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The purpose of this paper is to invite Dr. Grant J. Rich, a positive psychologist influenced by humanistic and existential psychology, to tell his story and to share his research in the field including his insight on mental health and peace.

A positive autoethnographic case study approach is used to enable Dr. Rich to narrate his story while also addressing topics within a Q and A format.

Dr. Rich narrates how his life and work has been enriched by intercultural, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Mental health and peace can be closely related, and Rich narrates a range of ways he honed his peacemaking skills which he views as requiring a kind and gentle approach, but also courage.

This case study narrates the experiences, perspectives and insight of one person, and these cannot be generalized.

As Dr. Rich states, “the world aches for peace now”. Peace psychology can enable us to understand how to induce inner and inter-relational peace, and reduce conflict and violence, for better mental health. This involves a practitioner/activist approach, albeit the authors have much to explore and investigate as to how best to do this.

Social needs and outcomes are fundamental to advancing peace psychology’s insights. A focus on multi-disciplinary collaborations, including with educators, social psychologists and sociologists, and the public is recommended.

Dr. Rich is a psychologist with a positive psychology orientation who has called for more qualitative and mixed-methods research in positive psychology. Here, he shares with us multiple insights and his research including in the areas of mental health and peace.

Properly allocating an organization's activities within a building is vital to reducing the relational complexity arising from process–environment interactions. Multiple relationships are mapped, and certain interferences are only identified after these have been processed. The method/software employed for this task is Mapping Activity Environment Allocation (MAEA). However, data input and interpretation of results depend on the usability conditions of the organization's agents. This paper presents MAEA's usability test results.

Test sessions and interviews were carried out with seven agents registered at a University Hospital. Participants were instructed to think aloud during its use, and immediately afterward, responded to semi-structured interviews. Test sessions were audio recorded and screen captured.

Participants found the software easy to use and pointed out valuable implications for professional and academic use. In addition to relationship, priority and parallelism data, customized visualizations were created, including organizational charts, flowcharts and activity flow routes on the floor plan.

MAEA's simplicity allows non-designers to conduct evidence-based assessments and decisions. It allows designers to test their proposals during the programming and outline proposal stages.

A more detailed definition of design requirements from the beginning increases the conditions to successfully achieve project goals.

The ability to map the allocation of activity-spaces in the pre-design phase of building architecture allows for early identification of interactions, aiding in the development of more robust project requirements during programming.