaten to the historic zone due to the permanent slides. In order to solve the problem of erosion and to recover the site as an important place of transition between city and nature, the strategy involves the manipulation and design of the landscape establishing specific places and points of infrastructure that can be used by the city for cultural and recreational activities and in which also temporal housing can take place, giving the site different uses and the sense of changing interaction between city and nature.

Mount Hood's Timberline Lodge built in 1936 and 1937 is the realization of the collective goals of the influential Portland businessmen of the Mount Hood Recreational Association, the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, and the Works Progress Administration. The resolution of the sometimes conflicting needs and aspirations of these organizations contributed to the selection of the talented architectural team responsible for the design of the lodge. The consulting architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood participated in the initial development of the Timberline Lodge project, and offered his counsel during the development of the project. As the previously unknown documentation of their background reveals, the Forest Service architects, William Irving Turner, Linn Argyle Forrest, Howard Lester Gifford, and Dean Roland Edson Wright, were men well qualified to carry out the project. The final design of Timberline Lodge is the result of their collaboration.

<p> This study involves conducting a rhetorically configurative analysis of an architectural interior, where `configurative' is defined as a set of visual/spatial interrelations perceived within a given context or framework. Specifically, the purpose of this project is to re-animate not only awareness of context, but also the imagination in its role in the creation of human significance in designing spaces.</p><p> Technological changes in communication directly affect the relevance of rhetoric to the development and continuation of culture. Shifts in rhetorical modalities, therefore, may eventually constitute cross-cultural transitions in sharing experiences. Thus, to maintain continuity of meaning, it becomes incumbent on professional communicators to develop a working familiarity with contemporary socio-cultural changes, particularly those changes that involve a transition from one form of communicative form to another.</p><p> According to rhetorician Ernest Grassi (1980, 1994) culture itself is rhetorical, i.e., a by-product of the human need for the psyche to achieve and, more importantly, to <i>share</i> meaning. For Grassi, this adaptation of nature involves a metaphoric transfer of meaning from inner understanding onto the physical world. To do this, however, there must be some means, some venue, available to create a common connection between the two realms.</p><p> Language has been such a venue, and, print, until recently in the West, has been the predominant communicative modality for the maintenance and transmission of culture. One cultural consequence of this adaptation is that written/printed communications deliberately hold form constant so as not to interfere with the transparent dissemination of information, as content. Electronic modalities, however, complicate this cultural communicative assumption in that: (1) virtual form can no longer be routinely subordinated to content, and (2) `knowledge' when experienced as simultaneous pattern need not be distanced and `provable' to be valid,</p><p> Grassi's understanding of metaphor as the link between rhetoric and culture (1980, 1994), in effect, characterizes metaphor as a hybrid communicative form that bridges the gap between rational/linguistic and aesthetic/configurative forms via human ingenuity. This approach has been explored on the linguistic/rhetorical side as generative criticism (Foss, 2004) where the researcher must create and/or design/construct a singular critical framework through which to interpret an unusual artifact. On the aesthetic/rhetorical side, however, Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky's analytical drawing process and correspondence color theory practicably elucidate design as a communicative system (Poling 1986). </p><p> This proposed visual/spatial analysis of the interior the lobby of the rotunda of Skeen hall is intended to depict an architectural interior as schematized space that will illustrate the processing inherent to Grassi's imagistic first principles, i.e., the <i>archai</i>, remnants of a primordial language (Grassi, 1994) where deductive reasoning fords its source, but that cannot, in and of themselves, be discovered via deduction (Grassi, 1980). In this view, the <i>archai</i> represent the collective sources of <i> ingenium</i> which allow humans to overcome their alienation from nature through the figurative development of human meaning that the rawness of the natural world alone cannot provide.</p>

<p> Parts machined from relatively large thickness cross sections can experience significant deformations from high residual stresses that develop in the part during the heat treatment used to form the aluminum alloy. Uphill quenching is a process that can create a part with low residual stress and stable dimensions when the process is controlled properly. The uphill quenching process involves a solution heat treat, quench, cool to liquid nitrogen, steam blast, and then age to final temper. </p><p> In this thesis two parts were modeled using ANSYS. The first part underwent the uphill quench process in the rough machined state. The second part was modeled in the stock material shape and only underwent a solution heat treat, quench, and age to final temper. After the residual stress in the second part was predicted the excess material was removed by killing the associated elements and the deformation of the final machined part was predicted. For both parts analyzed measurements were made and compared against predictions with fairly good results.</p>

<p> Actors create blocks based in fear, over-intellectualization of acting concepts, and the limiting assumptions they often make from any given theatrical text. Mask work can release the actor out of fear and into a non-intellectualized flow of freedom, expressivity and character transformation. Exploration with the various pedagogies and styles of Mask work can open doors for the actor that other contemporary training methods cannot, and therefore should be considered an essential component of the actor's training process. </p>

<p> Interaction design is the definition of digital behavior, from desktop software and mobile applications to components of appliances, automobiles, and even biomedical devices. Where architects plan buildings, graphic designers make visual compositions, and industrial designers give form to three-dimensional objects, interaction designers define the digital components of products and services. These include websites, mobile applications, desktop software, automobiles, consumer electronics, and more. Interaction design is a relatively new but fast-growing discipline, emerging with the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. In a software-saturated world, every day, multiple times a day, billions of people encounter the work products of interaction design. </p><p> Given the reach of their profession, how interaction designers work is of paramount concern. In considering interaction design, this dissertation turns away from a longstanding question of design studies: <i>How does interaction design demonstrate a special form of human thought?</i> And towards a set of questions drawn from practice-oriented studies of science and technology: <i>What kinds of objects and subjects do interaction design practices make, and how do those practices produce them? </i> </p><p> Based on participant observation at three San Francisco interaction design consultancies and interviews with designers in California's Bay Area, this dissertation argues that performance practices organize interaction design work. By &ldquo;performance practices,&rdquo; I mean episodes of storytelling and narrative that take place before an audience of witnesses. These performances instantiate &mdash; make visible and tangibly felt &mdash; the human and machine behaviors that the static deliverables seem unable on their own to materialize. In doing so, performances of the project help produce and sustain alignment within teams and among designers, clients, and developers. </p><p> In this way, a focus on episodes of performance turns our concerns from cognition, in which artifacts assist design thinking, to one of enactment, in which documents, spaces, tools, and bodies actively participating in producing the identities, responsibilities, and capacities of project constituents. It turns our attention to questions of political representation, materiality and politics. From this perspective, it is not necessarily how designers <i> think</i> but how they stage and orchestrate performances of the project that makes accountable, authoritative decision-making on behalf of clients and prospective users possible.</p>

<p> My thesis work, which consists of a series of small scaled, mixed media constructions, is inspired by the beauty and complexity of the natural world in which we live. There is beauty in the harmony and balance found in the intricate arrangements and order of a variety of living systems such as the rising and falling tides, human DNA structures, life cycles of plants, and the orbits and rotations found in our galaxy. Each work is intended to reveal the density and sophistication of these networks through layers of information and intricate detail. Found wooden cases, drawers, wire, reclaimed metals and recycled plastic, found glass objects, thread, monofilament, and mylar are just a few of the materials I work with to create my sculptures or assemblages. </p><p> The beauty and sophistication of the diverse elements in the natural world have inspired me to create these small scale assemblages or microcosms. Using science and nature as a foundation, I allow my interest in the reuse and transformation of found objects to direct the construction of these intimate environments. I hope the size of the work and layers of visual information entice viewers to explore the spaces and consider the numerous associations evident from my unique orchestration of elements.</p>