Daylight and access to views in classrooms and workspaces are important factors in creating a quality indoor environment that enhances student learning performance and motivation and worker productivity. Recent studies have found that student performance is significantly higher in well daylit classrooms than in classrooms with poor daylighting, that students perform better in classrooms with ample views out windows. Direct sun penetration and glare through windows has been found to negatively impact student and worker performance. These studies have important implications the future of classroom and office design, and can inform the design of windows for high performance buildings. Windows must be designed with careful consideration of orientation, position, and shading to provide even diffuse daylighting throughout a room as well as ample views out windows in order to create a high quality indoor environment for students, teachers, and workers. 

Orientalism is a mode of viewing non-Western cultures as other and lesser than Western cultures. European artists repeatedly made specific, denigrating representations of other cultures, thereby forming and sustaining Orientalist views. Yet, beginning in the nineteenth century, these modes of depiction were adopted by artists in Eastern countries. Such appropriation was used to communicate a subversion of Orientalist stereotypes. This paper will explore the ways that Western visual communication was used in the East as a reaction against dominating Orientalist views. The Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi in particular used subtle manipulations of the style and imagery of European Orientalist artists like Jean-Leon Gérôme to contradict demeaning ideas of Ottoman subjects and promote an intelligent, self-sufficient and modern portrait of the empire. Photography and exhibition practices were other visual tools appropriated by Ottoman artists, like Hamdi, for the promotion of their own culture. While mimicry has been suggested as the reason for the appropriation of Western visual forms, I argue that they were used primarily in defense against European ideas of the "Orient." Especially in the art and exhibition work of Osman Hamdi, images of the Ottoman Empire, displayed in a Western format, came together to form a picture of Islamic nations as they wished to be seen. Photographs of the most modern architecture or of Islamic scholars deep in thought promoted the concept of Eastern societies as advanced and worthy of respect. The use of Western representational tools allowed these viewpoints to be seen and understood by a Western audience, translating Eastern statements of self for Western consumption.

In the 1980s an international art movement, “Neo-Expressionism,” centered mainly in Germany and the United States, was warmly welcomed by an art world that had grown tired of conceptual and minimalist art. The painters grouped under this category by critics and art historians were initially linked based on their shared return to figurative and narrative painting, a similarity emphasized in major international exhibitions such as the 1981 A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy in London. However, a more in-depth analysis of these artists’ goals and influences reveals that the German and the American Neo-Expressionists were more different than similar, especially in terms of the social preoccupations in their work. A retrospective analysis indicates that the grouping of American and the German artists under the broad heading of “Neo-Expressionism” was an effect of the heightened power and influence of the art-world media and prominent dealers in the art market of the 1980s. Influential dealers such as Mary Boone and Michael Werner were especially important in sustaining this category through their joint marketing of these German and American artists as “Neo-Expressionists.”Art history textbooks of the 1980s and mid-1990s routinely include “Neo-Expressionism” as defined by these dealers as a new “movement” in painting, but the category has all but disappeared in more recent publications. My paper will examine a number of key factors that contributed to this revision of contemporary art history.

Every designer has his or her own understanding of design, depending on several important factors: when and where they received their design education; their personal experiences; and the discipline in which they practice. Each designer also approaches the process of ideation differently based on these factors. Within these individual conceptions of what it means to design something and how one can create the optimum mental environment to generate creative ideas for addressing a problem is a wealth of knowledge that is invaluable to designers of all educational, personal, and professional backgrounds. This paper focuses on exposing techniques designers from a wide range of disciplines have developed to support successful ideation. In studying how different designers ideate and what tools lead to success or mediocrity, I hope to shed light on the ostensibly mystical concept of the creative process, with the goal of generating a landscape of ideation techniques that other designers, and especially design students, can draw from. In order to gather data from a diverse sample of practicing and student designers, I am designing a survey and conducting unstructured interviews. The resultant quantitative data will be graphically analyzed to uncover salient themes and patterns, while the qualitative data will be used to give context and insight into the human experience of the ideation process. The results of my analysis will culminate in an anthology of ideation techniques and case studies that designers can make use of and expand upon in their own work.

 Within recent years anime has become a globally recognized Japanese medium. Since its beginnings anime has been heavily influenced by Western visual culture and by the physical traits of Westerners themselves. This can be seen in the physical characteristics of the people found within anime, such as blonde hair and blue eyes. These characteristics as well as other visual indicators have made the people depicted within anime appear to be more Caucasian than Japanese. Based on this visual analysis it has been previously argued that anime is a visual representation of the Westernization of the Japanese, as discussed by Antonia Levi in her book Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation. In this paper, I will argue that anime artists have moved past previous Caucasian-emulating depictions and have created an imaginary type of people that has become independent from Western associations. Although anime was initially influenced by the West, it was the exoticness of the West that was the appeal, not a desire to adopt Western culture because of its association with global political power. This exoticism persists but it has become disassociated from the West. I will explore these traits, such as fantastical depictions of hair and otherworldly representations of eyes from their origins in “exoticization” of Western features through their evolution by means of exaggeration into a paradigm that has become independent of Western association. Anime is a locally developed aesthetic that depicts native cultural contexts and situations. Modern anime has become a fantasyland rooted in Japanese culture, but beyond anything that actually exists.