Consensus Design offers a practical step by step guide to co-design; an increasingly important consideration for architects as they compete for work. The text moves from identifying the methodology of the process to developing a series of principles and practical steps which illustrate how consensus design can be established. For easy reference, flow charts show the process of achieving consensus design and include variations for different types of project and different groups of people. It gives clear timings so that agreements can be reached within a specific time frame, and also features a number of case studies to illustrate consensus design principles in practice. Case studies include projects in the UK, US, and Sweden. Consensus design isn't just a utopian ideal. It's the only meaningful way in which people can be involved in shaping where they live and work. It can have an influence on social stability, crime-reduction, personal health and building longevity, all of which in turn have monetary and environmental cost implications. Its consideration can also greatly help architects win work and commissions. Day argues that when places are designed by professionals for people, many things obvious to the residents are overlooked. When they are designed by lay people, the design can suffer from the lowest common denominator factor. When places are designed by both it tends to end up in conflict. However, Consensus Design shows that co-design is not doomed to either conflict or banality if it is managed correctly.

Written for the design professional, the book offers examples of management of the public process in large and small projects involving architects, planners, and urban designers. The book has methods, tips, and strategies for working with various constituencies in a design project.

This book focuses on the design and analysis of collective decision-making strategies for the best-of-n problem. After providing a formalization of the structure of the best-of-n problem supported by a comprehensive survey of the swarm robotics literature, it introduces the functioning of a collective decision-making strategy and identifies a set of mechanisms that are essential for a strategy to solve the best-of-n problem. The best-of-n problem is an abstraction that captures the frequent requirement of a robot swarm to choose one option from of a finite set when optimizing benefits and costs. The book leverages the identification of these mechanisms to develop a modular and model-driven methodology to design collective decision-making strategies and to analyze their performance at different level of abstractions. Lastly, the author provides a series of case studies in which the proposed methodology is used to design different strategies, using robot experiments to show how the designed strategies can be ported to different application scenarios.

"The world is changing rapidly and the practice of community organizing needs to change with it. Representing both an homage to, and a departure from the "alinsky traditions" of organizing, Consensus Organizing offers techniques that are specifically designed for urban and rural communities struggling to succeed in the global economy and the information age. Ohmer and DeMasi are experienced organizers who offer a relentlessly thorough examination of the process of bringing diverse communities together to make change and to bridge the ethnic and economic divisions that keep many communities from succeeding." —Bill Traynor Executive Director, Lawrence CommunityWorks Inc. A person doesn′t have to be a consensus organizer to think like one. Consensus Organizing: A Community Development Workbook—A Comprehensive Guide to Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating Community Change Initiatives helps students and practitioners begin to think like consensus organizers and incorporate this way of strategic thinking into their lives and their work. Through a wide range of exercises, role-play activities, case scenarios, and discussion questions, this workbook presents the conceptual framework for consensus organizing and provides a practical and experiential approach to understanding and applying consensus organizing to address a range of issues. This workbook is designed to be used by itself or along with Mike Eichler′s text Consensus Organizing: Building Communities of Mutual Self Interest (SAGE, 2007). Key Features and Benefits Provides a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a community analysis of both internal and external neighborhood resources Brings consensus organizing to life through case studies based on the real-life experiences of the authors Offers field exercises that engage the reader in applying and practicing consensus organizing Provides practical tools that community organizers and practitioners can use in their daily work Includes a sample job description, work plan, monitoring report, and field report for hiring and supervising consensus organizers Presents tools for describing and evaluating consensus organizing and community-level interventions Accompanying Website Instructors and students have access to the many activities and cases on the accompanying website.

Each chapter deals with a different technique from which we can best represent and make explicit the forms of knowledge used by designers. The book explores whether design knowledge is special, and attempts to get to the root of where design knowledge comes from. Crucially, it focuses on how designers use drawings in communicating their ideas and how they ‘converse’ with them as their designs develop. It also shows how experienced designers use knowledge differently to novices suggesting that design ‘expertise’ can be developed. Overall, this book builds a layout of the kinds of skill, knowledge and understanding that make up what we call designing.

This multi-contributor book provides comprehensive coverage of earthquake engineering problems, an overview of traditional methods, and the scientific background on recent developments. It discusses computer methods on structural analysis and provides access to the recent design methodologies and serves as a reference for both professionals and res

Protein Design: Methods and Applications presents the most up-to-date protein design and engineering strategies so that readers can undertake their own projects with a maximum chance of success. The authors present integrated computational approaches that require various degrees of computational complexity, and the major accomplishments that have been achieved in the design and structural characterization of helical peptides and proteins.