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Good design won't cure illness, but a group of art students in Halifax are trying to prove that it can make you feel better.
Since January 2003, design students from NSCAD University have worked with hospital staff and patients at Halifax's QEII Health Sciences Centre to improve the hospital's medical equipment and public spaces. Their creations were exhibited at the health centre this week.
NSCAD teacher Carlo Testa helped conceive Design for Health after visiting a family member in hospital.
"You feel like you are in a very depressing place - the choice of colours, poor air quality, poor lights, poor furniture," Testa said of his experience.
"You find extremely committed staff, [who do] everything possible to make you better, [in] an environment that does everything possible to make you worse."
The project's goal was to design more practical hospital equipment and more welcoming physical environments. Students created a range of prototypes, including a spill-proof cup for patients with failing hands, an ergonomic, football-shaped reflex hammer and an easily adjustable, padded lifting belt.
All designs were tested and evaluated by health professionals, some of whom are already using the instruments.
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Engineers who designed the World Trade Center may have significantly underestimated the force of the winds that the twin towers needed to withstand in the worst of possible storms, federal investigators said yesterday, an oversight that could have led to weaker-than-needed exterior steel columns.
That design decision, although inconsequential for three decades, perhaps shortened the time that tenants and rescue workers had to evacuate the towers before they collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.
The finding, which the engineers dispute and that investigators acknowledge needs more study and may turn out to be unfounded, was among dozens of interim conclusions released yesterday as a two-year study on the collapse of the twin towers neared a conclusion.
The report, released yesterday by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., includes detailed photographs that identify, for the first time, the exact spots where the exterior steel columns gave way. These critical zones were around the 81st floor in the south tower, near the offices of Fuji Bank, and near the 96th floor of the north tower, where Marsh & McLennan was based.
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International Symposium for Redefining the Concept of Cultural Heritage and its Protection
"A Future for Our Past" The İstanbul Initiative
Date: 24-26 June 2004, Istanbul
Venue: İstanbul Bilgi University, Dolapdere Campus
June 24 2004, Thursday
Why Mesopotamia?
Morning Session: Ancient Mesopotamia
Chair: Zeynep Ahunbay (Chair of Architectural Restoration Dept., Istanbul Technical
University, President of ICOMOS Turkey)
10:00-10:15 Opening Speech
10:15-10:35 McGuire Gibson (Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology, University of Chicago)
10:35-10:45 Discussion
10:45-11:05 Margarete Van Ess (Mesopotamian Archaeology Dr., German Archaeological Institute in Berlin)
11:05-11:15 Discussion
11:15-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-11:50 Nicholas Postgate (Professor of Assyriology, Cambridge University)
11:50-12:00 Questions
12:00-12:20 Benjamin Foster (Professor of Assyriology, Yale University)
12:20-12:30 Discussion
12:30-12:50 Zainab Bahrani (Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology, Columbia University)
12:50-13:00 Discussion
13:00-14:00 Lunch
Afternoon Session: A Future for Our Past
Chair: Isıl Karakas (Professor of Law, Galatasaray University)
14:00-14:20 Yasser Tabbaa (Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Oberlin College)
14:20-14:30 Discussion
14:30-14:50 Suphi Saatci
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Benjamin Franklin will add a jolt of electricity to the world's fair next year in Aichi, Japan.
Organizers of the U.S. Pavilion are incorporating the Founding Father into their effort on the world stage in hopes of boosting the United States' image abroad and reversing declining interest in the global event.
Aichi USA 2005, the Washington-based organization developing and operating the U.S. Pavilion, began soliciting private sponsors earlier this year and has raised the initial $20 million necessary to build the pavilion.
The 2005 World Exposition, with the theme "Nature's Wisdom," will host an estimated 15 million visitors from March to September in central Japan, southwest of Tokyo. The United States, which is one of 125 participating countries, expects at least 1 million visitors at its 17,000-square-foot pavilion -about 10,000 each day.
In the past, world fairs have featured the most innovative art, inventions and technologies, including the telephone in 1876 and the Eiffel Tower in 1889.
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A group of teenagers from Patiala will rub shoulders with the NASA engineers and take up the formidable task of designing a city to be built on the moon when they travel to the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, next month. The 18 students of the Budha Dal Public School and Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology in Patiala, have earned the distinction of becoming the first Indian team ever to qualify for the Space Settlement Design Competition at NASA.
The team, which registered for the competition organised by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics under the name "Team Force", is also the only foreign squad this year to have qualified for the final round of the competition to be held in Kennedy Space Center from July 17 to July 19.
The team, which met US Ambassador David C. Mulford here today, is gung-ho about its chances in the final round in which it will be led by a NASA engineer in designing a city for the moon.
Abhishek Agarwal, a first year engineering student at the Thapar Institute, whose brainchild the qualifying project was, said: "We registered very late for the competition, hence did not get much time to work on the initial project. But we still got selected. It is like a dream come true to go to NASA and work on a project there. We will make the most of it."
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