Environmental Design Commons^™

Designing Work: Collaboration Versus Concentration In Open Plan Workspaces?, John Walsh

Level 3

This paper looks at the design of open-plan offices, particularly in relation to the impact of spatial design on different work-modes. It briefly examines the history of the open plan office, looking at how today’s typical open-plan workplace has evolved. It considers how workplaces can be successfully designed to facilitate the seemingly conflicting requirements of supporting both collaboration and concentration.

Urban Design Vision: The Fremont Hub, Megan Kristine Miller

City and Regional Planning

No abstract provided.

Bicycle Planning In European Cities And Its Applicability To American Cities, Amy Gunn

City and Regional Planning

No abstract provided.

A Model For Sustainable Living In Guanajuato, Mexico, Melina Smith

City and Regional Planning

No abstract provided.

Respirable Dust Monitoring In Construction Sites And Visualization In Building Information Modeling Using Real-Time Sensor Data, Nour Smaoui, Kyungki Kim, Omprakash Gnawali, Young-Joo Lee, Wonho Suh

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Construction activities, involving cutting, drilling, and grinding of materials, often produce toxic respirable dust that can cause fatal diseases and illnesses. To protect workers from breathing excessive amounts of respirable dust at job sites, superintendents should continuously monitor the level of respirable dust in workspaces and make timely interventions for overexposed workers. However, current practices of respirable dust monitoring have critical drawbacks, and superintendents cannot accurately estimate workers’ exposures to respirable dust or make prompt decisions to protect the workers. Therefore, there is a need for real-time air dust monitoring that can be deployed ubiquitously at a construction site and …

Analyses Of Crowd-Sourced Sound Levels Of Restaurants And Bars In New York City, Gregory S. Farber, Lily M. Wang

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

For several decades, there has been a significant need to better educate the public about noise pollution. A small number of small-scale studies have focused on the sound levels of restaurants and their impact on health and hearing. There have also been an increasing number of media articles stating that eating and drinking venues are getting increasingly loud making it more difficult for people to connect with others in conversation. This study reports on an exploratory large-scale noise survey of sound levels of 2,376 restaurants and bars in New York City using a novel smart-phone application and categorized them based …

Libraries And The Missing Narrative: Practitioner Explorations In The Use Of Design Psychology And Environmental Autobiography For Library Buildings And Designs, Amy Beth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Environmental Autobiography as a research method of Environmental Psychology and Design Psychology informs this study of the meaning and experiences of libraries described by six library-building design practitioners. Participants were guided through an adaptation of Toby Israel’s (2010) Design Psychology Toolbox (hereafter known as the DPT or the “Toolbox”) exercises. The research is intended to expand the practice of designing libraries as places and spaces where social and emotional affordance is supported. Emphasizing the significance of libraries as place and space where people often have rich and even transformative experiences serves to augment use-efficiency and evidence-based space planning. Primary goals …

Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

Once a prosperous cultural urban center in the Mississippi River delta, but now the nation’s second fastest shrinking city, Pine Bluff (population: 42,700) is Arkansas’ Detroit. Indeed, a study of black wealth conducted by famed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899 found that Pine Bluff had the fourth highest rate of black wealth in the nation behind Charleston, Richmond, and New York City. The school’s community design center prepared a downtown revitalization plan, Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, a housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown “centers of strength”. While the revitalization approach is triaged around a …

Center For Farm And Food System Entrepreneurship, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

The average age of the American farmer is 58. Since communities are not reproducing the next generation of farmers, universities are establishing training centers to model new concepts and technologies in farming. The Farmers Training Center is both an immersive program in the rhythms of farm life and a public facility for hosting gatherings that celebrate value-added food products. Part of the University of Arkansas’ farm operations near campus, the center is the public face of agriculture where farmers and the public meet. Student farmers learn by farming, from organic vegetable production in fields and greenhouses, to machine repair, marketing, …

New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

More than three million Americans experience homelessness annually. Emergency shelter capacity is limited while local governments are unable to provide even temporary housing. Informal housing involving interim self-help solutions are now popular adaptive actions for obtaining shelter despite nonconformance with city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to move the problem around. Our homeless transition village plan prototypes a shelter-first solution using a kit-of-parts that can be replicated in other communities. Village design reconciles key gaps between informal building practices and formal sector regulations, creating …

Willow Heights Livability Improvement Plan, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

Willow Heights is a 43-year old public housing complex owned by the Fayetteville Housing Authority (FHA) within the federal public housing portfolio administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The school’s design center was commissioned by a local foundation to study an alternative to the FHA’s plan to sell the downtown Willow Heights complex to a developer of high-income housing, necessitating relocation of low-income residents to another complex outside of downtown. Using equity as a driver of decision making, the studio introduced scenario planning to organize reluctant stakeholders in considering transformations to the five-acre complex.

Investigating The State Of Play Of Geobim Across Europe, Claire Ellul, Jantien E. Stoter, Lars Harrie, M. Shariat, Avril Behan, Maria Pla

Conference papers

In both the Geographic Information (Geo) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) domains, it is widely acknowledged that the integration of data from both domains is beneficial and a crucial step in facing the multi-disciplinary challenges of our built environment. The result of this integration – which can broadly be termed GeoBIM – could answer questions such as identifying an appropriate Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning system for a building based on room usage, outside air temperature, solar exposure and traffic pollution or validating whether a proposed built asset meets relevant planning constraints.

Developing a coherent approach to GeoBIM integration requires …

Quality Of Life In A “High-Rise Lawless Slum”: A Study Of The Kowloon Walled City, Prudencea Leung Kwok Lau, Lawrenceb Wai Chung Lai, Daniel Chi Wing Ho

Faculty of Design & Environment (THEi)

Informed by the ‘quality of life’ model with specific reference to Chinese culture, this article uses reliable and publicly available information seldom used in historical or heritage study to identify the designs of flats and builders of the “Kowloon Walled City” (hereafter the City) and reliable oral testimonies to refute some myths about the quality of life within it. This settlement has been notoriously misrepresented by some as a city of darkness that was razed from the face of the Earth before 1997 to fulfill a pre-war dream of the colonial government. This article confirms the view that this extremely …

Assessing Hazard Vulnerability, Habitat Conservation, And Restoration For The Enhancement Ofmainland China’S Coastal Resilience, Muhammad Sajjad, Yangfan Li, Zhenghong Tang, Ling Cao, Xiaoping Liu

Community and Regional Planning Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Worldwide, humans are facing high risks from natural hazards, especially in coastal regions with high population densities. Rising sea levels due to global warming are making coastal communities’ infrastructure vulnerable to natural disasters. The present study aims to provide a coupling approach of vulnerability and resilience through restoration and conservation of lost or degraded coastal natural habitats to reclamation under different climate change scenarios. The integrated valuation of ecosystems and tradeoffs model is used to assess the current and future vulnerability of coastal communities. The model employed is based on seven different biogeophysical variables to calculate a natural hazard index …

Simultaneous Electrical And Mechanical Resonance Drive For Large Signal Amplification Of Micro Resonators, M. H. Hasan, Fadi M. Alsaleem, N. Jaber, M. A. A. Hafiz, M. I. Younis

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Achieving large signal-noise ratio using low levels of excitation signal is key requirement for practical applications of micro and nano electromechanical resonators. In this work, we introduce the double electromechanical resonance drive concept to achieve an order-of-magnitude dynamic signal amplification in micro resonators. The concept relies on simultaneously activating the micro-resonator mechanical and electrical resonance frequencies. We report an input voltage amplification up to 15 times for a micro-resonator when its electrical resonance is tuned to match the mechanical resonance that leads to dynamic signal amplification in air (Quality factor enhancement). Furthermore, using a multi-frequency excitation technique, input voltage and …

Impact Of Owners’ Early Decisions On Project Performance And Dispute Occurrence In Public Highway Projects, Sogand Hasanzadeh, Behzad Esmaeili, Ghada M. Gad, Douglas D. Gransberg

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Disputes are common in the construction industry and lead to unnecessary cost and schedule overruns in projects. It is commonly believed that owners’ early decisions regarding the selection of delivery methods, procurement methods, and contract types impact the frequency and severity of project disputes; however, no previous study has empirically tested this hypothesis, particularly in highway public projects. Therefore, this study empirically investigated the impact of owners’ early decisions regarding project organization (i.e., delivery methods, procurement, and contract types) on performance measures (e.g., cost and schedule growth), specifically dispute performance metrics (e.g., frequency and severity of disputes), in public highway …

Numerical Simulation Of Fault Impacts For Commercial Walk-In Freezers, Alireza Behfar, David P. Yuill

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Refrigeration systems can undergo many faults that could negatively affect their operation and performance. This paper describes a modeling process to simulate the fault impacts on the operation of a commercial walk-in freezer using semi-empirical models. These models often require less modeling effort than full forward models and could be used in scenarios where detailed information is missing, such as in field-measured systems. An important characteristic of a typical walk-in refrigeration system is the existence of a liquid-line receiver after the condenser, which significantly changes the behavior of the cycle, in comparison to a receiver-less system. Component models described in …

Utilizing Wearable Devices To Design Personal Thermal Comfort Model, Mostafa Rafaie, Mehari Tesfay, Fadi Alsaleem

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

have confirmed that thermal comfort significantly depends on internal personal parameters such as metabolic rate, age, and health status. This is manifested as a difference in comfort levels between people residing under the same roof, and hence no general comprehensive comfort model satisfying everyone. Current and newly emerging advancements in state of the art wearable technology have made it possible to continuously acquired biometric information. This work proposes to access and exploit this data to build personal thermal comfort model. Relying on various supervised machine-learning methods, a personal thermal comfort model will be produced and compared to a general model …

Sustainability At Sit: A Look At The Past, A Plan For The Future, Taliesin Haugh

Capstone Collection

Climate change threatens our world and way of life. Intelligent development and investment could mitigate the worst threats of climate change, while simultaneously providing continuous growth for the global economy. The New Climate Economy proposes efforts to combat this ecological collapse that would result in $30 trillion in new annual economic growth by 2030. Stockholm Resilience Center agrees, giving a framework based on global ecological systems that calls for five critical tasks that can bring growth and stability: Renewable energy

Sustainable local food production

New development models, based on what has worked globally

Reduction of wealth inequity

Education, health, and …

ประสิทธิภาพการลดการถ่ายเทความร้อนในระบบผนังด้วยฉนวน โดยพิจารณาอัตราส่วนพื้นที่ของผนังโปร่งแสงต่อพื้นที่ผนังทั้งหมด, จิราภา เดชจิระกุล

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์ในการศึกษาค่าการต้านทานความร้อนของผนังภายนอกอาคาร เพื่อวางแนวทางในการปรับปรุงอาคารเพื่อเพิ่มประสิทธิภาพการใช้พลังงานและประเมินความคุ้มค่าด้านการลงทุนในฉนวนความร้อนแต่ละชนิด โดยแบ่งอาคารเป็น 3 ประเภทตามกฎกระทรวง และมีช่วงระยะอัตราส่วนพื้นที่ของผนังโปร่งแสงต่อพื้นที่ผนังทั้งหมดแบ่งเป็น 6 ระยะ เริ่มจาก 10% ไปถึง 35% มีช่วงระยะห่างของแต่ละทางเลือกที่ 5% การศึกษาใช้วิธีการวิเคราะห์ค่าการถ่ายเทความร้อนผ่านโปรแกรมคอมพิวเตอร์เพื่อประเมินประสิทธิภาพพลังงานของอาคาร (Building Energy Code Software, BEC) ทำการศึกษาระบบผนัง 4 ประเภท คือผนังก่ออิฐฉาบปูน, ผนังก่ออิฐมวลเบา, ผนังคอนกรีต และผนังก่ออิฐ 2 ด้าน เว้นช่องอากาศ 10 เซนติเมตร ผลการศึกษาพบว่าสำหรับอาคารที่มีการใช้งาน 9 และ 12 ชั่วโมงต่อวัน หากใช้วัสดุคอนกรีตเป็นผนังภายนอกอาคาร สำหรับอาคารที่มีอัตราส่วนพื้นที่ของผนังโปร่งแสงต่อพื้นที่ผนังทั้งหมดเท่ากับ 10%, 15%, 20% และ 25% จำเป็นจะต้องติดตั้งฉนวนความร้อน ในขณะที่อาคารที่มีการใช้งาน 24 ชั่วโมง จำเป็นต้องติดตั้งฉนวนความร้อนที่อัตราส่วนพื้นที่ของผนังโปร่งแสงต่อพื้นที่ผนังทั้งหมดเท่ากับ 15%, 20%, 25% และ 30% จึงสรุปได้ว่าผนังคอนกรีตมีความจำเป็นมากที่สุดในการเพิ่มประสิทธิภาพการลดการถ่ายเทความร้อนผ่านผนัง เนื่องจากมีค่าการถ่ายเทความร้อนผ่านผนังก่อนการติดตั้งฉนวนความร้อนที่ไม่ผ่านเกณฑ์เป็นจำนวนมากหากเปรียบเทียบกับระบบผนังประเภทอื่นๆ เมื่อวิเคราะห์มูลค่าปัจจุบัน (Life cycle Cost) ผนังคอนกรีตอาคารที่มีการใช้งาน 9 ชั่วโมงต่อวัน ควรติดตั้งฉนวนใยแก้ว 32 kg/m³ ความหนา 50 mm. สำหรับผนังคอนกรีตอาคารที่มีการใช้งาน 12 ชั่วโมงต่อวัน ที่อัตราส่วนพื้นที่ของผนังโปร่งแสงต่อพื้นที่ผนังทั้งหมดเท่ากับ 10% และ 15% ควรติดตั้งฉนวนโพลิสไตรีน ความหนา 50 mm. และที่อัตราส่วนพื้นที่ของผนังโปร่งแสงต่อพื้นที่ผนังทั้งหมดเท่ากับ 20% และ 25% ควรติดตั้งฉนวนใยแก้ว 32 kg/m³ ความหนา 50 mm. และสำหรับผนังคอนกรีตยอาคารที่มีการใช้งาน 24 ชั่วโมง ที่อัตราส่วนพื้นที่ของผนังโปร่งแสงต่อพื้นที่ผนังทั้งหมดเท่ากับ 15% และ 25% ฉนวนใยแก้ว 32 kg/m³ …