Thursday 16 February 2017

Access to Online Journals, Databases and Digital magazines - Central Library of SPAV

Dear All,

Greetings !

Central Library of SPA Vijayawada has subscribed the following online journals (e-journals), databases and digital magazines for the year 2017. 

Online journals (Sage (23), Taylor and Francis (06) and Springer (01)) and Databases (Districtsofindia.com and Indiastat.com) are accessible through IP-based, whereas The Economist and Economic and Political Weekly are accessible through User ID and Password based.

The Project Reporter is a digital magazine and can be downloaded from our website. 

Links of the above online journals (e-journals), databases and digital magazines are provided in the library page of SPAV website for your kind perusal.

ONLINE JOURNALS



(Urban & Planning Subject Collection)




           Access Since 2008
2.       Journal of Architectural Education Access Since 1997
3.       Journal of Urban Design - Access Since 1997
4.       Planning Theory & Practice - Access Since 2000
5.       Journal of the American Planning Association - Access Since 1935
6.       Vernacular Architecture - Access Since 1971

        



1.       Journal of Housing and the Built Environment - Access    Since    2014


DATABASES

The Districtsofindia.com covers data on 640 districts and 5924 sub-districts. 



The Indiastat.com covers data on 29 states, 6 geographical regions and 33 socio-economic categories



DIGITAL MAGAZINES





These two magazines are accessible through USER ID and PASSWORD based. 








Note: user id and password sent to your institution mail id. 



Project Reporter is a magazine available in electronic format. It covers more than 100 projects every fortnight from India which are in Conceptual and Implementation Stage along with Project Updates, Commissioned Projects, Contract Awards. It is published on 1st and 15th of every month. 

Note: The Project Reporter can be downloaded from our website


"THE MORE YOU ACCESS THE MORE YOU BENEFITED"

Regards,

....

Dr. YS RAO

Tuesday 14 February 2017

Pen and paper 'beats computers for retaining knowledge'

Survey of students across 10 countries suggests handwriting and printed books have advantages over digital materials

Writing notes

University students find it easier to retain information when using books and handwriting notes rather than computers, according to a survey of European and Asian students. study of almost 650 students from 10 countries found that while computers often dominate teaching and learning at universities, students still see the benefits of reading and writing with paper.

The research, Students’ use of paper and pen versus digital media in university environments for writing and reading, surveyed undergraduates and postgraduates in Italy, the UK, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Russia, China, Portugal, Finland and Germany.Jane Vincent, guest teacher and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s department of media and communications and author of the study, said that the students were fairly consistent in their feedback.

“One of the reasons some students favour handwriting is the role it plays in learning and retaining knowledge,” she said. "Many of the students in our study found [that] making handwritten notes leads to greater retention of data than if it is typed.”

Students also experienced difficulties in writing mathematic and scientific formulas and graphs on computers, the study found. But they noted that searching for information, correcting typed material, spell checking and legibility were all advantages of using a computer.

Dr Vincent, who conducted the research while she was based at the University of Surrey, said: “Despite problems with posture and tired eyes, reading and writing online is usually more practical in university settings.”

The research also picked up some national differences when it came to the preferences of students.

For example, Chinese students tended to favour writing by hand because they felt they were able to better express themselves in the strokes of handwritten characters than in coded form on the computer, while Italian students cited paper’s “sensorial” qualities.

“I like very much to enjoy the scent of a book through the fragrance of the paper,” said one Italian student.

Meanwhile, younger students in Russia generally preferred reading and typing on screen as they were less accustomed to handwriting and reading printed books. Students from Bulgaria and Finland also preferred computers over paper.

Overall most students favoured using a mix of paper and computers.

The study will form the basis of a chapter in the forthcoming book Smartphone Culture, edited by Dr Vincent and Leslie Haddon, visiting lecturer at LSE’s department of media and communications.

Source: By Ellie Bothwell, Times Higher Education, February 13, 2017. (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pen-and-paper-beats-computers-retaining-knowledge)

How To Make Smarter Design Decisions: Whether You're A Team Or Individual

Making smart design decisions is harder than you think. First, you have to give up your personal preferences. Second, you have to scan yourself for biases refusing to consider alternative points of view and third, you must use data to design a product beneficial for the end user.
Today I’m talking to Jocelyn Lin. She is a Director of Design for Yahoo and Polyvore, where she manages a team of designers to create engaging experiences for Polyvore’s global style community. Prior to joining Polyvore, Jocelyn was a staff UX designer at Google, where she led design initiatives for Google Maps, Image Search and Universal Search. Prior to working at Google, she was a product manager for Oracle.
Read on to find out how to inspire, empower and lead design teams and make smarter design decisions.
Can you tell me a little bit about your role as Yahoo’s Director of Design for Yahoo View and Polyvore?
I lead a team of designers, but I am the most effective when I can get out of their way to let them do their best work. I do this by setting up product and design processes, reaching out to cross-functional leads, facilitating collaboration, and giving strategic product feedback. When things go awry on projects, I help play detective to find the source issue, and give my team any backup they need to resolve it. I also actively mentor my team to help them improve their skills and work on their career paths. In a pinch, I will play at being an actual designer too, but frankly, it’s better done by my team.

What do you consider to be “smart design decisions” and what are some examples of successful techniques?
A “smart design decision” is a decision that helps you move the design forward for a product. To do so, you need to have a good sense of your project objectives, and whether they are business or user-focused. Clear and early communication with your engineering, product, and marketing partners will correctly define the objectives before you get started. When you reach a crossroads, identify the most divergent paths at the highest level possible, decide with the right people in the room, and move on. By the highest level, I mean for example, that it’s useless to discuss color options when you haven’t nailed down the navigation model.

What are effective design review processes that have worked for Polyvore specifically?
Instead of a typical approval process, we have a twice-a-week peer review session. While everyone gives feedback, it’s up to the individual designers to decide what to do with it. This gives the team ownership over their own work, and they also realize the responsibility of being able to decide and consider feedback carefully. It’s a collaborative environment where we all work together to improve products, rather than the more traditional design critique where the presenter is often on the defensive.

For those presenting, they set context first before going through the design, and that includes the level of feedback they are looking to receive —  is this an early interaction concept or a final visual icon? On the reviewer side, while suggestions and solutions are certainly welcome, they ought to be phrased in terms of the problem so that the designer isn’t just applying feedback blindly. For example, instead of “I think you should add more thumbnails”, one could say “I don’t get a sense of how much content the site actually has. One option is to add more thumbnails. Or ...”
As a design lead, I serve as a moderator, eliciting feedback from everyone and making sure we stay on task — not trying to design in the session, that would take too long! I also wait for my team to give their feedback first and only say something if I have something news to add at the end. This ensures that the session is owned by the team, not the boss. Or, at least I try. You can ask my team how well that’s going.

How has Yahoo View created engaging, smart designs, and how can others adopt similar techniques?
We had a short window to launch Yahoo View, so we quickly had to determine our product strategy. This ended up being a combination of barebones “tablestakes” must-have TV features plus some experimenting with delightful differentiators. For watching functionality, after identifying major user flows and doing a quick competitive analysis, we easily came up with a list of basic features. Differentiators are a little harder. We partnered with research to understand who our potential users and their motivations and behaviors are. From there, to narrow down brainstorm ideas, we user-tested some very different concepts at the storyboard and static prototype stages before committing the full design, engineering, and product resources to build them out.

What leadership skills have you implemented in your role managing designers? What soft skills should other managers implement for smarter designs?
I’ve found these two skills to be the most handy as a design manager.
One, the ability to analyze process and progress, then to make adjustments to improve them, results in a team that is happy with their work. For example, if a designer is not getting enough time to make good design decisions, I need to figure out whether it’s because product goals aren’t clear, timelines are unrealistic, or there’s an inefficiency, before I can help fix it. The solution then could be something like better integration of design into scrum, setting up more frequent reviews, or creating new Sketch templates for team reuse. Solving things at the process level improves things going forward for the whole design team.
Second, I’ve found the ability to understand the reasoning behind what people say to be invaluable. In heated discussions, it lets me surface the core point, which cuts the meeting time in half and brings forward the one item that people are trying to decide upon. This allows a direction to be set, which then allows for better design.

To make all of this work, I need to know when to step away and when to step in. I like to think of it as developing a stress radar — it detects how individuals are doing with their projects, and whether it’s a healthy stress from an intense project or an unhealthy one from interpersonal conflict, for example.

How do you avoid wasting time designing things that won’t get built? How do you make sure that everyone agrees on the next steps?
There are cases where we intentionally design things that may not get built or launched, for learning purposes. User research prototypes and bucket experiments fall under this umbrella, and as long as the team understands that killing ideas actually leads to better product and more efficient use of time in the end, that’s totally okay.
On the other hand, there are cases where the poor designer is on iteration 15 of the design, either because the product goals are unclear or feedback is inconsistent. We’ve all been there.
To prevent that from happening too often, we need to start with a solid agreement and understanding of goals between the product leads, partners, engineers and designer. Easier said than done, of course. During a project, what you can do is, first, notice when things are starting to meander. At this point, it is wise to stop your work and put your efforts into solidifying goals with stakeholders. Think ahead, keep designs at a high level, focusing on user flows rather than detailed wireframes until direction is more set.

How can you elicit feedback and input in an effective way?
When seasoned designers show work to each other or to cross-functional partners, they first identify who the stakeholders are, and whether it’s best to connect in a formal group presentation, casual desk show-and-tell, or an intimate 1-1 conversation. Each one has pros and cons, and really depends on the personality of your particular stakeholders.

During the session, they start by setting context on the project and goals they’re trying to solve. Then, they either state the level of feedback they’re looking for (pixels and specific copy? product strategy?), or point out the specific elements that require opinions. This gets everyone on the same page and results in more relevant feedback.

After the session, it’s a good idea to follow up with written summaries of what was agreed and action items, because making it concrete will expose any misperceptions among the participants. It’s kind of surprising how everyone can seem to agree in person but a week later, have entirely different takes on the conversation, but it always happens! This can be done casually, over chat, or more formally over email.
Update: after publishing the article I've clarified Jocelyn's position.
(Source: Tomas Laurinavicius, Forbes, FEB 5, 2017 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomaslaurinavicius/2017/02/05/smarter-design-decisions/2/#5513d24d76d3>)


...

Dr. YS RAO

Saturday 11 February 2017

The Walled City (10-Mile Version)











Categories

[Image: “The Walled City (10-Mile Version)” by Andrew Kudless/Matsys].

A new exhibition opens next week at the Hubbell Street Galleries in San Francisco, part of the California College of the Arts, called Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation. The idea behind the group show is to look at “the relationship between code and drawing” (emphases theirs), or “how rules and constraints inform the ways we document, analyze, represent, and design the built environment.”
Drawing Codes is curated by Andrew Kudless and Adam Marcus, with Clayton Muhleman, and it features work by David Gissen, Erin Besler, Jimenez Lai, Elena Manferdini, the Oyler Wu Collaborative, Rael San Fratello, and many more.
As Kudless—of Matsys fame—pointed out to me over email, the curators “gave all of the participants a set of codes that they had to follow (e.g. all black and white, orthographic projection, 25″ x 25″, etc.),” using this set of constraints to, among other things, foreground differences in approach between each participating architect.
If everyone’s doing the same thing, then how each person does it becomes more revealing.
[Image: “Half-Hearted Diamonds” by Jimenez Lai/Bureau Spectacular].
Perhaps ironically, it was actually the drawing by Kudless himself—which I first saw on Instagram—that caught my interest.
Called “The Walled City (10-Mile Version),” that project imagines an entire metropolis that is nothing but one, continuous wall.
Kudless explained that it came about by posing himself a rhetorical question: “What would a city look like if it was a wall and nothing else? I’ve been fascinated with walls that have grown thick enough to be buildings in themselves. From medieval European city walls to the Great Wall in China, there is something really interesting about taking something that is ostensively about separating two territories and turning into an inhabitable space in its own right.”
[Image: Close-up from “The Walled City (10-Mile Version)” by Andrew Kudless/Matsys].
The results: a rule-constrained exploration of how a wall could become a city.
I started to play around with slowly increasing a wall’s length while preventing it from moving outside a site or intersecting itself. At a certain point in the growth process, the wall takes over the entire site. There is still an inside and outside to the wall, but sometimes the outside is deep inside the site boundary or vice versa. At that point, I was left with a big squiggly wall, but realized that I needed some sort of roofscape to make it read as a city and not just a thick wall. That’s when I turned to Google’s autocomplete feature to give me suggestions on what programs [spatial functions] a rooftop might support. I worked my way from A to Z pretty much accepting whatever suggestion Google’s autocomplete gave me and started designing parametric definitions that could implement that program on a number of different sites along the wall’s top.
The various social and architectural functions distributed around the massive roofscape included, for example, Rooftop Antenna, Rooftop Bar, Rooftop Cafe, Rooftop Deck, Rooftop Exhaust, Rooftop Film, Rooftop Garden, Rooftop Hotel Pool, and so on.
Interestingly, Kudless also pointed out that, if he were to run the same generative script again, it would likely produce “a similar, but not identical city,” and it would almost certainly not result in a wall exactly ten miles in length (which, in this case, was purely a coincidence, he explained).
In any case, I’ve been impressed by Kudless’s work for a long time; check out these older posts on his projects Nevada Sietch and robotic drawing protocols, for example, and then stop by the exhibition when it opens next week. There will be a reception on January 19 at 5:30pm at 161 Hubbell StreetMore info.
(source: Geoff ManaughBLDGBLOG-Posted on January 13, 2017)
....
Dr. YS RAO

Friday 10 February 2017

BLOG (Basic Library Online Guide)


WELCOME TO FRESHERS

You’ve made it, you’re one of the lucky few to have qualified to join us at School of Planning and Architecture, Vijayawada, Institute of National Importance under Act of Parliament-2014, MHRD, Government of India.   

 The Institute established in 2008 and completes its first decadal celebration in 2018. There are many milestones during the past 10 years. The Institute has wonderful academic programmes starting from Bachelor (B.Plan/B.Arch), Masters (sustainable architecture, landscape architecture, architectural conservation and building engineering and management urban and regional planning; environmental planning and management transportation and infrastructure planning) to Doctoral (PhD). It provides an excellent base for education, research and innovation.

Indeed, the institute aims to meet at considerable stature in terms of student enrolment/intake, faculty recruitment, new departments/courses, curriculum development, academic regulations etc. The institute has qualitative teachers and staff and gradually enhancing its strength to meet their academic and research needs.

The excellence of SPA Vijayawada has been recognized and honoured by various reputed agencies across the country:

Rank
Category
Year
Agency
09
Architecture
2019
NIRF
11
Architecture
2019
India Today Group

Now, you landed in academic garland where you can feel free to enjoy reading, learning, research, innovations and other activities to excel academic and research excellence. The campus is green rated and is equipped with state-of-the-art infrastructure such as hostels, central library, ICT and high end digital surveillance systems, laboratories, studios, classrooms, open air theatres, auditorium, cafeteria, outdoor sports facilities, etc. and the management is continuing to enhance its facilities at the highest.
You are proud to be SPAVian to create a value for the society.

On be-half of institute, faculty, staff and students, I welcome you all.



………..……
Dr. YS RAO
Dy. In-Charge, JoSAA/CSAB-2019, Nodal Officer, NIRF & Dy. Librarian