Education, Communication and Decision-Making on Renewable and Sustainable Energy

Abstract

This editorial aims to introduce the themes and approaches covered in this special issue on education, communication, and decision-making on renewable and sustainable energy. At first, I discuss the themes and topics that have informed the creation of this special issue. Then, I provide an overview of the content of each paper that is included on the special issue. Additionally, this editorial provides a solid background on the relationships between the factors affecting decision-making on renewable energy sources as well as on the degree of influence education and communication takes part in the attitudes of the public towards renewable energy sources.

Enhancing the Historic Public Social Housing through a User-Centered Design-Driven Approach

“…From the didactic point of view, the training activity is developed as a "knowledge exchange" between university, architects, industries, and community, to bring together design and construction phases. Knowledge exchange is a bi-directional process that involves transferring knowledge [53], also helping the development of concrete and multidimensional research questions [54]. Additionally, some suggestions for the scientific community can be delineated: (i) a first interaction with the real-life context permits to understand habits, cultures, activities, and needs of the inhabitants; (ii) the engagement with inhabitants and users is important from the early design to produce a user-center design-driven approach; (iii) training activities should contribute to the active and experiential learning through the interaction with the physical and social environment; (iv) the kinesthetic experience allows to appreciate the "non-structured" way, increasing the empathetical imagination for the architectural design project; (v) learners need freedom in their expression to integrate analog and digital tools (i.e., images, videos, texts, sketches, texts, and audios); (vi) design exercise helps to create the "architecture ideas" in a faster way; (vii) hand-drawn sketches should encourage to engage different cognitive faculties (more than cameras or a cellphones); (viii) working in teams favors the cross-fertilization of ideas and prepares for the professional activity, despite the difficulty in assessing individual contributions; (ix) conceptual design, project engineering, and mock-up are three faces of the same architectural project; (x) public presentation of the work (during the design studio or with an on-site exposition) helps to improve the architectural project and the long-term retention of notions and technical skills.…”