The book provides guidelines and practical creative exercises which equip creativemajor students as well as creative practitioners with fundamental knowledge on creation methods. Combination of functionality, simplicity and aesthetics in modern design is considered a fundamental design principle in the Bauhaus School in Germany, and, inspired by the School, the creative handcrafting exercises and the concepts introduced in this book are primarily coherent with this principle. The book draws a direction between two and three dimensional material-based design and modern digital creation process. The first part of the book introduces various creative handcrafting exercises on proportion, geometry and modularity, among other fundamental design principles. The creative exercises will sensitize students on aesthetical and structural issues, and thus serve as an essential building block for application of the design principles to computer-based creative processes, which are introduced in the second part of the book. Published by City University of Hong Kong Press. 香港城市大學出版社出版。

Volunteerism is a popular form of community engagement among youth and can involve helping organizations, such as nonprofits, as well as directly assisting neighbours or friends through informal types of helping. A large body of research has examined the different ways in which economic, social, and cultural resources impact on volunteerism. Fewer studies have considered the influence of place characteristics. This dissertation comprises three studies. The first study used secondary data to explore the moderating effects of urban/rural place of residence and certain resources (e.g., religiosity, work status) on youths' volunteer propensity and intensity. Results revealed significant urban/rural interactions. For example, belonging to youth groups (versus not) was particularly a strong lever for rural youth volunteerism, while higher religious attendance frequency was associated with greater volunteer intensities for urban youth. The second study used a mixed methods approach to investigate urban/rural differences in motivations for and barriers to volunteering, and skills acquired. Financial costs were associated with nonvolunteer status for rural youth, while urban nonvolunteers reported lacking interest. During the interviews, youth described reasons for volunteering, challenges to volunteering, and strategies to improve volunteerism. These discussions differed by urban/rural residence. Rural youth reported more contextual barriers, whereas urban youth questioned the significance of their impact. Rural youth discussed volunteering more as a general learning experience, whereas urban youth tended to mention specific skills they acquired (e.g., technical, interpersonal). In the third study, the relationships between perceptions of the neighbourhood environment (e.g., cohesion, amenities) and volunteer outcomes were explored. Results revealed that neighbourhood cohesion was particularly important to informal volunteering. Further, different clusters emerged based on volunteer type (informal/formal) and level of intensity. The findings from this dissertation suggest that understanding youth volunteerism within a socio-ecological perspective can widen our understanding of the volunteer process, including antecedents, challenges, experiences, and outcomes. This research may have practical implications for nonprofit organizations. For example, methods of outreach should consider how the environment impacts on volunteerism when trying to recruit young volunteers. Finally, the literature on youth volunteerism may benefit by adopting a holistic approach to volunteerism that considers the different ways in which place characteristics, rather than only individual-level factors, influence youth community engagement.

This book explores the role of the worker in facilitating participation, learning and active engagement within communities. Focusing on recent initiatives to strengthen citizen and community engagement, it provides guidance, frameworks and activities to help in work with community members, either as different types of volunteers or as part of self-help groups. Setting community work as an educational process, the book also highlights dilemmas arising from possible interventions and gives strategies for reflective, effective practice.

Volunteer management has many challenges, not the least of which is how we study it and view it. Academics examine it from a variety of disciplines and practitioners experience it in a variety of contexts. However both approaches have limitations. In academia we go to public administration schools to learn about public and nonprofit management, to business schools to apply the principles of private enterprise to nonprofit management, to sociology departments to study the phenomena of volunteerism, to psychology departments to understand the motives of volunteers, and economics departments to examine the value or economic worth of volunteerism. The liability of the academic approach is the segmentation of study and research into departmental areas. The study of volunteers and volunteerism needs to cross all of these organizational and discipline boundaries to be fully appreciated and understood as a field of interest. In contrast, practitioners view volunteer management from their own unique experiences. They try to gauge success in volunteer management based on what they have encountered in particular organizations, towns, cultures, and countries in which they work. As important as these insights are, they are difficult to generalize beyond local settings. Just because an individual has been successful in working with volunteers, it does not mean that the lessons learned in one situation can be translated to others under all conditions. The target audience for this volume is anyone who manages volunteers. The goal of the volume is to demonstrate the breadth of thought on volunteer management, both across disciplines and a wide range of settings in which volunteers work.

The Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior provides a comprehensive review of the current literature on when and why people act to benefit others. It provides a comprehensive overview of the field to give both the casual reader and the neophyte to the field some perspective about fundamental questions (what, why, when, and who) relative to prosocial behavior. Taking a multi-level approach, the chapters represent the broad spectrum of this multi-faceted domain. Topics range from micro-level analyses involving evolutionary and comparative psychological factors to macro-level applications, such as reducing intergroup conflicts and ethnic genocide. Between these extremes, the contributors--all internationally recognized in their field--offer their perspectives on developmental processes that may predispose individuals to empathize with and respond to the needs of others, individual differences that seem to interact with situational demands to promote helping, and the underlying motivations of those helping others. They explain volunteerism, intragroup cooperation, and intergroup cooperation to move the analysis from the individual to group-level phenomena. They extend the consideration of this topic to include support of pro-environmental actions, means to encourage participation in medical clinical trials, and the promotion of world peace. The ways that gender, interpersonal relationships, race, and religion might affect decisions to give aid and support to others are also addressed. The final chapter offers a unique view of prosocial behavior that encourages researchers and readers to take an even broader consideration of the field to search for a prosocial consilience.