"distinctly in a nineteenth century style": Samuel Hurst Seager's Christchurch Municipal Offices

In 1887 Samuel Hurst Seager described his recently completed Christchurch Municipal Buildings, as being "distinctly in a nineteenth century style." The building was the result of an architectural competition and was the architect's first commission following his return to New Zealand after a period of study in Britain. From a twenty first-century perspective we recognise the Municipal Buildings as a precocious New Zealand example of the Queen Anne style that had come into vogue in Britain in the 1870s. Seager, however, clearly aimed to present his building not as belonging to a particular style from the past but as a representative design of the age in which it was built. Where we see an eclectic amalgam of sources drawn from British and European architecture from the late seventeenth-century onwards, Seager saw a synthesis of motifs that produced a picturesque effect appropriate to the building's site. For Seager, it seems, eclecticism was indeed the style of the nineteenth century. Drawing on contemporary sources, including the architect's description of the building that accompanied his competition entry, this paper examines Seager's design in the context of late nineteenth-century discussions of architectural style but also within the specific context of Seager's personal search for a resolution of the nineteenth-century "dilemma of style."

Calculative Composition

This chapter evaluates the ethical ends and means toward which AI-driven design has been, and perhaps could be, applied. While some designers have committed to applying AI toward more ethical ends, they have paid comparatively less attention toward the ethical means of its application. In order to ensure the ethical application of AI in design, practitioners and managers must make sure that they are both defining responsible design parameters and operationalizing those parameters responsibly. Moreover, designers must consider where they should assert their agency within an automated workflow. The chapter then surveys representative design fields—fashion, product, graphic, and architectural design—to examine what ethical opportunities and risks people might face when AI-driven design practice is programmed to serve the needs and desires of laborers, consumers, and clients.

Representative Design in Psychological Assessment: A Case Study Using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART)

Representative design refers to the idea that experimental stimuli should be sampled or designed such that they represent the environments to which measured constructs are supposed to generalize. In this article we investigate the role of representative design in achieving valid and reliable psychological assessments, by focusing on a widely used behavioral measure of risk taking–the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Specifically, we demonstrate that the typical implementation of this task violates the principle of representative design, thus conflicting with the expectations people likely form from real balloons. This observation may provide an explanation for the previously observed limitations in some of the BART's psychometric properties (e.g., convergent validity with other measures of risk taking). To experimentally test the effects of improved representative designs, we conducted two extensive empirical studies (N = 772 and N = 632), finding that participants acquired more accurate beliefs about the optimal behavior in the BART due to these task adaptions. Yet, improving the task's representativeness proved to be insufficient to enhance the BART's psychometric properties. It follows that for the development of valid behavioral measurement instruments–as are needed, for instance, in functional neuroimaging studies–our field has to overcome the philosophy of the "repair program" (i.e., fixing existing tasks). Instead, we suggest that the development of valid task designs requires novel ecological assessments, aimed at identifying those real-life behaviors and associated psychological processes that lab tasks are supposed to capture and generalize to.

Features of representative design for academic needs – development of conceptual models when designing symbols and regalia

Authority symbols play a significant role in building the internal structure and representative function in the various governmental organizations and in particular - high schools and universities. There is a growing need of creating and implementing a clear methodology for designing academic signs based on a thorough analysis of principles in the design of the academic regalia in a real high school.