Peter Rutherford

Interactive and situated learning in education for sustainability

Purpose This study aims to explore the opportunities offered by interactive and situated learning (e-learning and m-learning) in support of education for sustainability in disciplines of the built environment. Design/methodology/approach The paper illustrates the development of an online portal and a mobile app aimed at promoting students’ motivation and engagement with sustainability in design, and discusses the outcomes of their testing, investigating users’ acceptance, comparing academic results and analysing feedback. Findings The findings add empirical evidence to the view that information and communication technology-enhanced pedagogies can substantially contribute to the agenda of sustainability in higher education, primarily due to their affordance of interactive communication and contextualisation of knowledge, while guaranteeing flexible time and pace of learning. Research limitations/implications The study solely focused on the development and testing of e-learning and m-learning tools to foster students’ competence of sustainability in design studio work. The tools trialled were mostly at their prototypical stage and their testing included a relatively short-term evaluation and a narrow, self-selected, user base. However, the approach and findings are felt to be applicable to a much wider range of educational contexts. Originality/value Interactive and situated pedagogical methods and tools have the potential to prompt a departure from transmissive educational models, encompassing at once theoretical, experiential and analytic learning processes. This is of value to education for sustainability in disciplines of the built environment due to the requirement to holistically consolidate multi-/inter-/trans-disciplinary knowledge into a coherent design whole.

Auditory Navigation and the Escape from Smoke Filled Buildings

This paper addresses the issue of escape from unfamiliar, smoke filled buildings such as hotels or airports where the scenario of complete visual deprivation may result in occupant death. It proposes that we may be able to apply concise auditory information to the escape procedure, using predictive ‘virtual acoustic’ techniques in order to assess its feasibility.

Indoor Environmental Quality: Lighting and Acoustics

Buildings are characterized by a mixture of environmental factors—(hygro)thermal, olfactory, luminous, and acoustic—that are commonly encapsulated under the banner of indoor environmental qualities (IEQ). Although a substantial amount of research has been done on the effects of IEQ on comfort and satisfaction of building users, the complex physical, physiological, and psychological processes underlying human responses to environmental stimuli are yet to be fully characterized. Among environmental forces, light and sound contribute significantly, individually and combined, towards the regulation of physio-psychological well-being, being most influential to perception and behavior. This article presents the current state-of-the-art of knowledge in lighting and acoustics, describing the challenges that need to be tackled for a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of the luminous and aural environments on the comfort, performance, and health of building users.

The use of damping to reduce the contribution of flanking paths to sound transmission in buildings

The importance of flanking paths to sound transmission in buildings has been studied recently. Damping treatments make it possible to increase the internal losses in structures and provide an opportunity to enhance the attenuation of long transmission paths. A number of numerical comparisons have been made to demonstrate the effectiveness of a global increase in structural damping of nine different physical systems using both bending only and three-wave models. Statistical energy analysis (SEA) has been adopted as the analytical framework. The results show that, by applying a damping treatment, the contribution of flanking paths to sound transmission can be reduced and sound insulation improved.