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The Assembly Systems Unit at the Royal Institute of Technology and IVF Stockholm has developed several Flexible Automatic Assembly (FAA) cell solutions over the years (Mark I, Mark II, Mark IIF and Mark III). The industrial reality, however, clearly points out that the basic notions of flexibility must be extended and be enhanced without increasing the complexity. This has led our research team to revise the ideas and solutions available for manual and automatic assembly, resulting in the Hyper Flexible Automatic Assembly (HFAA) project. The paper describes the driving factors behind the needs and objectives for the HFAA project, as well as how it will present a standardised set of assembly process‐oriented system components. The paper also describes the new Mark IV application. This industrial HFAA system is being developed in order to test the concept’s industrial viability. The HFAA concept will allow the user to start from a manual assembly station and gradually add assembly equipment. The basic concepts of stepwise automation, standard assembly machine and sub‐batch principle emanate from our previous research.

The key environmental issue of the 1980s has been that of the depletion of the stratospheric ozone. The key environmental issue to be addressed in the 1990s will be that of global warming. These head the list of worldwide ecological problems that arise directly from the activities of man. Each industrial sector has an urgent responsibility to increase awareness of such problems within both management and production and to seek to alleviate its impact upon the environment through development of modified or alternative manufacturing technologies. The electronics assembly sector had the opportunity to consider its future in a more environmentally conscious world at the first conference on Electronics Manufacturing and the Environment. This two‐day event was held at the Bournemouth International Centre. It was organised by Vertical Marketing of Wimborne and sponsored by The Department of Trade and Industry, Du Pont, ICI and Multicore Solders, who must take credit for a well organised and splendidly presented conference. The theme of the conference was one particular implication of environmental awareness, namely the elimination of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as a goal of the electronics manufacturing industry. The conference was aimed at addressing ways in which companies can eliminate the use of CFCs, taking into account the moral and financial implications involved as well as the stringent restrictions in CFC production that are about to be imposed.

The purpose of the paper is to examine how a number of key themes are introduced in the Master's programme in Engineering for Sustainable Development, at Cambridge University, through student‐centred activities. These themes include dealing with complexity, uncertainty, change, other disciplines, people, environmental limits, whole life costs, and trade‐offs.

The range of exercises and assignments designed to encourage students to test their own assumptions and abilities to develop competencies in these areas are analysed by mapping the key themes onto the formal activities which all students undertake throughout the core MPhil programme. The paper reviews the range of these activities that are designed to help support the formal delivery of the taught programme. These include residential field courses, role plays, change challenges, games, systems thinking, multi criteria decision making, awareness of literature from other disciplines and consultancy projects. An axial coding approach to the analysis of routine feedback questionnaires drawn from recent years has been used to identify how a student's own awareness develops. Also results of two surveys are presented which test the students' perceptions about whether or not the course is providing learning environments to develop awareness and skills in these areas.

Students generally perform well against these tasks with a significant feature being the mutual support they give to each other in their learning. The paper concludes that for students from an engineering background it is an holistic approach to delivering a new way of thinking through a combination of lectures, class activities, assignments, interactions between class members, and access to material elsewhere in the University that enables participants to develop their skills in each of the key themes.

The paper provides a reflection on different pedagogical approaches to exploring key sustainable themes and reports students' own perceptions of the value of these kinds of activities. Experiences are shared of running a range of diverse learning activities within a professional practice Master's programme.

As the municipal year ends this month, the public librarian will lightly (or otherwise) turn to thoughts of annual reports. Year by year the problem before him is to justify his ways to men, by producing a document which in the first place is attractive and in the second, third, and as many other places as possible, is true, logical, readable. It is no easy task, especially for those who are new to the experiment or who have made it for so many years that ideas do not come freely ; for, after all, the annual report is a question of ideas. If our minds are of pedestrian, unoriginal—or perhaps infertile is a better word, as originality is as rare as a new planet— type, we shall copy one of the received models, and will be well advised to do so. That is to say, we shall give a brief narrative of what we think are the outstanding events of the year with suitable acknowledgments to committee and staff, and add such statistical tables as will prove the position. These last are always to be summarised in the form prescribed by the Library Association ; the omission of such summary is inexcusable in the modern librarian.

The purpose of this paper is to study how experts on teaching sustainability in engineering education contextualize sustainability; also to evaluate the understanding of sustainability by engineering students. The final aim is to evaluate what pedagogy experts believe provides better opportunities for learning about sustainability in engineering education.

The authors used conceptual maps (cmaps) analysis with two taxonomies of four and ten categories. The first taxonomy clusters the significance of sustainability in environmental, technological, social and institutional aspects and shows the main trends; the second (of ten categories) divides the previous categories into greater detail. To evaluate the experts' cmaps two indices were defined that provide information about what experts think sustainability is most related to and evaluate how complex they see the sustainability concept. In total, 500 students from five European engineering universities were then surveyed and the results compared with those of the experts. Finally, interviews were held with experts to try to determine the best pedagogy to apply to achieve learning around sustainability.

The results show that Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) experts consider that institutional and social aspects are more relevant to sustainability than environmental and technological ones. The results were compared with the understanding of sustainability by a sample of more than 500 engineering students who had taken courses on sustainability at five technical universities in Europe. This comparison shows a mismatch among the EESD “experts'” and the students' understanding of sustainability, which suggest that sustainability courses in engineering degrees should emphasise the social and institutional aspects versus environmental and technological ones. Moreover, courses should emphasize more the complexity of sustainability.

The paper emphasizes the lack of priority that social and institutional aspects are given in sustainability courses and promotes a discussion about how these two elements and complex thinking can increase their importance in the engineering curriculum.

The purpose of this project is to test and, if necessary, refine a model of the public sphere known as the circulation of power model. The model faces several criticisms and was applied in a case study only once. It has not yet been applied to an American context.

This study uses the circulation of power model as a framework in a historical case study of a regional public library system in the United States. The temporal boundaries of the case are from 1924 to 2016.

This study resulted in a new and modified model called the tessellation model. New concepts in the tessellation model include circuits, tessellations, formal decisions and decision cycles. New distinctions in the model include narrowcast/broadcast and coalesced public/diffuse public.

The tessellation model and its associated concepts offer a new way to describe and analyze deliberative systems over time. The model requires further testing in other contexts.

The tessellation model is a new and validated way to describe the public sphere in an American political context.