Design for AM (DfAM) requires the definition of Design Actions (DAs) to optimize AM manufacturing processes. However, AM understanding is still very blurred. Often designers are challenged by selecting the right design parameters. A method to list and collect DfAM DAs is currently missing. The paper aims at providing a framework to collect DfAM DAs according to a developed ontology to create databases (DBs). DBs were tested with two real case studies and geometric features to improve identified. Future developments aim at widening the database to provide all-around support for AM processes.

Prototyping is a vital activity in product development. For reasons of time, cost and level of definition, low fidelity representations of products are used to advance understanding and progress design. With the advent of Mixed Reality prototyping, the ways in which abstractions of different fidelities can be created have multiplied, but there is no guidance on how best to specify this abstraction. In this paper, a taxonomy of the dimensions of product fidelity is proposed so that both designers and researchers can better understand how fidelity can be managed to maximise prototype value.

This article explores avian experiences with toxic war processes that unfold across space and time. Joining together three evolving areas of interest in global politics – ontologies of war, interspecies relations, and sensory politics – the article develops a view of war that centres ongoing war processes that affect more-than-human life in and outside of international warzones. Advancing a multispecies form of inquiry attentive to local voices, including Upper Cook Inlet Tribes, the article examines how interspecies relations emerge in national security debates about long-lasting ecological costs of war. Specifically, it offers an analysis of US Department of Defense hearings surrounding the controversy over reopening Eagle River Flats – an Alaskan estuary that had been polluted with white phosphorus munitions – for weapons testing and training during the Iraq War. The article also considers the experiences of two migratory avian communities (northern pintails and tundra swans) with toxic white phosphorus pollution, illustrating more-than-human sensory perspectives on the space and time of war processes. These conceptual and empirical moves reposition national security concerns about wartime risk into a much broader post-anthropocentric perspective.

The paper focuses on two problems with Alexander Wendt's unification of physical and social ontology on the basis of quantum theory. Firstly, by endowing social phenomena with an ontological foundation in physical reality defined in quantum terms Wendt risks reducing a plurality of worlds as ‘fields of sense’, ordered by their immanent rules, to the physical world ordered by the laws of quantum theory. Secondly, by defining his quantum social science as an ontology Wendt risks excluding from consideration all that which violates ontological laws, yet may still be said to exist or take place: event, potentiality, and alterity. Although the advantages of a scientific ontology are indisputable, the price we pay for it is a sense of ontological captivity, whereby everything that is definitely is so, being and non-being rigorously distinguished and separated with nothing between them. This captivity may be escaped by supplementing quantum ontology with ethics in the Levinasian sense of ‘otherwise than being’.

This paper examines several aspects of Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science. The paper questions the nature of the task, as ontologies are debated in a scientific field once there is a widely accepted substantive theory that stands in need of interpretation, as with Newtonian physics or quantum mechanics; doing this job for international relations (IR) is highly questionable give that there is no widely accepted substantive theory of IR that needs an interpretation. Second, the paper questions Wendt's view of the consequences for ontology of quantum theory being replaced in the future; Wendt the interpretation of the history of science maintains that in the physical sciences a new theory subsumes the older theory, including its ontology. But, this seems to misread history, while the empirical content of classical physics is subsumed by relativity theory, it is far from true that the former's ontology was subsumed. The ontologies are in sharp contrast. The paper raises questions also about the notion of ‘truth’ and of the meaningfulness of evaluative concepts like ‘justice’.

Most philosophers treat ontological dependence and metaphysical dependence as distinct relations. A number of key differences between the two relations are usually cited in support of this claim: ontological dependence's unique connection to existence, differing respective connections to metaphysical necessitation, and a divergence in their formal features. Alongside reshaping some of the examples used to maintain the distinction between the two, I argue that the additional resources offered by the increased attention the notion of grounding has received in recent years potentially offer us a way to unite the two relations, promising the attendant benefits parsimony offers, as a result.

This article develops an ontological description of land use and applies it to incorporate geospatial information describing land coverage into a knowledge-graph-based Universal Digital Twin. Sources of data relating to land use in the UK have been surveyed. The Crop Map of England (CROME) is produced annually by the UK Government and was identified as a valuable source of open data. Formal ontologies to represent land use and the geospatial data arising from such surveys have been developed. The ontologies have been deployed using a high-performance graph database. A customized vocabulary was developed to extend the geospatial capabilities of the graph database to support the CROME data. The integration of the CROME data into the Universal Digital Twin is demonstrated in two use cases that show the potential of the Universal Digital Twin to share data across sectors. The first use case combines data about land use with a geospatial analysis of scenarios for energy provision. The second illustrates how the Universal Digital Twin could use the land use data to support the cross-domain analysis of flood risk. Opportunities for the extension and enrichment of the ontologies, and further development of the Universal Digital Twin are discussed.

This article looks to journalism in order to understand the relationship between memory, mind and media more fully. Using the urgency that characterises the current news environment as a reflection of broader information flows, the article considers journalism's embrace of complex time to address the demands of speed. It suggests that the temporal practices adopted by both individual journalists and the journalistic community offer a model for institutions wrestling with the ontological uncertainty generated by current times, providing mechanisms to navigate and even offset the unending demands of simultaneity, immediacy and instantaneity.

A pluriversal encounter that includes interlocutors from other ways of knowing and being requires recrafting how we commonly approach ontology in IR. Our shared ontological register only acknowledges separation as the fundamental existential assumption, and not all lifeways depart from this assumption. The article prods us to move beyond considering ontology as the study of being, a more substantialist reading, to include other fundamental existential commitments so that we can address how distinct presuppositions shape and are shaped by how we perceive and engage existence. With this reorientation, the article first establishes how even relational approaches in the discipline, including variations of constructivism, poststructuralism, and new materialism privilege separation as the primordial condition of existence to the exclusion of any other option. A conceptual toolset is then elaborated to examine how a singular commitment to separation constitutes an ontological parochialism that enforces reductionism, exclusion, and domination towards lifeways that embrace the interconnection as fundamental existential commitment. Even though more effective engagement across pluriversal worlds would be crucial for developing more complex tools for confronting the current planetary crisis, the discipline's reductionist concept of ontology itself keeps us quite far from effectively being able to engage in such an exchange.