Books

Designing for the 21st Century - Interdisciplinary Questions and Insights
Professor Tom Inns
Gower Ashgate

Customers, users and stakeholders are no longer passive recipients of design. Expectations are higher and increased participation is often essential. This book explores these issues through the work of 21 research teams.

Over a twelve-month period each of these groups held a series of workshops and events to examine different facets of future design activity as part of the UK's Research Council supported Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative.

Led by the School of Design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design the five-year research programme is supporting the work of more than 40 research projects across the UK.

Each of the 21 contributions from the first phase of the programme, describes the context of enquiry, the journey taken by the research team and key insights generated through discourse.

Plans are now being put into place for a second book, to be published in 2009, based on the 20 research projects associated with Phase 2 of the Initiative.

Professor Inns is Director of the AHRC & EPSRC funded Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative.

The West and Islam: Religion and Political Thought in World History
Professor Antony Black
Oxford University Press

This comparative history of political thought examines what the Western and Islamic approaches to politics had in common and where they diverged. Byzantium is also compared.

The book considers how various ancient and medieval thought-patterns did or did not lead to modern developments; and how sacred monarchy, the legitimacy of the state and the role of the people were looked upon in each culture.

It focuses on the period from the rise of Islam to the European Reformation, but account is taken of all genres of political thought up to the present.

Up to the mid-eleventh century, Europe, Islam and the Byzantine world had more in common than is often thought. What made the West different was the papal revolution of the late eleventh century, Europe's twelfth-century `renaissance', and the gradual secularization of political thought which followed while Islam, after an early blossoming, interpreted its own revelation more and more narrowly.

Professor Black retired from the Department of Politics in 2000. He has written numerous books and papers on political theory and is working on a comparative world history of ancient political thought due for publication next year.

Bacterial Physiology and Metabolism
Cambridge University Press
Byung Hong Kim and Geoffrey Michael Gadd

Prokaryotic microorganisms include bacteria and archaea and, although small and relatively simple in structure, exhibit incredible metabolic diversity meaning they can live almost anywhere.

This advanced text book offers an overview of the key cellular processes that determine bacterial roles in the environment, biotechnology and human health.

Written by two leading microbiologists the book provides a thorough survey of the incredible metabolic diversity that occurs in prokaryotes under different conditions and in different environments, emphasizing the key biochemical mechanisms involved.

This text is relevant to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as being of use to teachers and researchers in microbiology, molecular biology, biotechnology, biochemistry and related disciplines.

Professor Geoff Gadd is Head of the Division of Molecular and Environmental Microbiology within the College of Life Sciences. He is an authority on microbial interactions with metals, minerals and radionuclides and their applications in environmental biotechnology.

Professor Byung Hong Kim is an expert on anaerobic metabolism, organic degradation and bioelectrochemistry based at the Korean Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul.