There are as many perspectives in designing as there have been instances in which it has occured. In each instance, constraints will have invariably arisen in various forms, to the extent that designing and constraints are considered to be an inherently natural pairing. In addition, they are both affected by the challenges of complexity, amongst many others, which is especially compounded by an increasingly significant shift towards interdisciplinary methods and means of working. This has been in response to the influences and implications with regards to the integrated elements of sustainability and sustainable development. To this effect, the body of research effort presented in this thesis searches for a simpler perspective towards designing, to which constraint-based thinking can be applied. It explores the implications of interdisciplinarity in the context of sustainability and sustainable development. It also considers an example of design-based process within the built environment that is inclusive of multiple disciplines and therefore not only interdisciplinary, but also affected by complexity. In response to these instances of complex interdisciplinary designing, this thesis contributes an exploration of constraint-based thinking and the consideration of an approach which uses design objectives as optimisation constraints, from which a methodology has been created. Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates constraints as useful in understanding, especially in the context of problem structures and their respective design spaces. As a form of constraint, optimisation objectives are also presented in this thesis as a means of exposing and handling complexity when applied as constrained optimisation for focusing designing efforts. Above all, this thesis advocates the use of constraint-based thinking and simplicity towards enhancing and supporting designing process.

Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) has received a lot of attention from academics, policy-makers, and decision-makers alike. RCUK invests £3 billion in research grants each year (RCUK 2017); half of the grants are provided to investigators who hail from different departments. There is mounting awareness of the challenges facing IDR, and a large body of literature trying to establish how IDR can be analysed (Davidson 2015, Yegros-Yegros, Rafols et al. 2015). Of these, the majority have been qualitative studies and it has been noticed that there is a distinct lack of quantitative studies that can be used to identify how to enable IDR. The literature shows that many of the barriers to IDR can be classified as either cultural or administrative (Katz and Martin 1997, Cummings and Kiesler 2005, Rafols 2007, Wagner, Roessner et al. 2011), neither of which are easily changed over a short period of time. The perspective taken in this research is that change can be affected by enabling the individuals who conduct IDR. Herein lies the main challenge; how can these future leaders of IDR be identified so that they can be properly supported. No existing datasets were deemed suitable for the purpose, and a new dataset was created to analyse IDR. To isolate dynamics within an organisation, hard boundaries were drawn around research-organisations. The University of Bath journal co-authorship dataset 2000-2017 was determined to be suitable for this purpose. From this dataset a co-authorship network was created. To analyse this, established models from literature were adapted and used to identify differences in disciplinary and interdisciplinary archetypes. This was done through a correlational study. No statistically significant differences between such author archetypes were found. It was therefore concluded that an alternative approach was necessary. By adapting the networks framework to account for different types of links between edges, a multilayer perspective was adopted. This resulted in a rank-3 tensor, node-aligned framework being proposed, allowing disciplines to be represented in the network. By using this framework to construct the University of Bath multiplex co-authorship network, an exemplar structure was established through use of a series of proposed structural metrics. A growth model was proposed and successfully recreated the structure and thereby uncovered mechanics affecting real-world multiplex networks. This highlighted the importance of node entities and the layer closeness centrality. This implies that it is very difficult to carry over benefits across disciplines, and that some disciplines are better suited to share and adapt knowledge than others. The growth model also allowed an analytical expression for the rate of change of disciplinary degree, thereby providing a model for who is most likely to enable and sustain IDR.

Thesis. 1975. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 139-142. / Ph.D.

The Oval Office is the most iconic room in the White House and one of the most recognizable interiors in the United States. I have recreated the Oval Office as a three-dimensional, interactive environment for the purpose of studying 3D modeling, texturing, and environment creation. My recreation of the Oval Office contains more than 30 unique models which use over 100 high-quality texture maps. My goal was to study the creation of both organic and hard surface models as well as learning which workflows were best suited to each object within a scene. I also wanted to study how different textures might be created and what workflows resulted in the most efficient and effective results, especially when creating Normal maps. The final project is designed for the Unreal 3 Engine, and still image renders were created with the Mental Ray renderer from within Autodesk Maya. The software I used to complete this project included Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Mudbox, Adobe Photoshop, Quixel’s nDO2, XNormal, and the Unreal Development Kit 3 (UDK) by Epic Games.

Overexposure to the sun is associated with an increased risk of melanoma and nonmelanoma skin cancer, but indications of improvements in sun protection behavior are poor. Attempts to identify emerging themes in skin cancer control have largely been driven by groups of experts from a single field. In December 2016, 19 experts from various disciplines convened for Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Skin Cancer, a 2-day meeting hosted by the National Academy of Sciences. The group discussed knowledge gaps, perspectives on sun exposure, implications for skin cancer risk and other health outcomes, and new directions. Five themes emerged from the discussion: (1) The definition of risk must be expanded, and categories for skin physiology must be refined to incorporate population diversities. (2) Risky sun exposure often co-occurs with other health-related behaviors. (3) Messages must be nuanced to target at-risk populations. (4) Persons at risk for tanning disorder must be recognized and treated. (5) Sun safety interventions must be scalable. Efficient use of technologies will be required to sharpen messages to specific populations and to integrate them within multilevel interventions. Further interdisciplinary research should address these emerging themes to build effective and sustainable approaches to large-scale behavior change.

Although Bangladesh is considered to be a water rich country the groundwater levels are decreasing at a steady rate. The pressure on water resources is to a large extent driven by the wet processing of textiles in the country, and this thesis will therefore focus on the issue of water governance in the textile industry. This thesis will argue that the issue is made complex due to the variety of stakeholders from different cultural backgrounds with vested interests in how the water resources are being managed. Based on interviewees from two Swedish retail brands, the Bangladeshi government, suppliers and organization active in the country, the thesis aims at identifying barriers towards increasing sustainable water management practices in the country. The diversity of cultural background will be analyzed through the lens of institutional theory in order to consider the differences in governance strategies and how they might relate to the barriers. The thesis will also present the prospect of an inclusive stakeholder dialogue platform as a means of overcoming barriers and institutional differences in terms of water governance strategies. Building on the findings the thesis concludes that there are several barriers in terms of agreement, knowledge, and social and political structures. Furthermore, it is possible to conclude that the stakeholders approach these barriers differently depending on their cultural background. Lastly, the stakeholder dialogue is considered to have the capacity to create a much needed space for stakeholder collaboration in order to overcome these barriers.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / This thesis critically investigates how student writers cope with interdisciplinarity in business studies at postgraduate level. The corpus of knowledge student writers have to grapple with today seems to distance itself from the traditional mono-disciplinary contexts. Texts as well as the students who construct them are being continuously informed and conditioned by new values and imperatives of relatively new discursive practices. Hence, student academic writing(henceforward ‘student writing’) especially at postgraduate level can be regarded as a complex academic endeavour where students have to take up multiple writing positions. Analyzing student texts against the backdrop of the enormous intertextual and interdiscursive resources pertaining to interdisciplinarity is a major component of this thesis. Electivization of the curricula, on the other hand, while providing student writers with a wide range of choices, has created yawning gaps between what is commonly known as prior knowledge and what is yet to be learnt in the form of new knowledges. These epistemological considerations, i.e., how disciplinary knowledge is acquired, evaluated, contested, and strategically used also constitute an integral part of this research. Also of importance in the above contexts are the often lengthy and generically diverse assessment tasks students are required to accomplish within specific deadlines. The nature and structure of assignment topics and assessment tasks have in the past two decades or so undergone tremendous changes owing in large measure to disciplinary as well as socio-economic imperatives. Student writing has several dimensions in terms of the mode of assessment, egg. examination-based, presentation-based, research-based, observation-based. This thesis, however, will focus on research-based writing tasks. Based on the findings of this thesis, a paradigm called critical interdisciplinarity has been proposed in the concluding chapter of this thesis. Pedagogical and curricular considerations play a vital role in critical interdisciplinarity. By virtue of their encyclopaedic dimensions, knowledge domains relating to academic interdisciplinarity in student writing lend themselves to a wide range of future research projects. An attempt has been made here to critically explore only a tiny proportion of this inexhaustible repertoire of knowledge.

Thesis (PhD.(Department of Education management and policy studies))-University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-219)

A spatial-temporal model is developed for modelling the impacts of simulated coastal zone storm surge and flooding using a combined spatial mapping and system dynamics approach. By coupling geographic information systems (GIS) and system dynamics, the interconnecting components of the spatial-temporal model are used with limited historical data to evaluate storm damage. Overlapping cumulative effects layers in GIS (ArcMap) are used for describing the coastal community’s profile, and a system dynamics feedback model (STELLA) is developed to define the interconnecting component relationships of the community. The component-wise changes to the physical environment, community infrastructure, and socioeconomic resources from the storm surge and seal level rise are examined. These changes are used to assess the impacts of the community system as a whole. For the purpose of illustrating this model, the research is applied specifically to the case of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, a vulnerable coastal city subject to considerable impacts from pending sea level rise and more frequent severe storm surge attributed to the changing climate in the coastal zone.

Educational institutions have remained remarkably unchanged throughout the last century, even when the political, cultural and social environments have undergone very significant transformation (cf. Duderstadt, 2005; Fullan, 2007; Rowan & Miskel, 1999). Because of the noted similarity among educational institutions and the institutions perceived inability to change, I wanted to identify a significant change at an educational institution, and examine the context and policy process that promoted this change. The focus of this study was the process of policy development within one type of educational institution, the university.<p> In this case study, I examined the policy process involved in establishing a joint, interdisciplinary school, the School of Policy and Research. Data were gathered from three sources: interviews, documents, and policies. I conducted semi-structured interviews with thirteen participants who had some connection to the School, and analyzed the data by coding emergent themes. These were not discrete themes, but rather were interconnected and reflected the complexity of the policy development process. From the findings, the concept of policy windows, as suggested by Kingdon (2003), was evident in the policy origin stage. The policy stream, the political stream, and the problem stream came together at a critical juncture as a confluence of forces that allowed the initiative of the joint interdisciplinary policy School to move forward into adoption and implementation. Due to this presence of a policy window, the initiative moved through the adoption stage relatively smoothly, at least initially. The policy actors were essentially the same at both universities; there was a core group of grassroots level faculty members who were involved in policy work and believed in the potential of the interdisciplinary policy School. They were supported by senior administrative personnel who saw this initiative as one way to address perceived problems confronting the institutions. However, the implementation stage at both universities was messy and difficult as the proponents of the School encountered many tensions, including issues around securing resources, program development, the proposal approval process, and several sources of resistance to change. The discipline-driven culture of the universities appeared to be an impediment to innovative practices that bridge disciplinary boundaries. Although the timing of this study obviated full consideration of the evaluation stage, the participants did speculate upon several intended impacts of the School, and they proposed possible collateral impacts. Implications of this investigation for practice included a need for individual organizations to conduct a thorough examination of situation-specific organizational practices that promote or inhibit innovation, including reviews of current practice for determining what programs need to be discontinued, for articulating how to monitor progress in achieving outcomes, and for identifying how to promote a more collaborative culture. In terms of implications for research, further exploration of the implementation stage of successful policy development was seen to have some potential. In change theory, further research could address the stark absence of the voice of resistors to change. Two elements of neoinstitutional theory that merit further research are the roles of agents in initiating change, and the role of isomorphic processes (coercive, normative, and mimetic) in inhibiting change in organizations. One theoretical implication of this study was the relevance of certain lenses (political, temporal, organizational, and cultural) in examining change. Additionally, the theoretical dichotomy of incremental and transformative change merits further examination in relation to the dynamics of the policy process.