Mainstream Design Research Articles

DTBR: A dynamic thermal-balance routing algorithm for Network-on-Chip

Network-on-Chip (NoC) replaces the traditional bus-based architecture to become the mainstream design methodology for future complex System-on-Chip (SoC). It introduces the principles of packet switching and interconnection network into SoC design, and achieves much better performance for its high bandwidth, scalability, reliability, etc. However, thermal problem, such as regional temperature differential and hotspot, is still one of the main designing constraints. This paper proposes a dynamic thermal-balance routing (DTBR) algorithm for Network-on-Chip, which can solve both of the two thermal problems. DTBR is a minimal adaptive routing algorithm based on an architectural thermal model. An efficient thermal-aware router is designed to implement the DTBR algorithm. According to the simulation results, the proposed DTBR algorithm can make the network thermal distribution more uniform and hotspot temperature is cut down about 20% in different traffic patterns. Moreover, DTBR will bring a profit for the performance of packet delay and network throughput compared with other routing algorithms.

Designing at t + n

AbstractIn the last four decades, Robert Aish has played a pivotal role in the development of new technologies in architecture. As a professional software designer and developer, he has directly informed building design and processes. As Director of Software Development at Autodesk, his role is to converge innovative concepts such as design computation with mainstream design and engineering software. Also an influential disseminator of knowledge, he is a co‐founder of the SmartGeometry Group and has helped create a vital bridge between architectural design and computation. Here he describes some of the critical dilemmas facing both software developers and architectural users of computational design tools, comparing the pioneering work of Bruce Archer and Ivan Sutherland in the mid‐1960s (at time t) with how such tools are used today (at time t + n). Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mechanistic-Empirical Modeling of Geosynthetic-Reinforced Unpaved Roads

AbstractMechanistic-empirical modeling and design solutions have been routinely used for conventional flexible pavements and have recently entered mainstream design practice through the issue of AASHTO design software. Recent work has been performed to incorporate mechanisms of base reinforcement with geosynthetics into mechanistic-empirical modeling and design. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of this work for mechanistic-empirical modeling of reinforced unpaved roads by using the same model components used for paved roads and incorporating new components that account for the significant influence of pore-water pressure generation in the subgrade. Results from instrumented unpaved road test sections are used to calibrate and compare with the model predictions. The model provides reasonable predictions of rutting behavior for test sections where rut development is stable, where stable is defined as a rate of rutting that decreases with increasing traffic. The importance of excess pore-water...

Social outcomes in the construction industry: the case of the Western Australian ‘Percent for Art’ policy

Social outcomes, in particular intangible social outcomes, are generally difficult to achieve in the construction industry due to the predominantly episodic, fragmented and heavily regulated nature of construction that presupposes a tendency towards mainstream construction processes and design. The Western Australian ‘Percent for Art’ policy is recognized for stimulating social outcomes, by creating richer and more aesthetically pleasing social environments through the incorporation of artwork into public buildings. A case study of four Percent for Art projects highlights the role of the Artwork Selection Committee in incorporating artwork into construction. A total of 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with committee members and policy officers. Data analysis involved a combination of pattern coding and matrix categorization, and resulted in the identification of the committee’s three key elements of collaborative communication, democratic decision-making and project champions. The findings suggest these key elements foster the interaction, communication and relationships needed to facilitate feedback, enhance relationships, create cross-functional teams and lower project resistance, which are all necessary to overcome constraints to social outcomes in construction. The findings provide greater insight into the mechanisms for achieving social outcomes and a basis for future discussion about the processes for achieving social outcomes in the construction industry.

A business process‐driven approach for generating software modules

SUMMARYBusiness processes describe the business operations of an organization and capture the business requirements. Business applications provide automated support for an organization to achieve their business objectives. A software modular structure represents the structure of a business application and shows the distribution of functionality to software components. However, mainstream design approaches rely on software architects' craftsmanship to derive software modular structures from business requirements. Such a manual approach is inefficient and often leads to inconsistency between business requirements and business applications. To address this problem, we propose an approach to derive software modular structures from business processes. We use clustering algorithms to analyze dependencies among data and tasks captured in business processes and group the strongly dependent tasks and data into a software component. A case study is conducted to generate software modular structures from a collection of business processes from the industrial setting and open‐source development domain. The experiment results illustrate that our proposed approach can generate meaningful software modular structures with high modularity. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The research on extracting the information of human errors in the main control room of nuclear power plants by using Performance Evaluation Matrix

Digitalized nuclear instruments and control systems have been the main stream design for the main control room (MCR) of advanced nuclear power plants (NPPs) nowadays. Digitalization of human–system interface (HSI) could improve human performance and, on the other hand, could reduce operators’ situation awareness as well. It might cause that humans make wrong decision during an emergency unintentionally. Besides, digital HSI relies on computers to integrate system information automatically instead of human operation. It has changed the operator’s role from mainly relating operational activity to mainly relating monitoring. However, if the operators omit or misjudge the information on the video display units and wide display panel, the error of omission and error of commission may occur. This study applies Content Category Analysis (CCA) and Performance Evaluation Matrix (PEM) methods to explore the potential problems in the MCR of advanced NPPs which are caused by human errors. The results show that the potential problems that would probably contribute to the human performance of MCR in the advanced NPPs are multiple accidents, pressure level, number of operators, and other factors such as working environmental. The conclusions of this research may be considered to avoid and prevent human errors in the human factor related researches especially in the nuclear safety field.

User-Sensitive Inclusive Design

Although “User-Centred”, “Participatory”, and other similar design approaches have proved to be very valuable for mainstream design, their principles are more difficult to apply successfully when the user group contains, or is composed of, older and/or disabled users. In the field of design for older and disabled people, the “Universal Design”, “Inclusive Design” and “Design for All” movements have encouraged designers to extend their design briefs to include older and disabled people. The downside of these approaches is that they can tend to encourage designers to follow a traditional design path to produce a prototype design, and only then investigate how to modify their interfaces and systems to cope with older and/or disabled users. This can lead to an inefficient design process and sometimes an inappropriate design, which may be “accessible” to people with disabilities, but in practice unusable. This paper reviews the concept that the authors have called “User-Sensitive Inclusive Design”, which suggests a different approach to designing for marginalised groups of people. Rather than suggesting that designers rely on standards and guidelines, it is suggested that designers need to develop a real empathy with their user groups. A number of ways to achieve this are recommended, including the use of ethnography and techniques derived from professional theatre both for requirements gathering and for improving designers’ empathy for marginalised groups of users, such as older and disabled people.

Design of HTS tri-axial cable in steady-state operation

By the advantage of more compact structure, small leakage field, and low heat loss, tri-axial cable become to be mainstream design in recently HTS practical project. However, the imbalance current problem was also reported by some practice experiments. Since the HTS tri-axial cable is composed of three concentric phases, an unsymmetrical inductance and capacitance distribution which is determined by twist pitches and radii, gives an inherent imbalance in three-phase currents distribution. In our previous research, we proposed a two sections structure design to overcome this limitation. Inductance has been balanced by twist pitch adjusting. In that case, the imbalance ratio of current only can be caused by capacitance distribution which is depending on voltage and line length. In this paper, we evaluate the thickness of insulation, the unsymmetrical capacitance distribution and cable fabrication error. Then we investigate the imbalance ratio due to the capacitance as functions of voltage and length by using Electromagnetic Transients Program (EMTP).

A relation between flow, noise, and system impedance for notebook computers.

Performance of notebook computers is strongly limited by the ability to reject heat from the system. In a typical mainstream design, the airflow driven by the internal fan is responsible for about 80% of the maximum cooling capability, and this airflow impacts all the internal components (CPU, memory, radios, etc.) as well as the top and bottom skin temperatures. Fan flow, in turn, is limited by acoustics. It has been shown that the fan installation conditions inside a notebook computer have an adverse effect on both flow rate and noise. The market trend is toward thinner systems, which generally have a higher system impedance. As impedance increases, system airflow must decrease to maintain a fixed acoustic limit, holding all other variables constant. In order to demonstrate the effect of impedance, this paper describes a simple, two parameter model relating the flow rate in a notebook computer at a given operator position sound pressure level to the impedance index of the system. This relation is shown to reasonably approximate the behavior of about 20 different notebook computers.

Affording Meaning: Design-Oriented Research from the Humanities and Social Sciences

Author(s): Almquist, Julka; Lupton, Julia | Abstract: User studies, whether conducted through qualitative ethnographic interviews or through more clinical and behaviorist analyses of specific affordances and interfaces, have remapped design research from a study of things to a study of people. Some design researchers have even argued that without the user, design does not exist. Although this focus on users might appear to benefit the consumers of design by celebrating their personal experience and finding new ways to maximize their pleasures and productivity, critics of the user model, whose diverse ranks include Johan Redstrom, as well as Ellen Lupton, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, have argued persuasively that user studies ultimately construe the human subject of design as a predictable bundle of reflexes and impulses that can be torqued, tuned, and tweaked in order to do the bidding—and the buying—prescribed by a consumer savvy cabal of designers, engineers, and marketers. The word “user” itself communicates the terrors of addiction as well as the triumphs of functional mastery. In a landscape of diminishing economic and natural resources, the vision of the user promoted by mainstream design research is in dire need of revision. Meanwhile, consumers themselves are striking back, not only in the form of the D.I.Y., fair labor, and green movements, but also by simply withdrawing, out of sheer economic necessity, from the relentless rhythms of getting and spending that dictate our modern “user” lifestyle.

Parallelizing sequential applications on commodity hardware using a low-cost software transactional memory

Multicore designs have emerged as the mainstream design paradigm for the microprocessor industry. Unfortunately, providing multiple cores does not directly translate into performance for most applications. The industry has already fallen short of the decades-old performance trend of doubling performance every 18 months. An attractive approach for exploiting multiple cores is to rely on tools, both compilers and runtime optimizers, to automatically extract threads from sequential applications. However, despite decades of research on automatic parallelization, most techniques are only effective in the scientific and data parallel domains where array dominated codes can be precisely analyzed by the compiler. Thread-level speculation offers the opportunity to expand parallelization to general-purpose programs, but at the cost of expensive hardware support. In this paper, we focus on providing low-overhead software support for exploiting speculative parallelism. We propose STMlite, a light-weight software transactional memory model that is customized to facilitate profile-guided automatic loop parallelization. STMlite eliminates a considerable amount of checking and locking overhead in conventional software transactional memory models by decoupling the commit phase from main transaction execution. Further, strong atomicity requirements for generic transactional memories are unnecessary within a stylized automatic parallelization framework. STMlite enables sequential applications to extract meaningful performance gains on commodity multicore hardware.

The Clinical Application of an Upper Limb Custom Silicone Interface: Observations of a Case Study

Silicone interfaces have played an important role in the prosthetics field over the last three decades. From suspension techniques to the enhancement of comfort and protection of atypical or diseased residual limbs, silicone provides unique and valuable benefits that have helped countless individuals regain functionality. Beyond the world of prosthetics, silicone has become a mainstay in wound management, scar maturation, and in the overall promotion of healing during occupational and physical therapy. Practitioners now recognize that silicone interfaces can protect fragile skin in extreme cases such as severe burns and extensive skin grafts. Clinically, as we incorporate custom silicone into the mainstream design of the “standard” upper-limb prosthesis, we are beginning to see unexpected and exciting benefits. Although not formally studied, clinical observation has shown that people wearing an upper-limb prosthesis that incorporates a custom silicone interface gain greater range of motion at the elbow and wrist, report increased comfort and better tolerances of aggressive socket design, and experience greater protection of fragile skin. A recent case study within our clinical setting highlights the positive effects of a custom silicone interface on a chronic wound and provides real observation of the benefits that the addition of this material to the prosthetic design can have on this patient population. (J Prosthet Orthot. 2009;21:120‐124.) KEY INDEXING TERMS: upper extremity, amputation, silicone, custom interface, prosthetics, wound healing, occupational therapy

CITIES, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND DESIGN PEDAGOGY ENHANCING “PEOPLE-ENVIRONMENTS” PARADIGM IN EDUCATION

Symposium Overview Recent years have witnessed dramatic changes in the socio-physical environments of cities suggesting the presence of multiple diversities. This is exemplified by changes in the structure of contemporary societies, the emergence of informal settlements, housing problems, large structure and new building types, and the deterioration of the built heritage, while the complexity of the built environment is continuously increasing. With these changes demands for new types of knowledge and their application in design pedagogy are clearly on the rise. The theme of this symposium is introduced as recognition of ties that have not been of concern for long to the mainstream design research. Therefore, the symposium addresses ways in which ‘people environments’ paradigm can be enhanced in design pedagogy where the theme of cities and cultural diversity is explored through different paradigmatic approaches. In this symposium, eight provocative and diverse papers are presented to shed light on the dialectic relationship between culture, diversity, and pedagogy. These are of S. Mazumdar on What’s Culture Got To Do With Design Pedagogy; A. Abdel-Hadi and T. Rashed on Influence of Cultural- Environment Diversity on Conceptual Output; A.M. Salama on Pedagogical Tools for Integrating ‘People-Environments’ Paradigm in Lecture based Courses in Architecture; H.T. Yildiz, G. _nalhan, and S. Y. Tok on Using Traditional and Historical Cities in Architectural Design Education; A. S. Deviren on Understanding Place through Design Studio Studies; J. W. Robinson on Travel Pedagogy for International Study of Housing and Urbanism; D. K. Shehayeb and N. H. Sherif on Shaping Young Architects’ Minds: Wearing the E B Glasses; and A. Eyuce on Learning from Istanbul. Representing different regions, the papers offer an exposition of philosophies and discourses, cases and experiments, and programs and approaches as voices that call for integrating ‘people-environments’ paradigm into teaching practices in an effective and efficient manner.

A Methodology for Building Up an Infrastructure of Haptically Enhanced Computer-Aided Design Systems

This paper presents an infrastructure that integrates a haptic interface into a mainstream computer-aided design (CAD) system. A haptic interface, by providing force feedback in human-computer interaction, can improve the working efficiency of CAD/computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems in a unique way. The full potential of the haptic technology is best realized when it is integrated effectively into the product development environment and process. For large manufacturing companies this means integration into a commercial CAD system (Stewart, et al., 1997, “Direct Integration of Haptic User Interface in CAD Systems,” ASME Dyn. Syst. Control Div., 61, pp. 93–99). Mainstream CAD systems typically use constructive solid geometry (CSG) and boundary representation (B-Rep) format as their native format, while internally they automatically maintain triangulated meshes for graphics display and for numerical evaluation tasks such as surface-surface intersection. In this paper, we propose to render a point-based haptic force feedback by leveraging built-in functions of the CAD systems. The burden of collision detection and haptic rendering computation is alleviated by using bounding spheres and an OpenGL feedback buffer. The major contribution of this paper is that we developed a sound structure and methodology for haptic interaction with native CAD models inside mainstream CAD systems. We did so by analyzing CAD application models and by examining haptic rendering algorithms. The technique enables the user to directly touch and manipulate native 3D CAD models in mainstream CAD systems with force/touch feedback. It lays the foundation for future tasks such as direct CAD model modification, dynamic simulation, and virtual assembly with the aid of a haptic interface. Hence, by integrating a haptic interface directly with mainstream CAD systems, the powerful built-in functions of CAD systems can be leveraged and enhanced to realize more agile 3D CAD design and evaluation.

Novel Antenna-in-Package Design in LTCC for Single-Chip RF Transceivers

An antenna-in-package (AiP) design offers an elegant antenna solution to modern single-chip RF transceivers. The AiP design that integrates an antenna or antennas with a single-chip RF transceiver die into a standard surface mounted device represents an innovative and important development in the miniaturization of radio systems in recent years. In this paper, we present a novel AiP design in low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) technology for single-chip RF transceivers operating in the 5-GHz band. First, we focus on the design of a microstrip line antenna on an LTCC substrate. Then, a double-resonance technique and a meshed ground plane are proposed to enhance the impedance bandwidth of the microstrip line antenna. Next, the microstrip line antenna is integrated into the novel AiP with emphasis on feeding the microstrip line antenna using the packaging elements of the carried single-chip RF transceiver die. After that, a unique AiP design which supports the operation of differential signal to suit the mainstream design of single-chip RF transceivers in a differential architecture is described. Finally, the performance of the original AiP design is verified by experimental results.

Asynchronous control of modules activity in integrated systems for reducing peak temperatures

The paper describes a new control method of integrated circuit (IC) modules activity in a modern processor design. The control method leads to improved frequency ability of integrated systems. The proposed solution, based only on computing flow modification, could be easily integrated into all future designs, ranging from a portable computing to a multi-core computing. A new approach to the thermal control method is described along with simulation results. An example of incorporation in current and future integrated circuits into mainstream designs is presented with exemplary algorithms and final simulation results.

Design for Sustainable Architecture and Environments

AbstractThis paper describes some of the research outcomes of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project partly funded by Department of Trade and Industry, UK. One of the aims of the project was to plan and develop designs for a range of autonomous eco-buildings through research into autonomous eco-building systems and techniques in order to identify best practice and the most appropriate systems for low-carbon buildings. The design of the Community Hall offering accommodations for a multi functional hall, café and exhibition, and offices, has been developed through partnership with mainstream design and construction companies in the region. Following a successful planning application and external fund raising exercise, the construction of the building is due to start shortly. The structure will be constructed using locally sourced materials and is designed to be ‘renewable’ whilst exceeding all the requirements of the current Building Regulations. It examines the potential of non traditional construction techniques and materials. The total environmental impact of the design as the result of environmental loads occurring during the life span of the building is estimated and compared with conventional practice. The building incorporates rain water collection, waste treatment, composting toilets and photovoltaics.

The Perils of Behavior-Based Personalization

“Behavior-based personalization” has gained popularity in recent years, whereby businesses offer personalized products based on consumers' purchase histories. This paper highlights two perils of behavior-based personalization in competitive markets. First, although purchase histories reveal consumer preferences, competitive exploitation of such information damages differentiation, similar to the classic finding that behavior-based price discrimination intensifies price competition. With endogenous product design, there is yet a second peril. It emerges when forward-looking firms try to avoid the first peril by suppressing the information value of purchase histories. Ideally, if a market leader serves all consumers on day 1, purchase histories contain no information about consumer preferences. However, knowing that their rivals are willing to accommodate a market leader, firms are more likely to offer a mainstream design at day 1, which jeopardizes differentiation. Based on this understanding, I investigate how the perils of behavior-based personalization change under alternative market conditions, such as firms' better knowledge about their own customers, consumer loyalty and inertia, consumer self-selection, and the need for classic designs.

Characterising the requirements of engineering information systems

Well-organised information is vital in gaining a competitive advantage within engineering companies. Increasingly, computer systems are used for managing this information, but for systems to be successful they need to be built on an understanding of how engineers work. This paper contributes to this understanding by reporting on how 10 engineers, from two aerospace companies, organise and use information. Information profiles have been proposed as a means of identifying the requirements of engineers who are working in different design situations (characterised by the stage of the design life cycle and also the social environment in which the engineers work). The results indicate important differences in the extent to which personal, local group and company-wide information is used. In particular, clear differences are identified between engineers who can be considered as company ‘experts’ and those involved in mainstream design activities. These differences manifest themselves in the extent to which personal and local group information collections are used, the content and also the strategies used for storing and updating the material within these stores.

Alternative Design Scholarship: Working Toward Appropriate Design

Design scholars from diverse fields have attempted to assist marginalized social groups by redirecting design thinking toward their needs. By offering alternatives to dominant design activities, “alternative design” scholarship seeks to understand how unequal power relations are embodied in, and result from, mainstream design practice and products. Alternative design scholars analyze how technologies and other designed artifacts are implicated in larger social problems, such as rampant consumerism, sexism, ecological abuse, lack of user participation and autonomy, and restricted access to built environments, among others. Through these efforts, alternative design scholarship offers designers an opportunity to think about how their work might be directed as wisely and fairly as possible. Efforts to redirect technologies toward the needs of marginalized people have a long and varied history. Dating back to the 1960s and before, technology transfer advocates argued for transferring Western technologies to the third world.1 They hoped to take advantage of the intellectual and financial resources already invested by the West to benefit those who seemed to need technology the most. But it soon became evident that the transferability of technology among contexts is far from straightforward. Limited resource availability (capital, expertise, spare parts, etc.), different perspectives on the nature of the problem/solution, and a lack of familiarity with similar technological systems led to dashed hopes and expensive failures for technology transfers, such as the numerous decentralized power systems fallen into disuse throughout the developing world.2 Technology scholars came to realize that differences between a technology’s developmental context and its use context were significant. In part as a response to failures of technology transfer approaches, “appropriate technologists” argued that context suitability should be central to identifying technologies relevant to poor people of the Third World and other marginalized social groups.3 Developing appropriate technologies required accounting for the needs of others by paying careful attention to the use context of that technology, as well as to local perspectives on the problem to be solved. Attention to contextual particularities became one of the guiding approaches to appropriate technology and, hence, unlike technology transfer scholars, appropriate technology thinking took design as the point of intervention. Through the 1970s, appropriate 1 Werner J. Feld, “The Transfer of Technology to Third World Countries: Political Problems and International Ramifications” in Mathew J. Betz, et al., eds., Appropriate Technology: Choice and Development (Durham, North Carolina: Duke Press Policy Studies, 1984), 49–63. 2 Frances Stewart, Technology and Underdevelopment (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977). 3 E. F. Schumacher was early to make this observation in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). A generation of scholars and practitioners followed.