A celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of USM's pioneering modular system within the greater context of architecture and design In 1965, leading Swiss furniture company USM patented its signature modular furniture system, USM Haller. This flexible storage solution for both home and office was inspired by Fritz Haller’s modular architecture and designed for infinite reuse and reconfiguration. Considered a design classic, USM Haller is included in the collections of major museums including MoMA and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Released as part of USM’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration of this iconic furniture design, Rethink the Modular examines the role of unit-based systems in the wider context of architecture and design. It combines previously published writings, specially commissioned essays from thinkers and innovators John Thackara and Rick Poyner, and interviews with leading figures in the design world that explain how the concept of the modular influences their work. Interspersed with visual material, the texts reveal the many possibilities created by balancing structure with flexibility, and seek to redefine the place of modularity in modern design history.

Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People brings together scholars, artists, composers, and musical instrument designers in an exploration of modular synthesis, an unusually multifaceted musical instrument that opens up many avenues for exploration and insight, particularly with respect to technological use, practice, and resistance. Through historical, technical, social, aesthetic, and other perspectives, this volume offers a collective reflection on the powerful connections between technology, creativity, culture, and personal agency. Ultimately, this collection is about creativity in a technoscientific world and speaks to issues fundamental to our everyday lives and experiences, by providing insights into the complex relationships between content creators, the technologies they use, and the individuals and communities who design and engage with them. With chapters covering VCV Rack, modular synthesis, instrument design, and the histories of synthesizer technology, as well as interviews with Dave Rossum, Corry Banks, Meng Qi, and Dani Dobkin, among others, Modular Synthesis is recommended reading for advanced undergraduates, researchers, and practitioners of electronic music and music technology. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book defines the parameters of the emerging business strategy of mass customization, covering the main categories in a systematic examination of: manufacturing systems and mass customization; supply chain management and mass customization; and information systems and mass customization. The book provides a conceptual framework for mass customization, its tools, its solutions, and real-world examples of successful implementations of the business strategy.

This book is an inter-disciplinary endeavour. Encompassing education and basic research, it discusses the modular-curriculum embodied in The Epistle from educational, historical, sociolinguistic, anthropological, phenomenological, and non-sectarian perspectives. It shows the cross-boundary philosophical reasoning and pedagogic dimensions of St. Paul as a great teacher and thinker from the Jewish-and-Christian faith. In doing so, this book refocuses academia’s attention on the inevitable antimonic nature inherent in humans’ efforts to create systemic knowledge. Knowledge about the inner aesthetic and volitional-interpretative self – the immanent psychic “I” – and other philosophical aspects of the realm of the transcendental should be rescued from the deepening trends of secularity. Being strong, powerful, productive, and performative should not be taken as the indisputable and exclusive aim of education. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) do not constitute a sufficient basis for building a better humanity. Education via public curriculums ought to serve both the belly and the mind. Deliberative curricular recalibrations, with rationales for grace, are thus needed for a better future for humanity.... This book is relevant for anyone with a core fascination about truths, values, epistemologies, life, spirituality, and holistic human development. It can also be used as a textbook or a reference in a number of fields including counselling, psychology, translation, cultural studies, and theology.

In this book, the authors describe the findings derived from interaction and cooperation between scientific actors employing diverse practices. They reflect on distinct prototyping concepts and examine the transformation of development culture in their fusion to hybrid approaches and solutions. The products of tomorrow are going to be multifunctional, interactive systems – and already are to some degree today. Collaboration across multiple disciplines is the only way to grasp their complexity in design concepts. This underscores the importance of reconsidering the prototyping process for the development of these systems, particularly in transdisciplinary research teams. “Rethinking Prototyping – new hybrid concepts for prototyping” was a transdisciplinary project that took up this challenge. The aim of this programmatic rethinking was to come up with a general concept of prototyping by combining innovative prototyping concepts, which had been researched and developed in three sub-projects: “Hybrid Prototyping” developed new prototyping approaches to validate and evaluate holistically developed systems with their services, infrastructure and business models. “Blended Prototyping” addressed a new technique whereby prototypes for user interfaces of software applications can be generated from hand drawings and immediately be tested. “Beyond Prototyping” examined the issue of the prototype in connection with algorithmically generated design for producing tailor-made products.

Providing a comprehensive development and defense of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules, this book is a useful reading for those with an interest in the nature and organisation of the mind.

The evolutionary psychology behind human inconsistency We're all hypocrites. Why? Hypocrisy is the natural state of the human mind. Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don't always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs, vacillations between patience and impulsiveness, violations of our supposed moral principles, and overinflated views of ourselves. This modular, evolutionary psychological view of the mind undermines deeply held intuitions about ourselves, as well as a range of scientific theories that require a "self" with consistent beliefs and preferences. Modularity suggests that there is no "I." Instead, each of us is a contentious "we"--a collection of discrete but interacting systems whose constant conflicts shape our interactions with one another and our experience of the world. In clear language, full of wit and rich in examples, Kurzban explains the roots and implications of our inconsistent minds, and why it is perfectly natural to believe that everyone else is a hypocrite.

This volume brings together scholars and artist-researchers to explore the nature and function of musical instruments in creative practices, and their role in musical culture. Through historical, theoretical, critical, practical-artistic perspectives and case studies, the contributors here examine identities and affordances of acoustical, electronic and digital musical instruments, the kinds of relationships that composers and performers establish with them, and the crucial role they play in the emergence of musical experiences and meanings.

"Prefab Architecture . . . is beyond theory, and beyond most of what we think we know about pods, containers, mods, and joints. This book is more than 'Prefabrication 101.' It is the Joy of Cooking writ large for the architecture and construction industries." From the Foreword by James Timberlake, FAIA THE DEFINITIVE REFERENCE ON PREFAB ARCHITECTURE FOR ARCHITECTS AND CONSTRUCTION PROFESSIONALS Written for architects and related design and construction professionals, Prefab Architecture is a guide to off-site construction, presenting the opportunities and challenges associated with designing and building with components, panels, and modules. It presents the drawbacks of building in situ (on-site) and demonstrates why prefabrication is the smarter choice for better integration of products and processes, more efficient delivery, and realizing more value in project life cycles. In addition, Prefab Architecture provides: A selected history of prefabrication from the Industrial Revolution to current computer numerical control, and a theory of production from integrated processes to lean manufacturing Coverage on the tradeoffs of off-site fabrication including scope, schedule, and cost with the associated principles of labor, risk, and quality Up-to-date products featuring examples of prefabricated structure, enclosure, service, and nterior building systems Documentation on the constraints and execution of manufacturing, factory production, transportation, and assembly Dozens of recent examples of prefab projects by contemporary architects and fabricators including KieranTimberlake, SHoP Architects, Office dA, Michelle Kaufmann, and many others In Prefab Architecture, the fresh approaches toward creating buildings that accurately convey ature and expanded green building methodologies make this book an important voice for adopting change in a construction industry entrenched in traditions of the past.

This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely collective process of construction. Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies draws together a wide range of both leading and emerging scholars to offer a critical survey of STS applications to music studies, considering topics ranging from classical music instrument-making to the ethos of DIY in punk music. The book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology. Raising crucial methodological and epistemological questions about the study of music, this book will be relevant to scholars studying the interactions between music, culture, and technology from many disciplinary perspectives.