Knowledge

She Ji is a peer-reviewed, trans-disciplinary design journal with a focus on economics and innovation, design process and design thinking. The journal invites papers that enrich the understanding and practice that enable design innovation in industry, business, non-profit services, and government through economic and social value creation. These papers may explore how design thinking can inform wider social, managerial, and intellectual discourses with an added focus on strategy and management. She Ji also publishes articles in research methods and methodology, philosophy, and philosophy of science to support the core journal area.

She Ji is fully open access. Tongji University and Tongji University Press support She Ji as a contribution to the design field and a public service to design research. Authors are not liable for any publication charges and all published articles are accessible free of charge from the journal web site at URL:

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

*DEADLINE 10 April 2022*
In the last two decades, objects have become increasingly relevant to historical studies as the primary focus of research discussing cross-cultural relations. Objects are produced, used, modified, preserved and destroyed according to historically specific political and cultural settings, thus providing researchers with information and insights about their original background. However, they can also throw light on a large array of cross-cultural encounters when their mobility is put to the fore. Objects can move by being bought, gifted, bartered and sold, borrowed or stolen, collected and dispersed, just as they can be modified, repaired, reshaped, repurposed and destroyed in the process. The Mediterranean, as a barrier and as a meeting place for different polities and communities, and as the setting of conflicted experiences of cultural, political, economic and social transformation, easily lends itself to this kind of historical analysis.
The workshop “Travelling matters: rereading, reshaping, reusing objects across the Mediterranean” intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways. Primarily, we intend to discuss objects flowing in all directions, thus avoiding the kind of narrowing perspectives embedded in the study of one-way routes, such as that which goes from the North to the South or from the East to the West. Moreover, the category of objects as we understand it should be as large as possible, including items such as food, drugs, books, manuscripts, maps, antiques, human remains and relics (as objects to study, ancestors to bury or to worship), clothing, minerals, plants, fossils, tools and scientific instruments, objects of use and objects in precious materials. The materiality and mobility of such items should be underscored along with the practises and knowledges with which they are intertwined. Secondly, we wish to concentrate on the “second-handedness” of displaced objects: in other words, how and why moving objects acquire new functions and new meanings as they are displaced and with what consequences for the relations between the communities involved? How and why displaced objects can be lost or forgotten just so that they can later re-emerge and be repurposed? What kind of relationship can be established between such repurposing on the one side, and political or cultural change on the other? In which ways do these processes affect and are affected by the historical shaping of individual and collective identities? What kind of emotional investments in the objects (thoughts, feelings, and behaviours) accompany their possession, their peregrinations, their reclaims? Were the objects used for nation-building, trying to create a national identity, or on the contrary for affirming local and regional identities in tension with the national and centralising one? Both these perspectives demand a broad chronology, extending from antiquity to the present-day, and for the intersection between different time frames, from the relatively narrow scale of individual objects being displaced across the Mediterranean to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools and workflows have the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of design, construction and operation activities. Numerous BIM deliverables and their respective requirements have been widely discussed by industry stakeholders. This is evidenced by the intensity of online communications surrounding BIM topics and the accelerating availability of noteworthy BIM publications (NBP)s. NBPs are publically-available industry documents incorporating guidelines, protocols and requirements focusing on BIM deliverables and workflows. These publications are the product of various governmental bodies, industry associations, communities of practice and research institutions, intended to facilitate BIM adoption, and realize BIM’s value-adding potential.
A specialized taxonomy is employed to analyze 57 noteworthy BIM publications from across eight countries selected for their active BIM scene. The BIM knowledge content (BKC) taxonomy includes three knowledge content clusters (guides, protocols and mandates) subdivided into 18 knowledge content labels (e.g. report, manual, and contract). Ten of these content labels are used to analyze and compare publications from Australia, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Preliminary content analysis is then performed which provides insight into the availability and distribution of BIM knowledge within noteworthy BIM publications. The analysis identifies knowledge gaps within publications and highlights opportunities for future research and complementary publication efforts.
This chapter contributes to organizing BIM knowledge as contained within numerous noteworthy BIM publications and – by that - facilitates targeted access to their content. It provides a knowledge repository for construction industry stakeholder’s to utilize during BIM implementation and a research base for investigators seeking to identify and address knowledge gaps across the BIM domain.

When people avow their present feelings, sensations, thoughts, etc., they enjoy what may be called “first-person privilege.” If I now said: “I have a headache,” or “I'm thinking about Venice,” I would be taken at my word: I would normally not be challenged. According to one prominent approach, this privilege is due to a special epistemic access we have to our own present states of mind. On an alternative, deflationary approach the privilege merely reflects a socio-linguistic convention governing avowals. We reject both approaches. On our proposed account, a full explanation of the privilege must recognize avowals as expressive performances, which can be taken to reveal directly the subject's present mental condition. We are able to improve on special access accounts and deflationary accounts, as well as familiar expressive accounts, by explaining both the asymmetries and the continuities between avowals and other pronouncements, and by locating a genuine though non-epistemic source for first-person privilege.

The following article presents a number of research projects dealing with architectural and urban-historical themes, directed towards the experimentation of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) which are usually employed only in territorial field. All these research projects are founded on one premise: the connection of the individual artefact to its territorial location is an increment of knowledge itself. The main aim, rather than a qualitative collection of data, is a systematic understanding of heritage, aimed at identifying all the interactions between the artefact and its context. In this framework, the “map” is the main place where information is processed, in order to join different levels of knowledge. According to this, in all the research projects here presented: i) the data were linked to the map space; ii) different information were organized in
databases; iii) standard procedures were identified for the realization of 2D and 3D accurate models, geo-referenced and interfaced to an external DBMS. The final goal has been the promotion of heritage through knowledge sharing. For this reason the research projects were oriented towards the study of relationships between GIS and the web and friendly interfaces based on criteria of perception, through which generate an improvement of interaction’s levels between the user and the map. Obviously all these experimentations were possible thanks to the abrupt development of digital technologies. But at the same time these new
opportunities may cause other problematic issues, which were considered in the different researches development, two of which are here highlighted. The first issue is the figurative redundancy. Its risk is a decrease of emotional power for each single image, whose ultimate consequence can be the dematerialization of the “sense of place”. The second issue is the reliability of information. It can be related to the quality of metrical, geometrical and surface data and to the communication of contents and management of transitions between different informative levels.