GDRC Mosaic
Keep yourself informed through GDRC's newsletter

January 2006


Welcome to another edition of GDRC's Mosaic!

This month, GDRC Mosaic is being set to more than 1000 subscribers in 110 countries worldwide.


THIS MONTH'S SPOTLIGHT: Back to the Drawing Board
from GDRC's Programme on Urban Environmental Management, in its "Green Construction" Section.

"Human settlements - cities, towns, villages - are defined by the buildings in which we live and work. Do we need to rethink on the sustainability of buildings and construction techniques?... "

The 'Back to the Drawing Board" Toolbox looks at buildings in its entire life-cycle, and provides tools and strategies that can be used to incorporate sustainability principles in building and construction.

The processes involved in a building's lifespan - design, construction, use, maintenance and demolition - have immense implications on its impact on the environment - in terms of natural resources and energy consumed.

GDRC has been working on these and related issues . Resources on this topic are available at: http://www.gdrc.org/uem/green-const/toolbox/box-index.html

As with all sections of GDRC, contributions, comments and suggestions are always welcome from users and subscribers! Please contact GDRC's Coordinator at - mosaic@gdrc.org


FOCUS ON GDRC: LEARNING LESSONS

Jazz and Information Design

A recent jazz concert provided an interesting opportunity to think of the lessons we can learn for information design!

Listen carefully to jazz - a wide range of seemingly random and different music streams, sounds and instruments come together to make 'music'. AND so it should be for designing information products - where different pieces of information should be used in different ways to present an idea or create knowledge.

The apparent randomness of jazz facilitates improvisation and on-the-fly music. The musicians sometimes invent new pieces as they go along, but creating seamless music. AND so it should be for information design as well - a mixture of information provided should enable different impressions and inspirations in the user.

Jazz uses different music beats in the same piece of music, but creating a composite whole that is pleasing and continuous. AND in information design, this is an important skill to be able to pay attention to different and sometimes out-of-sync streams of information to be able to build patterns of useful knowledge

And so the beat goes on!!


MONTHLY STATISTICS FOR GDRC'S WEBSITE

Total hits encountered - 1,054,011
Total files downloaded - 874,734
Total pages viewed - 329,344
Total web visitors - 135,270
Total KBytes - 9,240,359
Pages per day - Avg. 10264 Max. - 15,918
Visits per day - Avg. 4,363 Max. - 5,803


WHAT'S NEW AT GDRC'S WEBSITE?
A sample of new items added to GDRC's programmes:
ABOUT GDRC MOSAIC

The "GDRC Mosaic" is a monthly email newsletter that provides information bites, and summarizes programme activities of GDRC, including new items added to the website.

To subscribe: http://www.gdrc.org/about/newsletter.html
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CONTACT ADDRESS:

Global Development Research Centre
1-5-1-1013, Mori Minami Machi, Higashi Nada ku,
Kobe - 658-0011, Japan
Tel and Fax: +(81-78) 452-8414
Email: info-mosaic@gdrc.org
URL: http://www.gdrc.org/


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