Consensus Design

* An accessible guide that offers practical advice for implementing consensus design * Learn how to carry out 'inclusive design' and gain the edge over the competition when bidding for work * Illustrations of an international range of case studies demonstrate how consensus projects evolve in practice

Consensus Design offers a practical step by step guide to co-design; an increasingly important consideration for architects as they compete for work. The text moves from identifying the methodology of the process to developing a series of principles and practical steps which illustrate how consensus design can be established. For easy reference, flow charts show the process of achieving consensus design and include variations for different types of project and different groups of people. It gives clear timings so that agreements can be reached within a specific time frame, and also features a number of case studies to illustrate consensus design principles in practice. Case studies include projects in the UK, US, and Sweden. Consensus design isn't just a utopian ideal. It's the only meaningful way in which people can be involved in shaping where they live and work. It can have an influence on social stability, crime-reduction, personal health and building longevity, all of which in turn have monetary and environmental cost implications. Its consideration can also greatly help architects win work and commissions. Day argues that when places are designed by professionals for people, many things obvious to the residents are overlooked. When they are designed by lay people, the design can suffer from the lowest common denominator factor. When places are designed by both it tends to end up in conflict. However, Consensus Design shows that co-design is not doomed to either conflict or banality if it is managed correctly.

This handbook on group decision-making for those wanting to operate in a consensus fashion stresses the advantages of informal, common sense approaches to working together. It describes how any group can put these approaches into practice, and relates numerous examples of situations in which such approaches have been applied.

This 5-volume HCII-DUXU 2023 book set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Design, User Experience, and Usability, DUXU 2023, held as part of the 24th International Conference, HCI International 2023, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, in July 2023. A total of 1578 papers and 396 posters have been accepted for publication in the HCII 2023 proceedings from a total of 7472 submissions. The papers included in this volume set were organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Design methods, tools and practices; emotional and persuasive design; Part II: Design case studies; and creativity and design education; Part III: Evaluation methods and techniques; and usability, user experience and technology acceptance studies; Part IV: Designing learning experiences; and chatbots, conversational agents and robots: design and user experience; Part V: DUXU for cultural heritage; and DUXU for health and wellbeing.

In a systems theoretic context, the terms 'consensus' and 'synchronization' both describe the property that all individual systems in a group behave asymptotically identical, i.e., output or state trajectories asymptotically converge to a common trajectory. The objective of the present thesis is an improved understanding of some of the diverse coupling mechanisms leading to consensus and synchronization. A starting point is the observation that classical consensus and synchronization results commonly deal with two distinct facets of the problem: Consensus has regularly a strong focus on the interconnections and related constraints while synchronization typically addresses questions about complex individual dynamical systems. Very few results exist that address both facets simultaneously. A thorough analysis of static couplings in consensus algorithms provides explanations for this observation by unveiling limitations inherent to this type of couplings. Novel dynamic coupling mechanisms are proposed to overcome these limitations. These methods essentially rely on an internal model principle for consensus and synchronization derived in the thesis. This principle provides necessary conditions for consensus and synchronization in groups of non-identical systems, and it establishes a link to the output regulation problem. The fresh point of view revealed by this link eventually leads to a new hierarchical mechanism for consensus and synchronization among complex non-identical systems with weak assumptions on the interconnections. Applications include synchronization of linear systems and phase synchronization of nonlinear oscillators.

This book explores admissible consensus analysis and design problems concerning singular multi-agent systems, addressing various impact factors including time delays, external disturbances, switching topologies, protocol states, topology structures, and performance constraint. It also discusses the state-space decomposition method, a key technique that can decompose the motions of singular multi-agent systems into two parts: the relative motion and the whole motion. The relative motion is independent of the whole motion. Further, it describes the admissible consensus analysis and determination of the design criteria for different impact factors using the Lyapunov method, the linear matrix inequality tool, and the generalized Riccati equation method. This book is a valuable reference resource for graduate students of control theory and engineering and researchers in the field of multi-agent systems.

This book mainly presents the authors' recent studies on the distributed attitude consensus of multiple flexible spacecraft. Modified Rodrigues parameters and rotation matrix are used to represent spacecraft attitude. Several distributed adaptive controllers are presented with theoretical analyses, numerical simulations and experimental verifications. The authors intend to provide a manual that allows researchers, engineers and students in the field of aerospace engineering and mechanics to learn a theoretical and practical approach to the design of attitude consensus algorithms.

This book focuses on the design and analysis of collective decision-making strategies for the best-of-n problem. After providing a formalization of the structure of the best-of-n problem supported by a comprehensive survey of the swarm robotics literature, it introduces the functioning of a collective decision-making strategy and identifies a set of mechanisms that are essential for a strategy to solve the best-of-n problem. The best-of-n problem is an abstraction that captures the frequent requirement of a robot swarm to choose one option from of a finite set when optimizing benefits and costs. The book leverages the identification of these mechanisms to develop a modular and model-driven methodology to design collective decision-making strategies and to analyze their performance at different level of abstractions. Lastly, the author provides a series of case studies in which the proposed methodology is used to design different strategies, using robot experiments to show how the designed strategies can be ported to different application scenarios.