Search Results (45)

Material stocks (MS) serve as essential physical foundations for socio–economic systems, reflecting the accumulation, transformation, and consumption of resources over time and space. Positioned at the intersection of environmental and socio–economic systems, MS are increasingly recognized as leverage points for advancing sustainability. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive overview, making it difficult to fully capture the latest developments and cutting–edge research. We adopt a systems perspective to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric and thematic review of 602 scholarly publications on MS research. The results showed that MS research encompasses has three development periods: preliminary exploration (before 2007), rapid development (2007–2016), and expansion and deepening (after 2016). MS research continues to deepen, gathering multiple teams and differentiating into diverse topics. MS research has evolved from simple accounting to intersection with socio–economic, resources, and environmental systems, and shifted from relying on statistical data to integrating high–spatio–temporal–resolution geographic big data. MS research is shifting from problem revelation to problem solving, constantly achieving new developments and improvements. In the future, it is still necessary to refine MS spatio–temporal distribution, reveal MS’s evolution mechanism, establish standardized databases, strengthen interaction with other systems, enhance problem–solving abilities, and provide powerful guidance for the formulation of dematerialization and decarbonization policies to achieve sustainable development. Full article

The globally used additive manufacturing technique called Fused Deposition Modeling plays a central role in advancing dematerialized logistics by enabling on-demand production and minimizing material waste. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into FDM processes has introduced promising avenues to improve efficiency, accuracy, and sustainability. Expressly, researchers have proved in what ways machine learning algorithms can upgrade printing parameters, initiating enhanced product quality and lower defects. In the context of dematerialized logistics, the PRISMA methodology mentioned in this review is set to maintain a structured analysis of the junction between AI and FDM. Exhaustive research of analyzed studies issued from 2009 to 2024 through databases like Scopus, Web of Science, and IEEE Xplore demonstrate an expanding reliance on AI techniques like neural networks and genetic algorithms. All these mentioned methods are used to approach challenges such as print quality inconsistencies, material overuse, and structural weaknesses. The outcome shows the prospect of AI to reshape FDM, but major obstacles remain present: many problems, such as the scalability of models and their integration into existing logistical frameworks, need further studies and research. As demonstrated, this review gives an inclusive perspective on the actual progress and highlights the main directions for what lies ahead to improve FDM processes in logistics. Full article

Modern design products are increasingly complex and emotionally significant, demanding versatile and collaborative customization. However, a literature and commercial review reveals a limited availability of flexible, multi-user, photorealistic Virtual Reality (VR) systems for product configuration. We introduce MAGIC (Multi-user Advanced Graphic Immersive Configurator), a collaborative platform combining realistic graphics with ergonomic validation using digital avatars, addressing the limitations of 2D visualization and existing tools. MAGIC is evaluated in a yacht design case study involving 30 participants in an immersive, co-located configuration of a sailing yacht to assess the system’s usability and the potential of VR for customizing complex products. Results show MAGIC’s feasibility in supporting multi-user configuration (100% success rate) and achieving a strong usability score (SUS = 80.83). User feedback highlights that high-quality graphics and additional content significantly enhance immersion and user engagement. However, encountered challenges with navigation methods and spatial perception indicate areas for improvement. MAGIC’s collaborative and immersive capabilities can be extended to other industries demanding proactive customer engagement in the customization of large, heavy products and ergonomic design. Moreover, by promoting prototype dematerialization and providing an interactive remote tool for end users, MAGIC offers potential environmental and economic benefits to boost the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Full article

The circular economy is a tangible paradigm in response to the unsustainable model of production and consumption of resources in the agri-food system. The circular economy allows for a reduction in the environmental impact through the minimization of food waste or the maximal generation of renewable energy from waste. Despite the relevance, in the extant literature, there are scant indications on how to apply circular business models in agri-food systems. Hence, the paper aims to analyze the circular economy implementation level in the agri-food system in 29 European countries, focusing on specific circular economy strategies. Selected indicators were analyzed to evaluate the level of circular economy implementation in the agri-food system (e.g., production values, energy sharing from renewable sources, and total waste emission) using a Panel data analysis method. The required variables were gained from the global databases within the recent five years (2014–2018). The results reveal an overall lack of circular economy implementation in the agri-food systems among European countries. A set of 12 managerial propositions was suggested to foster the implementation of the circular business models by interacting the recycling, extending, intensifying, and dematerializing strategies with aspects of the production process, waste emission, and renewable energy sharing in the agri-food system. Full article

The traditional concept of real estate, rooted in physical attributes—including land, buildings, and infrastructure—has undergone significant transformation in the digital age. This paper repositions real estate as a foundational platform within the broader digital ecosystem, serving as an integrative node that connects various digital platforms. By examining processes such as informatization, servicization, automatization, e-spatialization, dematerialization, and humanization, this study demonstrates how these elements collectively embed economic, social, and environmental value states into the digital framework of real estate. Leveraging advanced technologies and interdisciplinary methodologies, this paper constructs a comprehensive framework for understanding real estate’s digital evolution. The findings highlight real estate’s pivotal role in providing essential spatial and digital infrastructure that support the integration and operation of other platforms. It contributes to the discourse on platformization by offering a new model for understanding and utilizing real estate in a digitally driven society while proposing strategies crucial for its successful implementation in the ongoing digital transformation. Full article

Climate change has become a global nightmare, and the awareness of the causes of carbon emissions has resulted in rigorous studies. These studies linked the increase in global warming with booming economic growth. Since global warming has become more apparent, researchers have explored ways to decouple economic activities from carbon growth. Economic and carbon growth must be decoupled to achieve a low-carbon economy to support the carbon-growth plan or emission-reduction strategy. The world is transitioning toward a carbon-neutral and green ecosystem, so finding ways to decouple carbon emissions from economic activities is an exciting topic to explore. This study reviews current information on the importance of decoupling energy from economic growth innovative techniques that thoroughly examine the challenges and constraints of low-carbon energy systems. In order to examine the detrimental effects of carbon emissions on ecosystems and the ways in which economic expansion contributes to carbon footprints, more than three hundred research papers were gathered using several search engines, including Elsevier and Google Scholar. This review revealed that decarbonization and dematerialization had been achieved without declining global economic growth. It also provides information on energy use and economic activities leading to global carbon emissions and alternative solutions to the global challenge of climate change. The decoupling methods commonly used to determine the impact of energy decarbonization on economic growth are explored. All the results suggest that economic growth is a primary mover of global carbon emission increase and must be separated to achieve a carbon environment. Full article

The construction industry is responsible for a significant share of global material consumption, including natural resources. Therefore, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12.2 on sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources cannot be achieved without significant advances and contributions from the construction sector. Furthermore, various materials used by the construction industry contribute to the development and expansion of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) system. LECA (Light Expanded Clay Aggregate) is one such material that enhances LEED performance through its key benefits, including lightness, thermal insulation, sound insulation, and fire resistance. One of the most effective methods for reducing the weight of concrete is the incorporation of lightweight aggregates, and the advantages of LECA include lessening loads and enabling reduced cross-sections, directly improving the sustainability of the built environment via reduced materials consumption. This study aims to develop a prediction model for the compressive strength of LECA-incorporated concrete through a meta-analysis. More than 140 data points were compiled through literature via 15 separate studies, and results were analyzed to conduct the meta-analysis. Moreover, an experimental program was carried out to verify the model and evaluate its accuracy in predicting compressive strength. Results from the developed model and the experimental program were in accordance with concrete having lower compressive strengths compared to those at high strength values. Likewise, more accurate results were obtained for concrete mixes that have w/b ratios of 0.5 or higher. Concrete mixes that have higher amounts of LECA by volume of concrete yielded more accurate results when using the prediction model. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to quantify the impact of several parameters on the compressive strength of LECA concrete. Full article

Joseph Kosuth, one of Concept Art’s influential practitioners, credited Marcel Duchamp in an important 1969 essay, “Art After Philosophy”, with instigating the shift from the visual to the conceptual by means of indifference and dematerialization. Duchamp’s approach to art was not limited, however, to the realm of artistic intention but also included the (re)contextualization provoked by his readymades. This (re)contextualization elucidated the embodied, dialogical encounters of the artist-artwork-audience, what I identify as an “aesthetics of difference”. This designation sets forth a framework of meaning that draws upon a burgeoning subset of early-twentieth-century personalist philosophy called dialogical personalism in order to offer a more suitable plausibility structure than the usual explanations of Duchamp and his approach to art, which typically revolve around nihilism, absurdity, and a solipsistic understanding of freedom. In doing so, Duchamp’s artistic approach retains not only a more viable ontology for continuing to question the nature of art, but also has important epistemological and ethical implications. Full article

Does our food for thought come virtually from the internet? When we take a long view, the instant stroke of a keyboard pales in comparison to the centuries-old evolution of real food harvesting and the generation and exchange of ideas, which have resulted in creative capital. The vernacular architecture of the agricultural built environment has almost dematerialized in its transition from the ancient pre-industrial era to the post-truth world, to become almost only an imagined concept. The symbology of the common threshing terrace of a Portuguese remote mountain village can now be found in multiple spaces of the urban realm, including in the metaphor of a community arts incubator’s modus operandi in Albany, New York (USA). How has the concept of food for thought developed and materialized? How has it evolved? And what are some of the expected ways it might be utilized in the future? The purpose of the paper is to trace the evolution of this concept and its elements via the BLC Framework. The methodology employs a time analysis of approximately three centuries to distinguish three distinct evolutionary phases: (i) the pre-industrial era, (ii) the industrial era, and (iii) the information-driven era. The key finding is an up-to-date discussion of the food for thought concept in two distinct geographical worlds and three-time eras, as well as a set of lessons learned according to a protest poem and a rock song. The results are presented in the form of five lessons learned with implications for public policy: the first two lessons pertain to issues of procedural justice as encapsulated in the anonymous ‘The Goose’ poem, while the last three result from a discussion of selected verses in Nick Cave’s ‘Fable of the Brown Ape’ rock song. Full article

Melvin Edwards made his first abstract sculptures at the beginning of the contemporary period in the early 1960s, but the ways he held on formally to a modern notion of “interiority” in his Lynch Fragments series provide us with an underexamined aesthetic position in contemporary art. Edwards offered nuanced relationships between interior and exterior at a moment when concepts of “interiority” and “self” were under the most strain in contemporary art practice. If we consider this turn away from interiority—and toward surface, emptiness, system, and dematerialization—to be, in part, a symptom of the pressure exerted by the commodity form on art viewers’ sensibilities after 1955, then the stakes of Edwards’ choice not only to use found metal objects, but to compose them around an active rather than empty center, feel higher. By comparing the sculpture Mojo for 1404 (1964) with the Bichos (1960–1965) of Lygia Clark, the distinctiveness of Edwards’ project emerges even more strongly. Clark responded to the crisis of interiority with shiny metal sculptures whose interiors were constantly being flipped inside-out. By contrast, Edwards’ art was motivated by the struggle for racial justice, and it persistently spoke its desire for grounded, scarred personhood in an aesthetic language that required viewers to recall their own interiority. Full article

When reflecting on the human condition, vulnerability is a characteristic which is clearly evident, because anyone is exposed to the possibility of being wounded (and is, therefore, vulnerable, from the Latin word "vulnus", wound). In fact, human vulnerability, intended as a universal condition affecting finite and mortal human beings, is closely linked to embodiment, intended as the constitutive bond every human has with a physical body, subject to changes and to the passing of time. In today’s cultural context, permeated by emerging technologies, theories in favor of the so-called human enhancement through the use of the Genetics–Nanotechnology–Robotics (GNR) Revolution or NBIC Convergence technologies, in particular transhumanism, are emerging in the bioethical debate and seem to question the fundamentally vulnerable nature of human beings, by proposing not only abstract theories, but also concrete techno-scientific projects for its overcoming. Such a project, however, could turn out to be fallacious and inconsistent and could lead to ethically unacceptable consequences. Instead, a coherent (and ethical) way of responding to constitutive human vulnerability seems to be its understanding and acceptance. Full article

In this paper, we seek to define the Portuguese Electronic Jurisdictional Administrative Procedure and characterize the scope and success of its implementation in terms of access to justice and court efficiency. It encompasses different perspectives on the judicial system and the electronic administrative procedure, reflecting the diversity of its authors, and combines a theoretical approach and discussion with statistics produced with official judicial data. Therefore, it introduces the issue and its background and discusses the models and principles of electronic judicial procedure and its representation in the Portuguese judicial procedure and law. It also presents the Portuguese exceptional and temporary regime for conducting judicial hearings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, discussing its merits and presenting the corresponding judicial statistics. The paper concludes that the advent of electronic judicial procedure, driven by technological advancements and aiming to achieve procedural effectiveness and efficiency, represents a paradigm shift and a change in the nature of the legal process, i.e., an ontological transformation in the theory of the process that requires a robust conceptual framework, to ensure consistent interpretation and application of procedural law and to guarantee respect for equality and legal certainty. Full article

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a recent emerging technology that is being adopted in various industry sectors and supply chains. Life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) are powerful methods that can be used for assessing the environmental and economic performance of emerging manufacturing technologies. This study aims to evaluate the life cycle environmental impacts and cost of computerized numerical control-based (CNC) manufacturing and direct metal laser sintering technology (DMLS) through a cradle-to-gate life cycle analysis. This research has four main novel elements: (i) conducting a recent comprehensive review of metal AM and conventional manufacturing (CM) processes using a systematic method and meta-analysis (ii) comparing the conventional process “CNC machining” and the additive technology “direct metal laser sintering” from the environmental (LCA) and economic (LCC) perspectives, (iii) investigating the influence of geometry complexity and shape size factors on the environmental and cost performance of both manufacturing methods, and (iv) conducting a Monte Carlo simulation-based sensitivity analysis to tackle uncertainty in LCC input parameters. The midpoints and endpoints impact for CNC and AM processes were estimated using the Ecoinvent v3.8 database and ReCiPe (E) impact assessment method. The review revealed that global warming potential is one of the most widely studied environmental indicators; however, only 6% of the studies have investigated the life cycle economic impacts of AM technologies using sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. The results have shown that in terms of ReCiPe endpoints, DMLS has the highest environmental impact on human health while CM has more impact on the eco-system quality. Electricity consumption is the main contributor to environmental impact categories in both manufacturing technologies. This is due to the high electricity utilization for casting and milling conventionally manufactured parts and printing the AM parts. LCC net present values revealed that manufacturing all parts with AM costs 91% more compared to CNC. The LCC analysis has shown that AM is more suitable and cost-effective for parts with highly complex geometries. Whereas CNC machining was found to be economically feasible for large-sized and low-complexity parts. The Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis demonstrated that for the case of AM, the most significant parameter is the processing cost followed by material cost, which highlighted the importance of energy-efficient AM and dematerialization through design for circularity. Full article

One of the most compelling effects of digitally enhanced and digitally enabled immersive exhibitions is their paradoxical dematerialization of “analog” experience. What leads exhibition visitors to accept that immersion is a state achieved only through technological mediation? Are we not already perceptually immersed in the world, as the phenomenologists asserted? This essay explores how digital enhancement disengages self-awareness by masquerading as immersion. In contrast, contemporary artists Karin Sander, Janet Cardiff, and Chris Salter employ desynchronizing and dislocating tactics to challenge naïve notions of what comprises an aesthetic experience, in order to requaint viewers with their own perceptual and ethical agency. Full article

Recent trends prove that energy production is shifting from traditional fossil fuel combustion technologies to renewable energy-based technologies. To estimate the economic efficiency of renewable energy technology implementation, the data for the EU-27 member states during the 2012–2021 period were collected; additionally, technological efficiency was analyzed based on a critical literature review. Breusch and Pagan Lagrangian multiplier tests were employed to select the most suitable econometric model. The results suggest that an increase in the share of renewable energy sources by one percentage point (1) decreased CO₂ emissions by 0.137 metric tons per capita (technological efficiency) and (2) decreased greenhouse gases by 13 g per EUR, in terms of GDP (economic efficiency). Regarding the Kyoto Protocol implementation, it was found for EU-27 that an increase in the share of renewable energy sources by one percentage point was related to a decrease of one percentage point in the greenhouse gases index. GDP per capita appeared to be an insignificant driver for reductions in per capita CO₂ emissions, while it proved to be important for economic efficiency models. Thus, increasing GDP per capita by 1000 USD reduces greenhouse gases by 7.1 g per EUR of GDP in EU-27. This paper also confirmed that a unit of electricity (1 kWh) generated by traditional energy plants is seven to nineteen times more environmentally costly than renewable energy generation. This paper thus concludes that digital transformations and additive manufacturing brought about the significant dematerialization of industrial production and the promotion of renewable energy on industrial and household levels. Full article