This book focuses on the role architects and architecture are playing in the process of political and cultural negotiation.

Buildings are increasingly ‘dynamic’: equipped with sensors, actuators and controllers, they ‘self-adjust’ in response to changes in the external and internal environments and patterns of use. Building Dynamics asks how this change manifests itself and what it means for architecture as buildings weather, programs change, envelopes adapt, interiors are reconfigured, systems replaced. Contributors including Chuck Hoberman, Robert Kronenburg, David Leatherbarrow, Kas Oosterhuis, Enric Ruiz-Geli, and many others explore the changes buildings undergo – and the scale and speed at which these occur – examining which changes are necessary, useful, desirable, and possible. The first book to offer a coherent, comprehensive approach to this topic, it draws together arguments previously only available in scattered form. Featuring the latest technologies and design approaches used in contemporary practice, the editors provide numerous examples of cutting-edge work from leading designers and engineering firms working today. An essential text for students taking design studio classes or courses in theory or technology at any level, as well as professionals interested in the latest mechatronic technologies and design techniques.

Using stories and exercises from grassroots organizing experience ... [this book] walks you through the steps of starting a new group or strengthening an old one - to build a better world.-Back cover.

To achieve sustained competitive advantage, you must create and deliver something that’s valuable, rare, and hard to imitate–and you can’t do that with a run-of-the-mill workforce. Your workforce needs to be strikingly different, obsessively focused on delivering on your unique value proposition. Compared with everyone else’s workforce, your people need to be downright strange! This book is about everything it takes to build a workforce that’s strange and extraordinary enough to execute your most powerful strategies and your unique value proposition. It’s about understanding exactly how your workforce needs to be different...creating an end-to-end Strange Workforce Value Chain...implementing workforce systems that support your unique goals...establishing detailed metrics based on what makes you unique...using those metrics to drive clarity throughout your entire organization, and steer it toward success. If you’re tasked with executing strategy through people, and “balanced scorecards” and “strategy maps” just haven’t been enough, take your next and greatest leap forward: make the Change to Strange. · Why “normal” workforces just won’t cut it anymore Everyone says their people make the difference. Most everyone’s wrong. · Create your strange workforce in four steps Imagine, pinpoint your gaps, prioritize, and act. · What your customers must notice for you to win Link your real performance drivers to specific workforce deliverables. · Rearchitect your workforce to break from the pack Organize to get strategic results from the right people. · Leverage the magic of measurement Implement metrics that work–and keep them working.

The software development ecosystem is constantly changing, providing a constant stream of new tools, frameworks, techniques, and paradigms. Over the past few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This practical guide ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time.

The benefits of using technology to remake government seem almost infinite. The promise of such programs as user-friendly "virtual agencies" and portals where citizens can access all sections of government from a single website has excited international attention. The potential of a digital state cannot be realized, however, unless the rigid structures of the contemporary bureaucratic state change along with the times. Building the Virtual State explains how the American public sector must evolve and adapt to exploit the possibilities of digital governance fully and fairly. The book finds that many issues involved in integrating technology and government have not been adequately debated or even recognized. Drawing from a rich collection of case studies, the book argues that the real challenges lie not in achieving the technical capability of creating a government on the web, but rather in overcoming the entrenched organizational and political divisions within the state. Questions such as who pays for new government websites, which agencies will maintain the sites, and who will ensure that the privacy of citizens is respected reveal the extraordinary obstacles that confront efforts to create a virtual state. These political and structural battles will influence not only how the American state will be remade in the Information Age, but also who will be the winners and losers in a digital society.

The Architecture of Change: Building a Better World is a collection of articles that demonstrates the power of the human spirit to transform the environments in which we live. This inspiring book profiles people who refused to accept that things couldn’t change, who saw the possibility of making something better, and didn’t esitate to act. Breaking down the stereotypes surrounding “socially engaged architecture,” this book shows who can actually impact the lives of communities. Like Bernard Rudofsky’s seminal Architecture Without Architects, it explores communal architecture produced not by specialists but by people, drawing on their common lives and experiences, who have a unique insight into their particular needs and environments. These unsung heroes are teachers and artists, immigrants and activists, grandmothers in the projects, students and planners, architects and residents of some of our poorest places. Running through their stories is a constant theme of social justice as an underlying principle of the built environment. This book is about opening one’s eyes to new ways of interpreting the world, and how to go about changing it.