Single Artifact Research Articles

Material evidence: definition by a series of artefacts in arts research

The possibility of the artefact in arts research to hold formal knowledge is still very much questioned. This paper explores the potential of not a single artefact but a series of artefacts to define and demonstrate formal knowledge in itself. Through a comparative analysis of a number of basic art research projects in e.g. painting, music, fashion design and photography, the paper explores how formal aesthetic principles may be not only defined through a series of artefacts but also equally argued for on the basis of the material evidence that the artefacts provide. The analysis of the examples shows how a series of artefacts can define and validate principle results of basic art research rather than narrate interpretative results of applied art research. The self-informed and self-referential character of the examples shows how formal aesthetic principles and its expressive potential can be validated in terms of fit rather than a justified belief in relation to the aim of the research. In conclusion, the result demonstrates significant implications for theoretical conceptualisation of foundational knowledge in art research based on a form of ostensive definition without significant use of text for theoretical reasons.

Enhancing Urban Heritage: Industrial Culture and Cultural Industry

The rehabilitation of historical centres in Italy offers a vast quantity of experiences, though the concept of preserving urban and architectural heritage is quite recent. In fact the same experience does not find place for industrial districts or areas. The scale of intervention is specific to each case as it deals with single artefacts as well as complex building systems, open spaces and urban closeness. The heterogeneity of adopted methods is a result of diverse contextual conditions and, perhaps above all, diverse urban policies. An initial distinction must be made between Monument and Document, thus distinguishing two levels, both equally relevant to the preservation of the identities of a site, though of widely varying origins and – quite often – diverse physical, formal and functional consistency. This text will examine primarily those aspects related to urban morphology, looking at buildings by means of the Vitruvius paradigm: firmitas, utilitas and venustas. These notions will, however, be subordinated to superior levels of programming. Political choices determine what can be pursued, while economic strategies indicate the limits of each intervention; last but not least is the notion of environmental sustainability in its broadest meaning that encompasses issues of energy, economics, function, technology and, above all, society. We will attempt to further narrow the field by considering the rehabilitation of a complex industrial district: the first methodological choice concerns the type of analysis (the reading) adopted to acquire notions useful to the development of a concept design. Architectural debate, in particular in Italy, was witness to the articulated development of diverse positions. A rich selection produced a number of fixed points that will be synthetically referred to. We shall expose the case of Porto Marghera, the Venice industrial district: readings and studies developed within our university research unit and with the help of research-fellows, degree students, phd students.

Scoring the Rhizome: Bussotti's Musical Diagram

The score of Piece Four of Sylvano Bussotti's Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor is the most important image in A Thousand Plateaus. It serves as a prefatory image not only to the Rhizome plateau, but also to the work as a whole. It functions as the book's musical score, guiding readers in their performance of the text. Embracing John Cage's graphism and aleatory practices, Bussotti created his own ‘aserial’ new music, one that celebrated passion and Bussotti's open homosexuality. The visual elements of Piece Four include a deterritorialisation of the standard piano score, a diagram of the composition's abstract machine, and a drawing that Bussotti had produced ten years before writing Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor. The drawing itself is a rhizomic artwork, with details that echo visual motifs throughout A Thousand Plateaus. The superimposition of the drawing on the deterritorialised framework of the standard piano score conjoins the visible and the audible, faciality and the refrain, in a single artefact.

Lithic recycling in a Middle Paleolithic expedient context: Evidence from the Abric Romaní (Capellades, Spain)

Lithic recycling in a Middle Paleolithic expedient context: Evidence from the Abric Romaní (Capellades, Spain)

Book Review of The Gurob Ship-Cart Model and Its Mediterranean Context, by Shelly Wachsmann

Tomb 611 in Gurob, excavated in 1920 by two of Petrie’s assistants, Guy Brunton and Reginald Engleback, yielded a single artifact: a wooden model of a ship-cart, its ship part colored red, blue, and yellow and measuring 38.5 cm long and 13.2 cm tall. The tomb in which the ship-cart model was found is one in a series of tombs dating to the 18th or 19th Dynasty (167). The object was dated based on radiocarbon samples to 1256–1054 B.C.E. (214). Wachsmann initially intended to publish this model, now exhibited in the Petrie Museum for Egyptian Archaeology, in an article (xviii).

Measuring Architecture Sustainability

It's difficult to express a software architecture's sustainability in a single metric: relevant information is spread across requirements, architecture design documents, technology choices, source code, system context, and software architects' implicit knowledge. Many aspects influence economic sustainability, including design decisions facilitating evolutionary changes, adherence to good modularization practices, and technology choices. An approach that focuses on a single artifact or perspective is likely to neglect important factors. ABB Corporate Research is tracking the architecture sustainability of a large-scale industrial control system currently under development. A former version of the system grew to several million LOC and suffered from architecture erosion and high maintenance costs. A multiperspective approach called Morphosis will help avoid such a situation in the future by focusing on requirements, architecture design, and source code. It includes evolution scenario analysis, scoring of technology choices, architecture compliance checks, and tracking of architecture-level code metrics.

Representing the Microscopic: New Ecological Thinking in Art and Science

An impressive range of competing and complementary visual renditions helps us understand the immaterial and the invisible by assigning a visual appearance to microscopic and submicroscopic substances. However, the sheer variety that dominates visualization of the microscopic suggests that a represented object may be so complex that it cannot be reflected by a single artefact. That is to say, it is not a monolithic given, a pristine entity or a “thing in itself” waiting to be dismembered and represented. I analyse mixed media installations by the bioartists Tagny Duff and Elaine Whittaker, contending that their method constitutes a recent media art trend towards ecological (re)thinking. By examining specific arrangements of objects and artefacts and the scientific processes used to manipulate, prepare and make the microscopic visible and by placing them side by side in the same execution, these artists unveil new alternative economies of nature that may reshape the way we understand the microscopic.

Managing the Repertoire: Stories, Metaphors, Prototypes, and Concept Coherence in Product Innovation

Arecognized challenge in innovation scholarship is how to coordinate the efforts of many minds contributing to the design of a single artifact. Much research shows that product concept representations can help coordinate design tasks, but we know little about the practices that make representations more or less effective. We used an inductive approach to examine how six teams in three industries used concept representations when creating novel products. All six teams crafted three types of representations: stories, metaphors, and prototypes. However, merely using representations did not ensure a shared repertoire and concept coherence—a common understanding of desired product attributes. Teams that failed to consistently engage in three practices—(1) collective scrutiny of representations, (2) linking representations to design constraints, and (3) active editing of representations—produced concept disunity, with disparate understandings of desired product attributes. Teams that maintained concept coherence were better able to coordinate design tasks than teams that experienced concept disunity. Our research explains how the ultimate effect of concept representations on the coordination of innovation is contingent on the practices used to manage a repertoire of representations in use.

Possible Variation in Late Archaic Period Bifaces in Belize: New Finds from the Cayo District of Western Belize

Six additional barbed bifaces have been recovered from the Cayo District of Western Belize, bringing the total number of known Late Archaic Lowe and Sawmill points from this part of the country to 12. Not only do these six points provide more evidence for a greater Late Archaic hunter-gatherer presence in this part of the country, but differences in their stems suggest the possibility of more variation in point styles than previously known. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 12 points from Western Belize and comparisons to others discovered in Northern and Northwestern Belize and the Sibun Gorge of Central Belize, we propose that there may have been three different styles of Lowe points used by Late Archaic food-foragers in Belize. However, two of these three possible Lowe point styles are only represented by a single artifact each, rendering more detailed explanations of sources of stylistic variation difficult. Unlike the Lowe points, the observed differences in the Sawmill point stems are not supported by quantitative data; therefore, there seems to be only one style of stem for these Late Archaic bifaces.

A one-kilogram quartz resonator as a mass standard

The SI unit of mass, the kilogram, is defined by a single artifact, the International Prototype Kilogram. This artifact, the primary mass standard, suffers from long-term instabilities that are neither well understood nor easily monitored. A secondary mass standard consisting of a 1-kg quartz resonator in ultrahigh vacuum is proposed. The frequency stability of such a resonator is likely to be far higher than the mass stability of the primary mass standard. Moreover, the resonator would provide a link to the SI time-interval unit. When compared with a laboratory-grade atomic frequency standard or GPS time, the frequency of the resonator could be monitored, on a continuous basis, with 10(-15) precision in only a few days of averaging. It could also be coordinated, worldwide, with other resonator mass standards without the need to transport the standards.

DISCOVERING AND MANAGING SOCIAL COMPOSITIONS IN COLLABORATIVE ENTERPRISE CROWDSOURCING SYSTEMS

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly used model to outsource certain tasks to be carried out by external experts on the Web. Especially when lacking experience or expertise with certain task types, crowdsourcing offers a convenient way to receive instant support. In this paper, we introduce an in-house enterprise crowdsourcing model, which leverages the crowdsourcing concept and transfers it to traditional organizations. Here, a company's staff is considered a crowd that — besides its regularly assigned tasks — can also receive tasks from colleagues from other departments and across hierarchical structures. The aim is to offer instant support and utilize free capacities throughout a large organization more efficiently. In our work, we describe this concept and supporting mechanisms in context of an agile software development use case. However, in contrast to usually crowdsourced microtasks, complex software architectures usually consist of tens and hundreds of connected modules that can be potentially crowdsourced. These technical dependencies between modules require active coordination and interactions between crowd members that process the single artifacts. Hence, technical dependencies of artifacts result in social dependencies of collaborating crowd members that create them. In order to efficiently discover member compositions based on artifact dependencies, we introduce an indexing and discovery approach based on subgraph matching. Typically, assigning tasks to well-rehearsed teams results in more reliable task processing, faster results, and higher quality of work. We evaluate our approach in terms of system scalability and overall applicability by mining and analyzing the popular SourceForge community. We show that our approach of member composition discovery is feasibly in terms of scalability and quality of discovery results. Our findings deliver important input for the design and implementation of supporting information systems for future large-scale collaboration platforms.

Artistically Directed Prototyping in Development and in Practice

The use of technology in artistic contexts presents interesting challenges regarding the processes in which engineers, artists and performers work together. The artistic intent and goals of the participants are relevant both when shaping the development practice, and in defining and refining the role of technology in practice. In this paper we present strategies for structuring the development process, based on iterative design and participatory design. The concepts are described in theory and examples are given of how they have been successfully applied. The cases make heavy use of different types of prototyping and this practice is also discussed. The development cases all relate to a single artifact, a gestural voice processing instrument called The Throat. This artifact has been in use since it was developed, and from that experience, three cases are presented. The focus of these cases is on how artistic vision through practice can recontextualize technology, and, without rebuilding it, redefine it and give it a new role to play.

The quest for runware: on compositional, executable and intuitive models

We believe that future models of complex software and systems will combine the crucial traits of intuitiveness, compositionality, and executability. The importance of each of these to modeling is already well recognized, but our vision suggests a far more powerful synergy between them. First, models will be aligned with cognitive processes used by humans to think about system behavior and will be understood, and perhaps creatable, by almost anyone. Second, one will be able to build models incrementally, adding to, refining or sculpting away already-specified behaviors without changing most existing parts of the model. Third, there will be powerful ways to execute such intuitive and compositional models, in whole or in part, at any stage of the development. The presence of these three traits in a single artifact will blur the boundaries between natural-language requirements, formal models, and actual software, bringing in its wake a major advance in the way systems are built, and in their cost and quality. We propose the term runware to refer to this kind of higher level artifact.

Temporal nature and recycling of Upper Paleolithic artifacts: the burned tools from the Molí del Salt site (Vimbodí i Poblet, northeastern Spain)

Temporal nature and recycling of Upper Paleolithic artifacts: the burned tools from the Molí del Salt site (Vimbodí i Poblet, northeastern Spain)

Information technology strategy and alignment issues in health care organizations

Information technology (IT) plays a key role in public health care management because it could improve quality, efficiency, and patient care. Researchers and practitioners repeatedly contend that a health care organization's information systems strategy should be aligned with its objectives and strategies, a notion commonly known as IT alignment. Actor-related IT alignment issues in health care institutions were explored in this study. More specifically, it explores the possibility of moving beyond the current IT alignment perspective and, in so doing, explores whether IT alignment-as currently conceptualized in the dominant body of research-is sufficient for attaining improved quality, efficiency, and patient care in health care organizations. The findings are based on a qualitative and longitudinal study of six health care organizations in the Stockholm metropolitan area. The empirical data were gathered over the 2005-2011 period from interviews, a focus group, observations, and archival material. The data suggest recurrent misalignments between IT strategy and organizational strategy and operations due to the failure to deconstruct the IT artifact and to the existence of various levels of IT maturity. A more complex picture of IT alignment in health care that goes beyond the current perspective is being offered by this study. It argues that the previously common way of handling IT as a single artifact and applying one IT strategy to the entire organizational system is obsolete. MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS: The article suggests that considerable benefits can be gained by assessing IT maturity and its impact on IT alignment. The article also shows that there are different kinds of IT in medical care that requires diverse decisions, investments, prioritizations, and implementation approaches.

Implant?: Prosthesis? Inclusion?

The author discusses the indiscriminate use of various terms to designate a single artifact and suggests the adoption of only one signifier. Although no publications deal specifically with the meaning of the terms "implant", "prosthesis" or "inclusion", apart from what is found in ordinary lexical and medical dictionaries, such terms are commonly and interchangeably used to designate a single artifact. According to the author, it is beneficial to select and utilize only the term that best conceptualizes the object designed for correcting lack of breast volume in specialty terminology. The use of a single term will facilitate scientific paper writing; therefore, the author proposes the use of the term "implant" to indicate the artifact placed inside the mammary gland.

ARTiiFACT: a tool for heart rate artifact processing and heart rate variability analysis

The importance of appropriate handling of artifacts in interbeat interval (IBI) data must not be underestimated. Even a single artifact may cause unreliable heart rate variability (HRV) results. Thus, a robust artifact detection algorithm and the option for manual intervention by the researcher form key components for confident HRV analysis. Here, we present ARTiiFACT, a software tool for processing electrocardiogram and IBI data. Both automated and manual artifact detection and correction are available in a graphical user interface. In addition, ARTiiFACT includes time- and frequency-based HRV analyses and descriptive statistics, thus offering the basic tools for HRV analysis. Notably, all program steps can be executed separately and allow for data export, thus offering high flexibility and interoperability with a whole range of applications.

Nurses' behaviors and visual scanning patterns may reduce patient identification errors.

Patient identification (ID) errors occurring during the medication administration process can be fatal. The aim of this study is to determine whether differences in nurses' behaviors and visual scanning patterns during the medication administration process influence their capacities to identify patient ID errors. Nurse participants (n = 20) administered medications to 3 patients in a simulated clinical setting, with 1 patient having an embedded ID error. Error-identifying nurses tended to complete more process steps in a similar amount of time than non-error-identifying nurses and tended to scan information across artifacts (e.g., ID band, patient chart, medication label) rather than fixating on several pieces of information on a single artifact before fixating on another artifact. Non-error-indentifying nurses tended to increase their durations of off-topic conversations-a type of process interruption-over the course of the trials; the difference between groups was significant in the trial with the embedded ID error. Error-identifying nurses tended to have their most fixations in a row on the patient's chart, whereas non-error-identifying nurses did not tend to have a single artifact on which they consistently fixated. Finally, error-identifying nurses tended to have predictable eye fixation sequences across artifacts, whereas non-error-identifying nurses tended to have seemingly random eye fixation sequences. This finding has implications for nurse training and the design of tools and technologies that support nurses as they complete the medication administration process.

Generating sample looks for geometric objects in a visual design language

Generating sample looks for geometric objects in a visual design language

Communicative Function Demonstration induces kind-based artifact representation in preverbal infants

Communicative Function Demonstration induces kind-based artifact representation in preverbal infants