Tag Archives: Interdisciplinary

New Interdisciplinary Program from NSF: Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS)

The overarching goal of INFEWS is to catalyze the well-integrated interdisciplinary research efforts to transform scientific understanding of the FEW nexus in order to improve system function and management, address system stress, increase resilience, and ensure sustainability. The NSF INFEWS initiative is designed specifically to attain the following goals:

  1. Significantly advance our understanding of the food-energy-water system through quantitative and computational modeling, including support for relevant cyberinfrastructure;
  2. Develop real-time, cyber-enabled interfaces that improve understanding of the behavior of FEW systems and increase decision support capability;
  3. Enable research that will lead to innovative system and technological solutions to critical FEW problems; and
  4. Grow the scientific workforce capable of studying and managing the FEW system through education and other professional development opportunities.

Continue reading New Interdisciplinary Program from NSF: Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS)

NSF Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (NSF PFI: BIC)

The Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (PFI: BIC) program supports university-industry partnerships which are led by an interdisciplinary academic research team collaborating with a least one industry partner. In this program, there is a heavy emphasis on the quality, composition, and participation of the partners, including the appropriate contributions for each role. These partnerships focus on the integration of technologies into a specified human-centered service system with the potential to achieve transformational change, satisfying a real need by making an existing service system smart(er) or by spurring the creation of an entirely new smart service system.

Continue reading NSF Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (NSF PFI: BIC)

the architecture of PLAY, and the play of ARCHITECTURE

TV_PostA TV_PostB

Playing with materials, the design decisions based on responses from material processes are integral to the art of craft.  The embodied knowledge of making is gained through the physical interaction with materials, searching for an order rooted in history, perception and materiality.[1]

Creativity in architecture can be based on the transformation of matter. Different from the formal imagination, the material imagination can give rise to images provoked solely and directly from an immediate confrontation, interpretation, and manipulation of matter. These images may be assigned a category by the eye but only the hand truly reveals them. They depend on visceral readings that are projected through qualities such as mass, material surface, texture, or light, space, and time.

Continue reading the architecture of PLAY, and the play of ARCHITECTURE