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This study aims to explore aesthetic atmospheres and their affordances in urban squares to advance knowledge on the research and design of attractive living environments.

Descriptions of pleasant and unpleasant experiences of urban squares were collected using qualitative questionnaires with open-ended questions. The theoretical framework and the lens of aesthetic affordances were applied to pinpoint and understand the connections between the place attributes and experiences.

This study found four distinct aesthetic atmospheres formed by perceived synergies of both the material and immaterial aspects of the environment. It was also found that the atmospheres may shift. A model that shows the aesthetic atmospheres and their potential affordances as layered and emerging is presented.

Everyday aesthetics considered as affordances open new research perspectives for the understanding of what generates attractive living environments – or not.

Aesthetics affordances may provide the design professionals and alike means on how to design places that engender specific aesthetic atmosphere.

Gathering and discussing commonplace aesthetic experiences in everyday life may enhance democratic participation in place development among people with different levels of design expertise.

This study combines theories of place with a novel concept of aesthetic affordances to identify distinct aesthetic atmospheres. A holistic overview structure of how the various constituents of aesthetic atmospheres relate to each other provides new ways of studying and understanding urban aesthetic atmospheres.

This paper aims to address tertiary education informal learning space preferences for learners’ informal learning activities. The study accentuates learners’ preferred informal academic learning space (IALS) for informal learning activities that required interaction and communication and collaboration.

The research is based on a survey questionnaire that participated by 1,079 diploma learners from Polytechnics’ technical and non-technical academic programmes in Malaysia.

The finding reveals that learners mostly preferred IALS that were categorized as semi-outdoor and connected to nature. Learners prefer to have IALS for collaborative learning activities with the appropriate information, communication and technology facilities and thermally conductive. Learners preferred an attractive layout design with comfortable furniture for informal learning activities. Apparently, learning space design is more focused on formal learning rather than informal learning.

This study grants a profound insight centred upon the learner’s perspective on the spatial alignment of education 4.0 learning ecosystem can be configured to enhance collaborative and self-regulated learning activities by distinguishing the critical preference of IALS.

This study aims to address the growing importance of online health information (OHI) and the associated uncertainty. Although previous research has explored factors influencing the credibility of OHI, results have been inconsistent. Therefore, this study aims to identify the essential factors that influence the perceived credibility of OHI by conducting a meta-analysis of articles published from 2010 to 2022. The study also aims to examine the moderating effects of demographic characteristics, study design and the platforms where health information is located.

Based on the Prominence-Interpretation Theory (PIT), a meta-analysis of 25 empirical studies was conducted to explore 12 factors related to information content and source, social interaction, individual and media affordance. Moderators such as age, education level, gender of participants, sample size, platforms and research design were also examined.

Results suggest that all factors, except social support, have significant effects on the credibility of OHI. Among them, argument quality had the strongest correlation with credibility and individual factors were also found to be relevant. Moderating effects indicate that social support was significantly moderated by age and education level. Different sample sizes may lead to variations in the role of social endorsement, while personal involvement was moderated by sample size, platform and study design.

This study enriches the application of PIT in the health domain and provides guidance for scholars to expand the scope of research on factors influencing OHI credibility.

Plugging into the multimodal aesthetics of youth lifestreaming, this article examines how three lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) youths use digital media production as an activist practice toward cultural justice work. Focusing on the queer rhetorical dimensions of multimodal (counter)storytelling, the communicative practice used to (re)name, remix and challenge epistemic notions of objective reality, this paper aims to highlight how youth worked to (de)compose and (re)author multiple identities and social relationships across online/offline contexts.

Through sustained participant observation across online/offline contexts, active interviewing techniques and visual discourse analysis, this paper illuminates how composing with digital media was leveraged by three LGBTQ youths to navigate larger systems of inequality across a multi-year connective ethnographic study.

By highlighting how queer rhetorical arts were used as tools to surpass and navigate social fault lines created by difference, findings highlight how Jack, Andi and Gabe, three LGBTQ youths, used multimodal (counter)storytelling to comment, correct and compose being different. Speaking across the rhetorical dimensions of logos, pathos and ethos, the author contends that a queer rhetorics lens helped highlight how youth used the affordances of multimodal (counter)storytelling to lifestream versions of activist selves.

Reading LGBTQ youths’ lifestreaming as multimodal (counter)storytelling, this paper highlights how three youths use multimodal composition as entry points into remixing the radical present and participate in cultural justice work.

While the spatial dimensions of augmented reality (AR) have received significant attention in the marketing literature, to date, there has been less consideration of its temporal dimensions. This paper aims to theorise digital timework through AR to understand a new form of consumption experience that offers short-lived, immersive forms of mundane, marketer-led escape from everyday life.

The authors draw upon Casey’s phenomenological work to explore the emergence of new dynamics of temporalisation through digitised play. An illustrative case study using AR shows how consumers use this temporalisation to find stability and comfort through projecting backwards (remembering) and forwards (imagining) in their lives.

The proliferation of novel digital technologies and platforms has radically transformed consumption experiences as the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, fantasy and reality and play and work have become increasingly blurred. The findings show how temporary escape is carved out within digital space and time, where controlled imaginings provide consumers with an illusion of control over their lives as they re-establish cohesion in a ruptured sense of time.

The authors consider the more critical implications of the offloading capacity of AR, which they show does not prevent cognitive processes such as imagination and remembering but rather puts limits on them. The authors show that these more short-lived, everyday types of digitised escape do not allow for an escape from the structures of everyday life within the market, as much of the previous literature suggests.

The authors argue that corporations need to reflect upon the potential threats of immersive technologies such as AR in harming consumer escapism and take these into serious consideration as part of their strategic experiential design strategies to avoid leading to detrimental effects upon consumer well-being. More nuanced conceptualisations are required to unpack the antecedents of limiting people’s imagination and potentially limiting the fully fledged escape that consumers might desire.

Prior work has conceptualised AR as offloading the need for imagination by making the absent present. The authors critically unpack the implications of this for a more fluid understanding of the temporal logics and limits of consumer escapism.

Social studies educators have displayed an interest in student-created multimedia, including digital documentaries. The research community has responded with a small but growing body of studies, but the literature to date has not explored students‘ perspectives on these assignments. This study combined classroom observations, document analysis, and student interviews to examine students‘ views of technology, the curriculum, and their final products. The findings reveal that students come to technology-based, content-driven assignments with prior conceptions of both the technology and the content. These expectations shape student actions and transform the assignment, in some cases surpassing curricular expectations. Evidence from students‘ products, classroom observations, and interview data, however, also suggest that student agency was limited by the classroom reality of mimetic learning. The results of this study have various implications for teacher educators and educational researchers interested in leveraging technology to improve learning. They must acknowledge the dynamic nature of classroom interaction and the impact student choices have on Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). Technology integration occurs in the operational curriculum, often in unpredictable ways. Based on our study we know that student preconceptions and desires impact the learning goals. By better under-standing the role of student agency, teachers can plan for instruction that uses digital history to effectively teach content.

Psychological and epidemiological literature suggests that the built environment plays both causal and therapeutic roles in schizophrenia, but what are the implications for designers? The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role the built environment plays in psycho‐environmental dynamics, in order that negative effects can be avoided and beneficial effects emphasised in architectural design.

The approach taken is a translational exploration of the dynamics between the built environment and psychotic illness, using primary research from disciplines as diverse as epidemiology, neurology and psychology.

The built environment is conceived as being both an agonist and as an antagonist for the underlying processes that present as psychosis. The built environment is implicated through several means, through the opportunities it provides. These may be physical, narrative, emotional, hedonic or personal. Some opportunities may be negative, and others positive. The built environment is also an important source of unexpected aesthetic stimulation, yet in psychotic illnesses, aesthetic sensibilities characteristically suffer from deterioration.

The findings presented are based on research that is largely translated from very different fields of enquiry. Whilst findings are cogent and logical, much of the support is correlational rather than empirical.

The WHO claims that schizophrenia destroys 24 million lives worldwide, with an exponential effect on human and financial capital. Because evidence implicates the built environment, architectural and urban designers may have a role to play in reducing the human costs wrought by the illness.

Never before has architecture been so explicitly implicated as a cause of mental illness. This paper was presented to the Symposium of Mental Health Facility Design, and is essential reading for anyone involved in designing for improved mental health.

This paper aims to interrogate the place of literature in the digital world and the way a narrative is represented in digital spaces. In the changing landscape of digital, mobile and virtual texts, the authors aimed to examine how multimodal and animated elements in digital narratives engage young readers and encourage affective and aesthetic reader response?

The study was an exploratory, interpretive qualitative research study undertaken in a classroom of 28 10-year-old boys in grade 5. The investigators analysed data recorded during a lesson where students responded to the textual conventions and literary features of a traditional story read in print and multimodal digital format. Two coding systems were used to identify students’ understanding of textual conventions along with the nature of their responses.

The results suggested that when students are prompted to attend to the impact of multimodal layering in digital literature, affective, aesthetic and critical responses, they are encouraged in their interpretations. The responses emphasised the importance of teacher scaffolding and development of meta-language in teaching literature in both print and digital form.

Because of the small sample and limited data set, the research results lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed implications further.

The paper includes implications for teacher pedagogy, while teaching reading with multimodal narratives in digital form.

This paper offers insight into the differences between print and multimodal literary texts; it codes students’ responses to multimodal texts and offers a method for analysis.