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There is an emerging consensus that the United Kingdom ( UK ) is presently facing a housing crisis, the root cause of which is predominantly down to the lack of provision of affordable housing (Helm, 2017; Ferrari, 2015 ). Calls for a change in approach, to the way the government meets the housing needs of its citizens, have seldom been more audible (Harris, 2018). One potential solution proffered due to its perceived success in other countries as a solution to their own housing crises and also due the significant role it had in the UK after World War II (Vale, 2013), is the construction of pre-fabricated homes using off-site manufactured components (Miles and Whitehouse, 2013). There is therefore a perceived need to adopt innovative and new construction practices to accelerate the rate of construction (NHBC, 2016).

Addressing the issues of governance, ethics and social consequences in today’s Information Society is a monumental task. The authors who have contributed to this publication have risen to the challenge and produced papers that offer a variety of perspectives reflecting their different disciplines. \ud This Chapter attempts to give an overview of the theme of the conference and the work contained within this book by drawing out the potential for influencing policy and the development and deployment of future technologies. It does this by using a stakeholder categorisation in terms of: international, governmental, organisational, educational and individual. Professionals and professional bodies have a major role in promoting awareness, and the ways in which they can do this are discussed. Finally, following the original conference programme, the steps that can be taken by Working Group 9.2 within IFIP together with the recommendations made at the end of the conference are briefly summarised.

Gameful and playful design aspire to make existing activities and systems more engaging by infusing them with the engaging qualities of games and toys. One such quality is make-believe, the constitution of fictional “as ifs”. While frequently evoked, actual work on make-believe in gameful and playful design has remained quite scarce and scattered. This chapter therefore draws on neighbouring fields to break out five major design aspects of make-believe: theming; storification; scripting, ruling, and framing; role-play; and their integration in unified experiences. For each, the chapter presents explanatory theories; psychological and behavioural effects; design elements and strategies used to evoke said effects; and existing empirical studies. The chapter closes in summarizing how and why playful make-believe design differs from current gamification in form (often artistic one-offs) and technology (often audio); and what limitations future research should try to overcome.

Historically, Universities have been regarded by employers as generators of ‘neatly boxed’ lawyers, chemists, engineers, etc. who could be (and perhaps some saw it better that they were) completely divorced from, or agnostic about, the challenges of the world around them, while operating within their own disciplinary silos. However, there is now a growing recognition across society, industry and business that such is the complexity and uncertainty associated with the global challenges of today, that these problems cannot themselves be viewed, defined or indeed solved through such a disassociated and disjointed disciplinary approach. These are not just ‘engineering’ problems, or ‘legal’ problems, or singularly social, environmental or economic problems; they are all of these and more - and at all the same time. Consequently, focusing teaching on ways of thinking, being and practicing, and so how students think, feel and act in relation to the rapidly changing world around them, should be done in a way that actively stretches students beyond the comfort of their disciplinary subject boundaries and skill sets. This makes for not only more socially aware, empathetic, emotionally intelligent, connected, cooperative and ethically responsible graduates, but ensures they are equipped with the types of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary competencies that will be required to meet the challenges required “to safeguard our social, economic and environmental wellbeing – now and for future generations” (UNESCO, 2019). This paper seeks to explain and justify, at a pedagogical level, the suitability of Strathclyde’s Vertically Integrated Projects for Sustainable Development (VIP4SD) programme as an experiential learning vehicle through which engineering undergraduates (and others) can engage in meaningful, purposeful and transformational interdisciplinary research on global sustainability challenges.

Aesthetic evaluation of computer generated patterns is a growing filed with several challenges. This paper focuses on the quantitative evaluation of order and complexity in multi-state two-dimensional 2D cellular automata CA. CA are known for their ability to generate highly complex patterns through simple and well defined local interaction of rules. It is suggested that the order and complexity of 2D patterns can be quantified by using mean information gain. This measure, also known as conditional entropy, takes into account conditional and joint probabilities of the elements of a configuration in a 2D plane. A series of experiments is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the mean information gain in quantifying the structural order and complexity, including the orientation of symmetries of multi-state 2D CA configurations.

In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, thus resulting in an analysis encompassing a wide diversity of social enterprises, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major SE models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level. These SE models reveal or confirm an overall trend towards new ways of sharing the responsibility for the common good in today’s economies and societies. We tend to consider as good news the fact that social enterprises actually stem from all parts of the economy. Indeed, societies are facing many complex challenges at all levels, from the local to the global level. The diversity and internal variety of SE models are a sign of a broadly shared willingness to develop appropriate―although sometimes embryonic―responses to these challenges, on the basis of innovative economic/business models driven by a social mission. In spite of their weaknesses, social enterprises may be seen as advocates for and vehicles of the general interest across the whole economy. Of course, the debate about privatisation, deregulation and globalised market competition―all factors that may hinder efforts in the search for the common good–has to be addressed as well. The first of a series of four ICSEM books, Social Enterprise in Asia will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and other categories of people who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.

Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are widely adopted in higher education to facilitate online methods of content delivery for the lecturers, to enable online submission for the students and to provide course management tools for the administration team. There are a variety of software solutions to choose from, modelled according to heterogeneous needs and functionalities. Despite the existence of clear organisational, pedagogical and technological goals, the procurement and implementation of a VLE is a complex task with significant challenges. We present the case study of a university which went through the process of procuring a new VLE. We examine the usability of each VLE utilising the System Usability Scale (SUS) and capture further feedback from the stakeholders by applying the Interactive Management (IM) methodology. The first part of the research focuses on the three VLEs remaining in contention during the final stages of the procurement process. The results of the usability evaluations are analysed, explained and compared. The second part of the study (Vertesi A, Dogan H, Stefanidis A, Ashton G, Drake W: Usability evaluation of a virtual learning environment: a university case study. In: 15th international Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA), 21–23 October 2018, Budapest, Hungary, 2018) examines the selected and implemented VLE 6 months after its initiation. A usability test was carried out again on this VLE to examine changes since its launching. Additional feedback was collected from the stakeholders to support the fine-tuning process after the implementation. According to the evaluation of each user group, all the three VLEs performed below the average usability expectation. Generally, students evaluated the usability of the VLEs higher than the academics and administration staff. The usability scores of the students’ evaluation from different courses and years show remarkable differences. The ranked and categorised feedback given by the stakeholders highlights the importance of planning, training and communication prior to and during the implementation process. Usability and learnability play important roles according to the feedback.

The large number of Web pages on many Web sites has raised\ud navigational problems. Markov chains have recently been used to model user navigational behavior on the World Wide Web (WWW). In this paper, we propose a method for constructing a Markov model of a Web site based on past\ud visitor behavior. We use the Markov model to make link predictions that assist new users to navigate the Web site. An algorithm for transition probability\ud matrix compression has been used to cluster Web pages with similar transition behaviors and compress the transition matrix to an optimal size for efficient probability calculation in link prediction. A maximal forward path method is used to further improve the efficiency of link prediction. Link prediction has been implemented in an online system called ONE (Online Navigation Explorer) to assist users' navigation in the adaptive Web site.

This essay explores the history of the tirailleurs sénégalais, a corps of colonial infantrymen founded in 1857. The tirailleurs were initially deployed to aid the French in the ‘pacification’ of their West African Empire but they made their mark on metropolitan France when they served in their tens of thousands in the First World War, distinguishing themselves in major battles, including the famous victory at Verdun. In the aftermath of the war, the image of a cartoonish, wide-eyed, smiling tirailleur sénégalais on packets of the popular Banania powdered chocolate drink, still used today, arguably became the most important site of French colonial memory.

The ability to predict correctly the future remaining life time of components is of paramount importance to improve the safety and reliability of systems and networks via an effective maintenance policy. However, simplifications and assumptions are usually adopted to compensate lack of data, imprecision and vagueness, which cannot be justified completely and may, thus lead to biased results. To overcome these issues, an imprecise probabilities approach is proposed for reliability analysis and risk-based maintenance strategy. A novel efficient computational approach is proposed for identifying robust maintenance strategies. The optimal solution is obtained through only one reliability assessment based on Advanced Line Sampling and reusing the outcome of maintenance activities in a force Monte Carlo approach. The proposed methodology remove the huge computational cost of reliability-base optimization making the analysis of industrial size problem feasible. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by identifying the optimal maintenance policy of buried pipelines and it is shown how this approach can improve the current industrial practice.