Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopment disorder that affects an individual’s social skills, communication skills and repetitive behaviours. Due to these factors, an autism learning environment has to be purposely-built to cater for the sensory needs of these learners. In special education practice, animal-assisted intervention has become popular over recent years to this end. This study aims to analyse the practice of animal-assisted intervention in an autism learning environment with the aid of a sustainable system called an integrated farming system. The study is conducted using mixed methods, involving content analysis of the technical information and detailed drawings of an integrated farming system, as well as an online survey about the implementation of the intervention in autism classrooms via such a system. Our findings show that the technical drawings for implementing an integrated farming system in the built environment represent an architectural intervention. The online survey also shows positive feedback from experts in autism services. The study concludes that animal-assisted autism learning is a promising future model for special education. It also suggests that an integrated farming system is a potential nature-based livestock farming solution to include animals in a farm-based autism educational setting. This could serve as a reference and basis for future architects or researchers to extend the research or implement animal-assisted interventions in real practices.

The conventional floor slab has few drawbacks of giving little structural support and posing a large amount of self-weight to a building. Therefore, bubble deck slab system is introduced to tackle these limitations. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the bubble deck slab system on its design and performance. A systematic literature review was conducted in this paper based on the selected journal and articles through the database search engine. The findings will better understand the feasibility of the bubble deck slab system and its potential as a viable replacement for the conventional floor slabs.

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The use of concrete has always been an important construction material used throughout the construction industry in the world. The objective of this study is to explore the potential of using lightweight concrete block mixing with plastic waste and additional plastic material as a sustainable construction material for constructing the demising wall in the current construction industry. The research is conducted quantitatively through experiments to test the density and strength of the materials. A series of experiments are conducted based on two types of plastics which are Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) as replacement of coarse aggregate and Polypropylene (PP) fibres which corresponds to the percentage of cement mass added into the concrete mix and each with a different percentage to observe the variations throughout a series of tests. The findings show that concrete mixing with 0.5 % of Polypropylene (PP) fibres showed outstanding results in the compressive strength compared to the control specimen and PET specimen. However, if comparing the amount of recycled waste incorporated into the same size of lightweight concrete block, the PET has a higher recycling rate which is 27 times the amount of PP fibres. From the findings, the research will contribute to a wider range of sustainable building materials choices for the designer or architect in the project.

Seawater is deemed as renewable energy and supplemental water source in coastal development. Utilizing seawater resources in air conditioning and plumbing system involves implementation of innovative technology such as seawater air conditioning (SWAC), seawater heat pump (SWHP), landscape irrigation system, potable water and greywater recycling. The research aims to demonstrate seawater usage as water efficiency option to reduce energy consumption, save freshwater and environment. The research had adopted systematic literature review (SLR) method to analyze the application of seawater building air conditioning and plumbing system on current publications and papers, and conclude with summary of benefits and challenges.