This thesis aims at developing a (dis/re)assembly oriented methodology towards product end-of-life. Particular focus in this thesis is on the circularity of furniture via design for (dis/re)assembly. The main motivation behind this study was the need for a method to evaluate the (dis/re)assembly options of furniture designs to be able to facilitate repair, reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishing, or recycling. The study draws upon relevant theories and prior research on Circular product Design, Design for EoL, Design for Environment, and Design for (Dis)assembly of vehicles, electrical and elocronic equipments, whitegoods, as well as office furniture, though relatively limited. The proposed methodology determines major aspects of design for (dis/re)assembly to be taken in to consideration in the early stages of product development. It further provides a set of parameters that are relevant to cabinet type and upholstery furniture group. The study involves a variety of qualitative research methods that are embedded in an interactive research conduct with the engagement of different stakeholders that are charged with the task of product development at Ikea of Sweden (IoS), the collaborator of this study.  The proposed methodology is implemented on three selected furniture designs in a pilot study. The results of the study, above all, suggest that (dis/re)assemblability of a product is a strategic choice that needs to be made at early phases of product development, namely the design phase. Two particular features of the furniture groups, upon which this study focuses, emerges as factors having negative impact on the disassemblability of products: first, wooden frame sofas with respect to their complex structure and connectivity of componants and, second, permanent joints with respect to their destructive impact on the product. The study concludes that it is feasible to develop and implement a potentially comprehensible method to evaluate the ease of disassembly of furniture products and to design for disassembly. The proposed methodology in this study is a contribution to support product design for disassembly towards product circularity.

This dissertation investigates second language (L2) development in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics. Specifically, it examines the acquisition of definiteness and specificity in Russian within the Feature Re-assembly framework (Lardiere, 2009), according to which the hardest L2 learning task is not to reset parameters but to reconfigure, or remap features from the way they are assembled in the L1 into new formal configurations in the L2. Within the Feature Re-assembly approach, it has been argued that re-assembling features that are represented overtly in the L1 and mapping them onto those that are encoded covertly by context in the L2 will present a greater difficulty than re-assembling features in the opposite direction (Slabakova, 2009). This dissertation examines the acquisition of four linguistic properties (types of modifiers, word order, indefinite determiners and case marking) that encode definiteness and specificity overtly or covertly in L2 Russian by English and Korean speakers. The native languages of the learners were chosen specifically in order to test various overt-covert mappings. The data obtained from two experimental tasks (grammaticality and felicity judgments) completed by 56 Russian native speaker controls, 51 English- and 53 Korean-speaking learners support Slabakova's prediction that overt-to-covert realization of the feature is more challenging than covert-to-overt realization. In addition, the findings uncovered other important factors facilitating or impeding acquisition, such as the nature of the form-to-meaning mapping (one-to-one or one-to-many) and the availability of clear, unambiguous evidence for a certain mapping in the input available to learners. Results also reveal that the presence or absence of the L1 transfer depends on the overt/covert status of the feature in the L2. That is, when the feature is marked overtly in both the L1 and L2, L1 transfer has facilitative effect on the acquisition of the feature. On the contrary, when the feature is marked covertly in both the L1 and L2, L1 transfer has no or negative effects. These findings provide new insights into the effects of the native language on L2 learnability and enable us to come to a more precise and fine-grained understanding of grammatical meaning acquisition in the second language.

This thesis examines the problem of the automated re-assembly of jigsaw puzzles. The objectives of this research are as follows: to provide a clear statement of the jigsaw puzzle re-assembly problem; to find out which solution technique is best suited to this problem; to determine the level of sensitivity of the proposed solution technique when solving different variations of this problem; and to explore solution methods for solving incomplete jigsaw puzzles (puzzles with missing pieces). The jigsaw puzzle re-assembly problem has been investigated only intermittently in the research literature. This work presents an extensive examination of the suitability and efficiency of the standard solution techniques that can be applied to this problem. A detailed comparison between different solution methods including Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and Constraint Satisfaction Programming, shows that a constraint-based approach is the most efficient method of generating solutions to the jigsaw puzzle problem. The proposed re-assembly algorithm is successful. Consequently, it can be used in development of automated solution generators for other problems in the same domain, thus creating new theoretical and applied directions in this field of research. One potential theoretical line of research concerns jigsaw puzzles that do not have a complete set of puzzle pieces. These incomplete puzzles represent a difficult aspect of this problem that is outlined but can not be resolved in the current research. The computational experiments conducted in this thesis demonstrate that the proposed algorithm being optimised to re-assemble the jigsaw puzzles is not efficient when applied to the puzzles with missing pieces. Further work was undertaken to modify the proposed algorithm to enable efficient re-assembly of incomplete jigsaw puzzles. Consequently, an original heuristic strategy, termed Empty Slot Prediction, was developed to support the proposed algorithm, and proved successful when applied to certain sub-classes of this problem. The results obtained indicate that no one algorithm can be used to solve the multitude of possible scenarios involved in the re-assembly of incomplete jigsaw puzzles. Other variations of the jigsaw puzzle problem that still remain unsolved are presented as avenues for future research. The solution of this problem involves a number of procedures with significant applications in other computer-related areas such as pattern recognition, feature and shape description, boundary-matching, and heuristic modelling. It also has more practical applications in robotic vision and reconstruction of broken artefacts in archaeology.

This study investigates second language (L2) acquisition of word orders and markers of collectivity in Chinese and Thai. One of the differences between Chinese and Thai is that Chinese nominal phrases appear with a “numeral + classifier + noun” word order while Thai phrases appear as “noun + numeral + classifier”. Another difference is that men, the Chinese collective marker, cannot be used with nouns referring to animals or indefinite nouns, while phûak, the Thai collective marker, can do so. Based on the cross-linguistic differences, an empirical study was conducted to answer whether Thai learners of Chinese and Chinese learners of Thai would be able to acquire target language (TL) structures that are different from those in their native language (L1) and whether they could reject incorrect TL structures. One hundred and forty-four participants were recruited to complete an acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. It is found that both Chinese and Thai learners could perform native-like in their acceptance of TL word orders since early stages of acquisition. However, it took them until an advanced level to be able to completely reject incorrect TL word orders that resembled structures in their L1. Thai learners also faced difficulty rejecting the use of men with animal and indefinite nouns in their L2 Chinese. In contrast, Chinese learners tended to be successful in their acquisition of phûak. The results are interpreted in terms of roles of positive evidence and form-function transparency. In general, L2 learners tend to acquire a TL structure earlier when they can receive positive evidence in TL input and when a form-function connection of the structure is transparent. Nonetheless, these factors do not have an absolute effect on acquisition outcome since some learners may be able to use a probabilistic learning strategy to successfully acquire L2 knowledge even when positive evidence is unavailable.