This thesis addresses the need for the Vancouver Art Gallery to expand to accommodate its large and ever-expanding art collection. Situated in the current debate of whether to expand on site or move to a new site altogether, this thesis proposes a contemporary addition to the existing neo-classical building which houses the current Art Gallery. To find opportunity in this historic setting, strategies involving scale and perspective, joining the old and the new, and strengthening the connection of art to the downtown core are explored. The site for this thesis is in central downtown Vancouver, BC. The new addition is located adjacent to the existing Vancouver Art Gallery on City Block 51, which is bounded by Robson, Howe, Hornby and West Georgia Streets.

<p>  </p> <p>The symbolic reference to being in the “beyond” captures how individuals occupying the hybrid space create identities and cultures that extend beyond the dominant pathways recognized in engineering. The fundamental understanding of the cultural theory suggests that hybridity emerges when two cultural identities overlap that were previously discrete. Scholarship focused on hybridity emerged from studies centered on racial, ethnic, and gender identity and has progressed to examine hybridity in learning environments. I draw on fundamental understandings of hybridity to examine how an interdisciplinary engineering program reflects a hybrid space. </p> <p>This dissertation employed an ethnographic case study approach to investigate the following overarching research question: How is the interdisciplinary engineering program characterized as a hybrid space? The corresponding research questions examine how the interdisciplinary engineering programs shape students’ identities, agency, and belonging and what considerations faculty make concerning students identity development, belonging, and agency in the classroom? This study involved the analysis of three streams of interview data and supporting evidence from site documents retrieved from participants and publicly available sources. </p> <p>This within-case analysis resulted in the emergence of four categories of hybrid spaces—a) structural, b) cultural, c) physical, and d) pedagogical. The structural category represents how the interdisciplinary engineering program reflects a hybrid space through its policies, people, and resources. The cultural category represents how the interdisciplinary engineering program reflects a hybrid culture through its core values. The physical category represents how the interdisciplinary engineering program reflects a hybrid space through students’ access and navigation across multiple curricular and co-curricular spaces. The pedagogical category is concerned with the opportunity structures present in the curricular spaces enabling students to author and negotiate their identity as interdisciplinary engineers. Most importantly, the pedagogical category illustrates how the structural, cultural, and physical categories coalesce. By understanding this interdisciplinary engineering program, these insights can provide transferable lessons to new and emerging programs. </p>

Our increasing dependency on the internet has had a significant social, behavioural and psychological impact on us all, and not entirely positive. Networked technologies provide an endlessly-renewing refuge of digital information from the uncertainties of life in the physical world, a potentially addictive and ultimately unfulfilling emotional sanctuary. A compulsive craving for constant connectivity has been normalized by broader trends in public life, including a celebration of hypermediated workaholism, unsustainable consumerism, and a corporatist agenda for commodifying personal data and social conformity.Habitual use of networked digital media is crucial in order to socially and professionally thrive in contemporary society, so exposure cannot be completely curtailed and must be voluntarily monitored and managed at a personal level. Informed by an analysis of related socio-theoretical phenomena and historical counter-strategies, as well as expert interviews and interaction design theory, we explore how this could potentially happen through re-sensitizing the ‘smartness’ and ‘responsiveness’ of the technology itself, to appropriately curb its own misuse.These issues are addressed by a design concept developed through two artifacts: the first, a web-based application; and the second, a semi-functional technology probe and conjectural video prototype. Design is enlisted to explore how rethinking the implementation of digital experiences could potentially re- empower an individual to achieve a temporary liberation from (or at least an increased self-awareness of) their splintered psychological predicament, in the hopes of ultimately guiding them towards a healthier, more balanced relationship with networked media technologies.

Questions have been shown to aid in student understanding of mathematics, particularly "novel" questions (Mesa, Celis, & Lande, 2013) that do not have a predetermined answer. However, students do not always understand what is intended by questions posed by teachers, particularly those students who come from different cultural and lingual backgrounds than those dominant in the classroom discourse. This project investigated the relationship between how a mathematics teacher acknowledged students funds of knowledge in her questions and how Latina/o students responded. It shows some research based questioning techniques that allow Latina/o students greater opportunity to participate in the mathematical problem-solving process and how resulting classroom experience shows evidence of progression toward a hybrid space, as well as factors that limited progression toward a hybrid space. These results yield implications for English-speaking teachers instructing students who are bilingual in English and Spanish at varying degrees of proficiency.

<p>When computational systems become increasingly mobile and ubiquitous, digital information and the use of computational systems may increasingly be immersed into the physical and social world of objects, people and practices. However, the digital, physical and social materials that make up these hybrid spaces have different characteristics and are hard to understand for users. In addition, users are themselves part in constructing and re-constructing the hybrid spaces.</p><p>The main question addressed in this thesis is whether making aspects of the digitally mediated hybrid spaces observable and accessible provides support to users. The observability may provide support for the specific task at hand or help in building an understanding for what the system does and how, an understanding that is needed to explain system output and to cope with service breakdowns. The fundament of the approach is to empower users of computational systems to actively make sense of the system themselves.</p><p>Two prototype services are described, Socifer and MobiTip. Their common denominator was to make digitally mediated parts of the hybrid spaces observable to users. Without disqualifying other kinds of information, the work focussed on digitally mediated social trails of other users.</p><p>Building on experience from the prototype work and an investigation into in seamful design, observability and awareness, I have investigated the effects of making a computational system’s social context observable to users in a way that</p><p>- is separated from the service’s main functionality in the interface, allowing it to become peripheral and non-obtrusive;</p><p>- uses simple models and little interpretation;</p><p>- to some extent opens up the service to allow for user appropriation of both service content and functionality; and</p><p>- is informative rather than proactive in order to empower the user rather than acting on the user’s behalf.</p><p>By designing systems that fulfil these criteria I claim that the user will be supported in performing the task at hand, with or without the service, and that with service use, the user will become more and more aware of the possibilities and limitations of the underlying technology. In addition, the digitally mediated hybrid spaces where physical, social and digital contexts meet constitute application domains in themselves, domains that users may enjoy exploring.</p>

When computational systems become increasingly mobile and ubiquitous, digital information and the use of computational systems may increasingly be immersed into the physical and social world of objects, people and practices. However, the digital, physical and social materials that make up these hybrid spaces have different characteristics and are hard to understand for users. In addition, users are themselves part in constructing and re-constructing the hybrid spaces. The main question addressed in this thesis is whether making aspects of the digitally mediated hybrid spaces observable and accessible provides support to users. The observability may provide support for the specific task at hand or help in building an understanding for what the system does and how, an understanding that is needed to explain system output and to cope with service breakdowns. The fundament of the approach is to empower users of computational systems to actively make sense of the system themselves. Two prototype services are described, Socifer and MobiTip. Their common denominator was to make digitally mediated parts of the hybrid spaces observable to users. Without disqualifying other kinds of information, the work focussed on digitally mediated social trails of other users. Building on experience from the prototype work and an investigation into in seamful design, observability and awareness, I have investigated the effects of making a computational system’s social context observable to users in a way that - is separated from the service’s main functionality in the interface, allowing it to become peripheral and non-obtrusive; - uses simple models and little interpretation; - to some extent opens up the service to allow for user appropriation of both service content and functionality; and - is informative rather than proactive in order to empower the user rather than acting on the user’s behalf. By designing systems that fulfil these criteria I claim that the user will be supported in performing the task at hand, with or without the service, and that with service use, the user will become more and more aware of the possibilities and limitations of the underlying technology. In addition, the digitally mediated hybrid spaces where physical, social and digital contexts meet constitute application domains in themselves, domains that users may enjoy exploring.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Juliana Caetano Neto.pdf: 5965216 bytes, checksum: c4943a44b0fbf91c92b412aad919ca7b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-03-06 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / As the artistic movements, the act of story telling has changed considerably due to technical advances. Mobile devices have influenced the creation of unusual narratives that investigate, among other things, the relationship between space and individual. This essay intends to discuss the changes that this relationship has suffered due to the spread of pervasive computing, and how these changes enabled the emergence of new trends in aesthetic technology. Mobile devices of communication re-invent urban environments, such as multiplayer connected environments independent of the geographical position and physical presence, encouraging the emergence of hybrid spaces, which is defined by the disappearance of borders between physical and virtual and created by a constant mobility of users who use handsets. As theoretical support, the thinking is based on studies of André Lemos, Lúcia Santaella, Milton Santos, Pierre Lévy, and artists such as Jeremy Hight, the English Blast Theory. The essay intends to introduce a scenario of aesthetic technology based on mobile devices and the public spaces, and through an specific case show how is the relationship between narrative and technologies in hybrid spaces / Assim como os movimentos artísticos, o ato de narrar, de contar histórias, também se transformou consideravelmente com os avanços técnicos. Os dispositivos móveis têm influenciado criações narrativas inusitadas e que investigam, entre outras coisas, a relação entre espaço e indivíduo. A presente dissertação discute as transformações que essa relação tem sofrido devido à disseminação da computação pervasiva, e de que forma essas transformações propiciaram o surgimento de novas tendências da estética tecnológica. Os dispositivos móveis de comunicação re-inventam espaços urbanos como ambientes de multiusuários conectados independentemente da posição geográfica e presença física, favorecendo o surgimento de espaços híbridos, ou seja, definidos pelo desaparecimento das bordas entre físico e virtual e criados pela constante mobilidade dos usuários que utilizam aparelhos portáteis. Como referencial teórico, a reflexão se fundamenta nos estudos de André Lemos, Lúcia Santaella, Milton Santos, Pierre Lévy, e artistas como Jeremy Hight e o grupo inglês Blast Theory por ser uma pesquisa de caráter multidisciplinar. O recorte feito visa introduzir um cenário estético tecnológico com dispositivos móveis com foco em espaços públicos e através de um estudo de caso apresentar a relação entre criação narrativa em espaços híbridos

Global mobility, wireless technology and networked society are transforming the airport territory. These changes (hard factors) have been analysed in airport planning and transportation studies (Koll-Schretzenmayr 2003; Banister 2003; Schaafsma 2003; Knippenberger &Wall 2010; Salewski & Michaelli 2011; Convenz & Thierstein ed. 2014 et al) and architecture and design (Edwards 1998; Blow 2005; Cuadra 2002; Uffelen 2012; Gensler 2013 et al). But design strategies focusing on the passenger experience (soft factors) have not yet been thoroughly assimilated by architecture and design. On the theoretical level this dissertation spans the analysis of current methodologies in social studies (e.g. Castells 1996; Gottdiener 2000; Cresswell 2006; Urry, 2007; Elliott & Urry 2010; Adey 2010 et al) and their relation to architectural and urban studies concepts for the airport. The latter includes the “Airport as City” (Güller & Güller 2000), “Aviopolis – A Book about Airports” (Fuller & Harley 2005) and “Aerotropolis” (Kassarda 2010). This dissertation also explores IT and aviation industry interests at the interface between technology and air travellers. In this light aviation industry research and solutions (Amadeus 2011, SITA 2013) are important to consider, as well the philosophy behind who travels and for what purpose (Sloterdijk 1998; Koolhaas 1998; Gottdiener 2000; Urry 2007; Birtchnell & Caletrio 2014 et al). Here, the author’s previous field research at Frankfurt International Airport is relevant. We live more mobile lifestyles, we work in hybrid spaces (Suoza 2006; Duffy 2010 et al), and we consequently need to share information and collaborate differently. Using constant travellers as a case study, the impact of physical and informational mobility on perceptions of and behavioural patterns in the airport can lead to a deeper understanding of mobile work and the air travel experience. New design strategies can be developed from research about constant travellers, and the results may improve their work and air travel experience. The author’s combination of design approaches from architecture and social science (sociology and psychology) methodologies can better address the real needs of constant travellers in hybrid workspaces. It is hoped that this dissertation will inspire airport architects and designers, interaction designers and the aviation industry to pay more attention to users’ needs in their design processes.

Le dimensionnement préliminaire d’un propulseur hybride passe par une phase d’essais à échelle réduite afin de caractériser entre autre la loi de régression du couple oxydant/combustible envisagé pour remplir les besoins de la mission en terme de performances, durée de fonctionnement, etc. Afin de limiter le recours à ces campagnes expérimentales onéreuses et génératrices de délais pour les industriels, il est nécessaire de développer des outils numériques fiables permettant de prévoir rapidement, sous différentes conditions de fonctionnement et géométries de chambre de combustion, la loi de régression d’un couple oxydant/combustible. L’objectif de cette thèse est de proposer une modélisation monodimensionnelle du mécanisme de régression des combustibles liquéfiables. Cette classe de combustibles offre des vitesses de régression trois à cinq fois plus élevées que celles rencontrées avec les combustibles généralement utilisés en propulsion hybride (PBHT par exemple). Ce modèle se base alors sur le transport de la phase gazeuse et du film liquide se développant sur le combustible solide, la vitesse de régression dépendant des transferts de masse et d’énergie entre ces trois phases. Afin de valider cette approche et l’architecture du code Hydres conçu pour la résolution de ce modèle et la prévision des performances propulsives d’un moteur hybride, des campagnes expérimentales ont été réalisées sur les bancs d’essais Hycarre et Hycom. Ces essais ont également permis de développer une technique de mesure permettant l’obtention de la vitesse de régression instantanée du combustible, conduisant à la restitution de la loi de régression instantanée du couple oxydant/combustible. / The preliminary design of a hybrid rocket engine requires lab-scale tests to characterize the regression law of the oxidizer/fuel pair intended to fulfil the mission needs in terms of performances, etc. To limit these costly and potentialy delaying experimental campaigns, it is necessary to develop reliable numerical tools to quickly predict the regression law of the oxidiser/fuel pair under different operating conditions and with different combustion chamber geometries. The objective of the thesis is to develop a one-dimensional model of the regression mechanism of liquefying fuels. These particular fuels offer regression rates three to five times higher than those found with classic polymers used in hybrid propulsion (eg. HTPB). The model is based on the transportof the gaseous flow and the liquid film which is developing along the solid fuel grain. The regression rate depends on mass and energy transfers between these three phases. To validate this approach and the Hydres numerical tool, specifically designed to solve this model and forecast the performances of a hybrid engine, experimental tests were performed with the Hycarre and Hycom facilities. These tests also allowed for the development of a technique to measure the instantaneous regression rate of the solid fuel, providing directly the instantaneous regression law of the oxidizer/fuel pair.

This dissertation aims to position train surfing as a visual spectacle that is practised by Sowetan train surfers within the context of post-authoritarian Johannesburg. The author argues that train surfing is a visual and spatial phenomenon that is theoretically under-researched. As such, this study aims to decode seven train surfing videos to establish what train surfing looks like, where train surfing occurs and why individuals participate in such a high risk activity. This study, furthermore, aims to frame train surfing as a spectacle by investigating the similarities between train surfing and rites of passage (initiation rites). The author also regards train surfing as a very specific form of storytelling. The narratives conveyed in the seven videos are, therefore, interpreted to establish that train surfing is practised to ‘voice’ fatalistic feelings, societal as well as individual crises. After establishing the visual aspects of train surfing, the author focuses on the spatial context of train surfing. Johannesburg is described as both an authoritarian and post-authoritarian construct by tracing the spatial and political history of the city. When the discussion turns to the post-authoritarian city, townships and squatter settlements are analysed as being both marginal and hybrid spaces. It is argued that townships are marginal spaces due to their location, they are inhabited by the underclass and they are formed by processes of capitalism and urbanisation, and as a result of these factors, township residents might have fatalistic mindsets (Gulick 1989). The author, however, contends that township space is an ambivalent construct, and as such, it can also be read as hybrid space. Here, hybrid space is interpreted as a platform from which township residents can resist oppressing spatial and political ideologies. In this context, train surfing is regarded as one way in which train surfers use hybrid space to express tactics of resistance. After establishing the spatial context of train surfing, the socio-economic and material living conditions of train surfers are investigated. The discussion firstly, explores the underclass, as theorised by Jencks and Peterson (1990), and thereafter highlights why train surfers can be classified as being part of this sub-category. It is, furthermore, argued that Sowetan train surfers are part of a new lost generation due to high unemployment rates, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and bleak future outlooks. The author aims to establish that, as a result of their socio-economic status and material living conditions, train surfers are fatalistic, and practice an extreme activity to exert control over one area of their lives, namely their bodies. Lastly, the dissertation aims to explore train surfing as being both a risk-taking activity and a new spatial practice. The dynamics of adolescent risk-taking behaviour is explored by emphasising the psychological motivations behind high risk activities. The author argues that alienating space can be regarded as an additional factor that usher adolescents into risk-taking activities. As such, the place(s) and space(s) inhabited by train surfers, namely Johannesburg, Soweto and township train stations, are discussed as alienating spaces. Moreover, it is argued that alienating spaces create opportunities for resistance (following the power-resistance dialectic inherent to space), and as such, train surfing is interpreted as a de-alienating spatial practice that enables the marginalised train surfer to exert control over his surroundings. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Visual Arts / unrestricted