Humberto Cavallin

Walls talk: Microbial biogeography of homes spanning urbanization.

Home microbes track space-use and reflect a decreasing exposure to environmental microbes due to urbanization. Westernization has propelled changes in urbanization and architecture, altering our exposure to the outdoor environment from that experienced during most of human evolution. These changes might affect the developmental exposure of infants to bacteria, immune development, and human microbiome diversity. Contemporary urban humans spend most of their time indoors, and little is known about the microbes associated with different designs of the built environment and their interaction with the human immune system. This study addresses the associations between architectural design and the microbial biogeography of households across a gradient of urbanization in South America. Urbanization was associated with households’ increased isolation from outdoor environments, with additional indoor space isolation by walls. Microbes from house walls and floors segregate by location, and urban indoor walls contain human bacterial markers of space use. Urbanized spaces uniquely increase the content of human-associated microbes—which could increase transmission of potential pathogens—and decrease exposure to the environmental microbes with which humans have coevolved.

Erratum to: The first microbial environment of infants born by C-section: the operating room microbes

After publication of this article [1], the authors noticed one of the collaborator’s names had been misspelled in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section. “Dr. Tsei Ming” is incorrect and should be “Dr. Ming C. Tsai”. The correct version of the ‘Acknowledgements’ section is included below and has been updated in the original article [1].

How relative absolute can be: SUMI and the impact of the nature of the task in measuring perceived software usability

This paper addresses the possibility of measuring perceived usability in an absolute way. It studies the impact of the nature of the tasks performed in perceived software usability evaluation, using for this purpose the subjective evaluation of an application’s performance via the Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI). The paper reports on the post-hoc analysis of data from a productivity study for testing the effect of changes in the graphical user interface (GUI) of a market leading drafting application. Even though one would expect similar evaluations of an application’s usability for same releases, the analysis reveals that the output of this subjective appreciation is context sensitive and therefore mediated by the research design. Our study unmasked a significant interaction between the nature of the tasks used for the usability evaluation and how users evaluate the performance of this application. This interaction challenges the concept of absolute benchmarking in subjective usability evaluation, as some software evaluation methods aspire to provide, since subjective measurement of software quality will be affected most likely by the nature of the testing materials used for the evaluation.

Building Stories Revisited: Unlocking the Knowledge Capital of Architectural Practice

Abstract Since architects deal with unique projects, their knowledge is largely experience-based, tacit and embedded within the design and construction process. Nevertheless, few consistent and systematic mechanisms exist that try to establish and maintain access to the professions knowledge. Effectively capitalizing on this knowledge thus seems as pressing a problem as producing more knowledge. Building Stories, an experimental course at University of California—Berkeley, started with a carte blanche opportunity and generous support from leading architecture firms in the San Francisco Bay Area, to try to unlock the knowledge capital of architectural practice through storytelling. This paper is about creating a discussion forum for dialogue about the nature of knowledge in architecture, how it can be captured and disseminated. More importantly, the paper illustrates how designers and other participants in the design and making of architecture can share their experiences through the method of storytelling. The paper looks back on the outcomes of Building Stories over the past five years, and on how it has evolved into an inventive methodology for catalyzing knowledge sharing between projects, between individual architects and architecture firms and, finally, between practice and academia. After briefly recalling the underlying ideas of Building Stories and their implementation as an operational methodology, the paper reports on its recent in-depth evaluation involving former participants from various contexts—young and seasoned professionals in practice, students and researchers in academia. Besides valuable feedback on Building Stories as such, this assessment provides more general insights regarding current ideas and practices of knowledge production and sharing in architecture.

The right story at the right time: Towards a tacit knowledge resource for (student) designers

In response to the lack of systematic study of architectural practice, the Building Stories methodology propounds storytelling as a vehicle for studying active cases, i.e., projects that are in the process of being designed and built. The story format provides a dense, compact way to deal with and communicate the complex reality of a real-world project, while respecting the interrelated nature of events, people and circumstances that shape its conception. With an eye to establishing a valuable knowledge resource of and for the profession, the paper explores how stories can be stored, organized and accessed so as to turn the growing story repository into a convenient instrument for students, educators and practitioners.

Design in mind

Research on the relationship between design and the creation of knowledge is a relatively recent phenomenon. In architecture, for instance, it was not so long ago that designers tended to view knowledge with disdain, as a hindrance to unfettered creativity or an encapsulation of “freeze-dried prejudices.”1 Recently, however, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) devoted the December 2004 issue of its AIA Journal entirely to the theme of knowledge, which strongly suggests that times are changing. Increasingly, the act of designing is considered to be or involve some kind of knowledge production.2 This directly follows from the type of knowledge designing relies on, which is practicebased and tacit,3 (i.e., embedded within the very act of designing).4 On the other hand, it is possible—at least in a rough and ready way—to appreciate the distinction between the aim, or intention, of producing knowledge and other aims,5 such as designing an object or a building. To state it a bit more bluntly, a client typically hires an architect to design a building, not to produce knowledge. Why then is it so difficult to set clear boundaries between design and scholarly research? Questions about the relationship between both are far from new. According to Nigel Cross, they reappear about every forty years,6 and have been written about by many authors before. Already in 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber pointed out the difference between the kind of problems designers and planners deal with and those that scientists handle.7 More recently, Johannes Eekels and Norbert Roozenburg made a methodological comparison of the structures of design and research in engineering, and concluded that both are strongly interwoven and mutually dependent, yet fundamentally different.8 Although it seems time to move on from making all sorts of comparisons between design and research, this paper tries to shed more light on the issue from a conceptual and psychological point of view. To this end, it calls in the philosophy of mind—rather than the philosophy of science, as is usually the case9 —and more precisely the notion of intentionality. Instead of considering design as a mix of knowledge creation and application, the process is decomposed into distinct yet interacting mental acts, in which designers establish relationships with (objects in) the world. A detailed analysis of this relationship forms the basis for a nuanced, yet fundamental, comparison with

From repository to resource. Exchanging stories of and for architectural practice

In response to the lack of systematic study of architectural practice, the Building Stories methodology propounds storytelling as a vehicle for studying active cases, i.e. projects that are in the process of being designed and built. The story format provides a dense, compact way to deal with and communicate the complex reality of a real-world project, while respecting the interrelated nature of events, people and circumstances that shape its conception. With an eye to establishing a valuable knowledge resource of and for the profession, the paper explores how stories can be stored, organized and accessed so as to turn the growing story repository into a convenient instrument for students, educators and practitioners.

The multiple faces of social intelligence design

Nowadays, interactions between the human and the digitalhave become paramount aspects of our everyday experi-ence. The pervasiveness of the digital has closed the bridgebetween the cyber and the human, progressing toward asituation in which boundaries that used to separate thecomputers and the world in which the subject interacts withthe devices continuously disappear. In a recent conferencepaper, Mikael and Erik (2008) pointed out how recenttrends show how their multiple studies on ‘‘digitallyenhanced physical environments, as well as by recentresearch into ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence,and interactive architecture which all highlight the blend ofthe physical and virtual world, and the disappearing char-acter of modern information technology’’, leading them toargue that the ‘‘move towards digitally enhanced interac-tive environments has to be taken seriously by the field ofHCI’’ (Mikael and Erik 2008, p. 21).The articles included in this special issue of AI andSociety, take on the challenge posed by these authors,tackling this subject of study through a conceptual frame-work that connects the relationship between the individualand the interactive environment by means of social medi-ation. The theoretical ground to these conceptualizationscomes from the paradigm of social intelligence design(SID) as defined by Nishida that it is explained by Nijholtet al. as ‘‘the necessary ability for people to relate tounderstand and interact effectively with others’’ and theirparticular concern to understand ‘‘how Social Intelligenceis mediated through the use of emerging information andcommunication technologies’’ (2009, p. 2). This paradigmtherefore involves the development of systematic approa-ches concerning design and implementation of systems andenvironments, ranging from team-based collaborationsystems that facilitate common ground building, goal-oriented interactions among participants, to community-centered systems that support large scale online dialog andinstructional design.The multidisciplinary articles included in this specialissue are augmented versions of ten selected works origi-nally presented at the 7th Social Intelligence Design (SID)workshop held at the School of Architecture of the Uni-versity of Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR, in December 2008.As in previous SID workshops, Puerto Rico hosted for3 days a multidisciplinary group of individuals, comingfrom varied disciplines such as industrial design, engi-neering fields, computer science, human computer inter-action, communication, social science, cognitive science,social psychology, and architecture. Common to all, thesediverse minds were a shared goal to improve the means andapproaches to produce better interactions between thehuman beings and their environments by means of theprinciples stated by SID.The first two articles in this special issue deal specifi-cally with the problem of communication. The article byKatai et al. studies the fundamental structures of verbalcommunication among people by using the conceptualnotions of coming from the Leibnizian notions of space andtime. In this article, the formalization generated by themodels used by Katai et al. shed light on the pieces and