Air Quality and the Senses in Early Modern Italy

Using printed and archival records, this article analyzes the sensory practices associated with air quality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Air pollution was a prime concern for early modern Italians, particularly in urban centres where industry, density, and frenetic sensescapes were thought to prompt chronically unhealthy airs. According to early modern experts, air quality was at the root of individual and public health. My analysis shows how Italians relied on a robust set of sonic and olfactory tools to cleanse the air and craft healthy environments. Simultaneously, a contrasting set of sounds and smells were thought to pollute the air. The sensory practices surrounding air quality reveal the highly localized and personalized nature of early modern environmental practice. This article argues that entwined social and environmental conceptions of purity and pollution shaped sensory, social, and environmental experience in the premodern city.

Experience-Driven Plasticity and the Emergence of Psychopathology: A Mechanistic Framework Integrating Development and the Environment into the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Model

Despite the clear importance of a developmental perspective for understanding the emergence of psychopathology across the life-course, such a perspective has yet to be integrated into the RDoC model. In this paper, we articulate a framework that incorporates developmentally-specific learning mechanisms that reflect experience-driven plasticity as additional units of analysis in the existing RDoC matrix. These include both experience-expectant learning mechanisms that occur during sensitive periods of development and experience-dependent learning mechanisms that may exhibit substantial variation across development. Incorporating these learning mechanisms allows for clear integration not only of development but also environmental experience into the RDoC model. We demonstrate how individual differences in environmental experiences—such as early-life adversity—can be leveraged to identify experience-driven plasticity patterns across development and apply this framework to consider how environmental experience shapes key biobehavioral processes that comprise the RDoC model. This framework provides a structure for understanding how affective, cognitive, social, and neurobiological processes are shaped by experience across development and ultimately contribute to the emergence of psychopathology. We demonstrate how incorporating an experience-driven plasticity framework is critical for understanding the development of many processes subsumed within the RDoC model, which will contribute to greater understanding of developmental variation in the etiology of psychopathology and can be leveraged to identify potential windows of heightened developmental plasticity when clinical interventions might be maximally efficacious.

Domestic Environmental Experience Design

The term ‘domestic environmental experience’ was defined as users’ experiences of cognitive perceptions and physical responses to their domestic built environments. Domestic environments can be enriched through the implementation of environmental experience design (EXD) by combining users’ environmental, spatial and contextual factors that may accommodate occupants’ needs and demands as well as their health and wellbeing. Here, an EXD theoretical concept has been developed based on the ‘User-Centred Design’ thematical framework.

The Colour Perception – In an Indoor & Outdoor Architectural Environment

Colour is considered an integral element for an indoor and outdoor environment. It is an essential element of our environmental experience and visual perception. It is often connected to, stimulated by, light in the natural or human design environment and accompanies us in different visible ways. They are the substance of how we experience the surroundings, as humans are the centre of concern in designing the architectural environment. It affects individuals differently based upon their age, gender, culture and other biological factors. Colour is a universal visual language appreciated by all. The aim is to utilise colour as an expressive component to emphasise the building character and create unity and harmony.

The Crab House on Oyster Creek: Folkloristic Response to Vernacular Landscape and its Environmental Moorings

The Andersen crab house on Oyster Creek is located on a waterway that is part of the wider estuarine environment consisting of New Jersey’s Great Bay and the Mullica River. It is a building type that has long served oystermen, clammers, crabbers, finfishers, and waterfowlers along New Jersey’s Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay coastlines. Having survived for almost ninety years, the building’s siting allows Phil Andersen to effectively tend the adjacent crabbing grounds and prepare the catch for market. The building, along with his boat and harvesting gear organizes the contours of his working landscape, tools that do not simply define the occupation’s environmental fit, but, as an assemblage, continually advance Andersen’s acquisition of traditional ecological knowledge. While its stark presence on the salt marsh punctuates its environmental fit and role as the axis of Andersen’s occupational map, its enduring function as a working landscape resonates widely throughout the community. The work and social life of the building speak to its capacity to be broadly affiliative, its features, use, and siting laden with aesthetic and performative depth that make it a touchstone of environmental experience and sense of place. These attributes—specifically their role in curating memory and affirming a community’s environmental moorings—show how the Andersen crab house, and similar buildings that preceded it, have engendered folkloristic response for over one hundred and fifty years.

Conceptual Parametric Relationship for Occupants’ Domestic Environmental Experience

Today’s architectural design approaches do not adequately address the relationship between users’ spatial, environmental and psychological experiences. Domestic environmental experience generally indicates users’ cognitive perceptions and physical responses within dwelling spaces. Therefore, without a clear perception of occupants’ experiences, it is difficult to identify proper architectural solutions for a domestic environment. To understand notions of these domestic experiences, the current study explores the theoretical relationship between spatial and environmental design factors within domestic settings which led to the concept of “Environmental Experience Design (EXD)”. Extensive data exploration was conducted using a combination of thirty keywords through different databases (e.g., Scopus, ScienceDirect, PubMed, Google Scholar, Mendeley and Research Gate) to categorise the relevant literature regarding thematic study areas such as human perception and phenomenology, environmental design and psychology, residential environment and design, health-wellbeing and user experiences. This study has identified theoretical associations between spatial and environmental design factors of different domestic spaces that can stimulate occupants’ satisfaction and comfort by reviewing eighty-seven studies from the literature. However, occupants’ contextual situations significantly impact domestic spaces, where spatial and environmental design attributes may be connected to diverse sociocultural factors. The scope of explanation about user context is limited, to some extent, in environmental design theories. Thus, combining occupants’ contexts with spatial and environmental design factors will be a future research direction used to explore the notion of “Domestic Environmental Experience Design”

Clustering of Health and Wellness Tourists Based on Tourism Motivation

In this paper, exploratory factor analysis, cluster analysis and other methods are used to study the health and wellness tourists based on tourism motivation, the results showed that: (1) the motivation of health and wellness tourism can be divided into three push motives: knowledge and experience, social and health, exploration and reflection; three pull motives: food and cultural activities, supporting facilities and information, natural and interpersonal environment. (2) According to the motivation, there are four types of tourists: seeking knowledge and health and wellness, facility service and environmental experience, exploration and reflection, and nearby travel. (3) There are significant differences among the four different types of health and wellness tourists in age, education level, occupation and monthly income.

Suasana Mendung di Cempaka Sari

This work entitled “Suasana Mendung di Cempaka Sari” in terms of ideas is held through environmental experience encountered by the artist since residing in Perak (from 2001 until now). The artist lives in Seri Manjung district and works at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Perak Branch, Seri Iskandar (in Bota sub-district). Hence the daily travel distance of the artist goes back and forth from home to work and vice versa is about 100 kilometres. Through “daily activities” back and forth, the artist indirectly has been served with various shapes and visual elements pertaining to “social products” that are having “potential” to be questioned such as politics, economics, culture, religion, or environment in supporting the formation of his ideas for designing artwork.