Toronto, Ontario; Richmond Hill, Ontario; Don Mills, Ontario; San Francisco, California; Oakland, California; Berkeley, California; San Jose, California; Mountain View, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Los Gatos, California
David Crombie Park: Two hours before @nuitblancheTO starts, still preparing for public art installation at many locations across the city. Set up and teardown for outdoor venues are easier in daylight, with most visitors attracted in the darkness of night. (Nuit Blanche Toronto, David Crombie Park, The Esplanade, Toronto, Ontario) 20161001
Kevin Cooley 2016 Fallen Water – Niagara Escarpment:
Video installation @BrookfieldPLTO @nuitblancheTO Kevin Cooley 2016 “Fallen Water – Niagara Escarpment” closing tonight. Biking around downtown at dusk, an hour before official start of the event after night falls. (Allen Lambert Galleria, Brookfield Place, Financial District, Toronto, Ontario) 20161001
2 St. Clair Avenue West: View northward on Yonge Street from shows trees of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and the towers along Eglinton Avenue and beyond. Before 1973, the subway only ran to Eglinton Avenue, called North Toronto, and Rosedale up to St. Clair Avenue was the affluent residential area. This intersection isn’t the destination that it used to be. (2. St. Clair Avenue West, Deer Park, Toronto, Ontario) 20161005Darling Building: Fireside @TorontoJS with @mhartington @devgirlFL @macdonst @tazsingh hosted by @cfndrs has large screen version of flames. Answered questions on Ionic and Phonegap/Cordova, much of the audience was new to mobile development. Session started with attendees rearranging the room from computer working spaces to a seats facing the stage. (Ci. Strategy+Design, Darling Building, 96 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20161005Premiere Banquet Centre: Not a banquet, instead reservation of dinner for 12 in the extended family calling for a larger table. West coast visitors and rest of family were uptown, so opportunity for a leisurely dinner to catch up on news. Our children have moved away, so we’re bridging information across ties. (Premier Banquet Centre, Leslie Street, Richmond Hill, Ontario) 20161009UToronto iSchool: Exploring polydisciplinary interests @ischool_TO @prof_lyons @duffwm @snousala, @daviding, with @jpovaska behind the lens. Lots of coincidental threads that could be tied together from Toronto to Shanghai and Europe. (University of Toronto Faculty of Information, St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20161012OCADU RSD5: Workshop @RSDSymposium @OCAD U Toronto led by @snousala on Design X and Systemic Design precedes Emerging Practices meeting at Tongji U Shanghai by only a day, can’t be in two places at one time. Organic approach to discussing led to five groups with different perspectives on the future of design. Further digesting into findings is taking more time offline. (Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium, OCAD U, Toronto, Ontario) 20161013
Riverside laneway: Commute to @RSDSymposium for @snousala @jpovaska from east side has been 25 minutes west over Don River bridge early in day, then back with headlights in the dark later. Warm and sunny weather on first and last day makes seeing the city near sidewalk scale enjoyable. The terrain had been mostly flat. (Laneway between Booth Avenue and Logan Avenue, south of Queen Street East, Riverside neighbourhood. Toronto, Ontario) 20161015Osaka Restaurant: All you can eat sushi, closing out 4 days of conference, universities and incubator visits. Flights tomorrow morning. will probably fall asleep en route. An exceptionally busy month of intensive collaboration. (Osaka Restaurant, Don Mills, Ontario) 20161015SFIA BART Station: Morning arrival at SFO, unexpectedly rainy. Beating traffic through San Fran and over bridges via easy public transportation. Will have experience of Bay Area north for the next few days. (San Francisco International Airport BART station, California) 20161016Italian Colors: Relaxed dinner at initiation of a new joint writing project. Deep thinking needs unpacking time to contemplate ideas approached from multiple angles. Arrived on early flight from east to west, were should be sharper after a good night’s rest. (Italian Colors, Montclair Village, Oakland. California) 20161016Oakland Hills: Dinner including 2 babies and 1 toddler, adults served lactose-free, dairy-free and vegetarian diets. Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc, dessert of gluten-free cheesecake, vegan chocolate cake and limoncello reflects California variety and quality of food. Network of researchers, but little talk of day jobs, more about visiting and living in the Bay Area. (Oakland Hills, California) 20161017Campanile Tower: Campus tour by an alumnus who attended Berkeley when tuition was token. View over campus to the southeast. (Campanile Sather Tower, U.C. Berkeley, California) 20161018NextEV: Leisure + recreation area on second floor, to give a break from Silicon Valley thinking. Tour of new offices, ribbon cutting was last week. Academics coming up the curve on technologies to be released over next few years. (NextEV. N. First Street, San Jose, California) 20161020Rengstorff: Gratitude to nephew for providing temporary home for researchers, and venue for dinner with local family and friend. Menu included poached fish because farmed Canadian salmon because cheaper than at home, and yam noodles with fresh oyster mushrooms and woods ears. Evening scheduled a little early, full day meeting tomorrow. (Rengstorff, Mountain View, California) 20161020Santa Teresa County Park: Afternoon walk to clear minds from conversation on cognitive systems and service systems. Singing chairs art installation past small gate on trail outside IBM Research Almaden building. Mary Edson, Gary Metcalf, Stuart Kauffman, Susu Nousala, Stephen Kwan, David Ing, Jim Spohrer. (Santa Teresa County Park, San Jose, California) 20161021Fremont Street: Doing cultural anthropology in Las Vegas on a Saturday night. First registered for World of Watson conference, then Viet dinner, fire-breathing praying mantis at Downtown Container Park, and joined the crowds watching zipliners overhead and street performers on the ground. With many people dressed for partying, sometimes hard to separate visitors from vendors. (Fremont Street, Las Vegas, Nevada) 20161022St. Mark’s Square: Dinner on the plaza next to the stage with musical trio that appeared three times in the course of a leisurely meal. Escaped from conference at Four Seasons, when concentration lost after 9.5 hours of sessions. Walked from The Linq to The Wynn Resort, noting the signature scents at each property. (Mercato Della Pescheria, St. Mark’s Square, Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada) 20161023McCarran Airport Concourse D: Unusually rainy day in Las Vegas, lightning had been striking ground at a distance. Morning flight delayed into afternoon. Continuing hop back to the Bay Area, will still change beds a few more times before going home. (McCarran Airport, Concourse D, Las Vegas, Nevada) 20161024Doppio Zero Pizzeria: After strolling Castro Street, decided on a non-Asian dinner. Three thin crust Neapolitan style pizzas plus an order of spaghetti, spinach salad and fries with truffle oil meant both eating too much and still taking leftovers home. Opportunity for newsy conversation, although hard surfaces make for a noisy restaurant. (Doppio Zero Pizzeria, Castro Street, Mountain View, California) 20161024Accelerated Discovery Lab: Discussing @rarar @snousala trajectories of design and research, appreciating generational evolution as interactive technologies have risen. Puzzle includes design at user interface level, and in enterprise systems. (Accelerated Discovery Lab, IBM Almaden Research Centre, San Jose, California) 20161025IBM Almaden Research Center: Service science @snousala @cher95112 evolving with rise of data science. How do communities of practice in design relate to innovation? (IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California) 20161025Los Gatos: Outlining @The_ISSIP perspective @yassimoghaddam @snousala beyond technology platforms and business model platforms, service ecosystems connected through APIs. Finding some common themes with other conversations today. (Los Gatos, California) 20161025Barrows Hall: Talk @SocSciMatrix Tove Frymker visiting from Lund U. at CCRM Center for Catastrophic Risk Management. On “From collective improvisation to collective problem solving”. Existing definitions are unclear, taken for granted. At beginning of field research, looking for feedback. (CCRM, Social Science Matrix, University of California Berkeley) 20161026Faculty Club: Lunch elevated to salad bar at Faculty Club, as appointment with niece intersected with follow-up from morning meeting. It’s okay to have meals there, just don’t sit at the Nobel Laureate table. Enough time to catch up on news before she had to go to class. (Faculty Club, University of California Berkeley) 20161026School of Information: Drop-in @snoussala on @rjglushko in office, the day before he’s leaving for Hawaii. Shirt to match the mood. Last time we met in person was at the dawn of service science. (School of Information, South Hall, University of California Berkeley) 20161026Hotel Kabuki: Corner suite with balcony wrapped around, view north into Japantown. West of city centre, walking distance to conference at USF over weekend. Dropped off colleague at SFO airport after 17 days of traveling together, she does it with carry-on luggage. Hotel is on Japan Plaza. (Hotel Kabuki, Post Road, Japantown, San Francisco, California) 20161028USF McLaren Center: Opening #puarl2016 @hajoneis Seth Wachter @pbaumgartner theme of The Regenerative City. Multiple sessions on pattern language, more emphasis on urban planning and architecture this year than Purplsoc 2015. (McLaren Conference Centre, University of San Francisco, California) 20161028USF Cowell Hall: : Presented paper at #puarl2016 conference in one of four parallel tracks. Audience ranged from newcomers to the body of work, through to a coauthor with Christopher Alexander of the original 1971 A Pattern Language book. About 100 attendees at this conference. USF is still lively on a Saturday with singing and music competing in the main room through a thin room partition wall. (Cowell Hall, University of San Francisco, California) 20161029USF Kalmanovitz Hall: Context on Max Jacobson #puarl2016 paper on @EdRobertsCampus, saying architect recognised experts are the vision-impaired and wheelchair users of the facility. no pattern language for them. More important than beauty is the collective space welcoming interaction between parties in the facility. Jacobson was a coauthor with Christopher Alexander of 1977 A Pattern Language, then practicising architect with Murray Silverstein for 35 years. Had been teaching at USF as adjunct for past few years. (Kalmanovitz Hall, University of San Francisco, California) 20161030USF Kalmanovitz Hall: Pattern language on federated wiki @michaelwmehaffy #puarl2016, not frozen in text inside book. Search hits for pattern language in architecture is one-tenth that in software development. Proposes extending the 1977 A Pattern Language content online in the living form originally described in the work itself. Mehaffy dissertation including real-time updating of charts with federated wiki was defended at TU Delft in November 2015. (Kalmanovitz Hall, University of San Francisco, California) 20161030Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Tom Sachs (2007) Apollo LEM as part of YBCA Space Program Europa exhibition. A short distraction late on Sunday afternoon, before walk and dinner in Chinatown. Tomorrow making the jump back into Eastern Time at home. (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mission Street, Dan Francisco, California) 20161030SFO Gate G98: Rigo 23 (1999) “Thinking of Balmy Alley” is a 378×240 inch ceramic type mosaic hanging in the atrium on the wall above the doors to Gate G98. The artist, residing in San Fran, was inspired by a mural (since destroyed) painted in 1993 by the artist and local youth in Balmy Alley, located in San Francisco’s Mission District. This work is lit by daylight through a window to its right. It is part of the collection of the SFO Museum, if travellers will take a moment to look up from their destination-oriented travel. (Gate G98, San Francisco International Airport, California) 20161031
The idea of managers being proactive only dates back to 1964, as classes of functions described by Abraham Zaleznik: homeostatic, mediative, and proactive. Predispositions may or may not be altered through educational development.
Fit the people around an organization; or an organization around the people? Working backwards, say @MitroffCrisis + #HaroldLinstone, from current concrete choices to uncertain futures, surfaces strategic assumptions in a collective decision, better than starting with an abstract scorecard to rank candidates.
Should we do, or not-do? Russell Ackoff, over many years, wrote about (negative) potential consequences: There are two possible types of decision-making mistakes, which are not equally easy to identify. (1) Errors of commission: doing something that should not have been done. (2) Errors of omission: not doing something that should have been done. For […]
The final publication of the October 2016 Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium workshop "Some Future Paths for Design Professionals: DesignX and Systemic Design" was published as “Systemic Design Agendas in Education and Design Research” in FormAkademisk, following 2 years of rewrites, reviews and revisions.
Federated wiki is deployed on a node.js server, an environment which has become available on some cPanel shared hosting providers. Here are some instructions written while restoring a wiki site originally installed in 2014-2015 on a cloud provider.
Reading The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, reminded me of a PhD course at UBC with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, before they were recognized as Nobel prize candidates.
Before judging democratic systems over authoritarian, examine the functioning of governments through its diplomats, where plutocracy has an alternative in meritocracy, says @mahbubani_k @longnow @asiasocietysfx. [1:19:30] … when people compare the American government with the Chinese government, they say: “This…Read more ›
The story of #JosephNeedham by @simonwwriter, about the scholar behind the 27-volume Science and Civilisation in China starting in 1954 and continuing after his death in 1995. Arriving in China in 1942, Needham discovered gunpowder, printing and the magnetic compass…Read more ›
Talk at @gtalug on Let’s Learn Tech Online @torontolibrary with @p2pu @CiscoNetAcad @TorontoESS. Linux Unhatched online course conducted in groups of 8 to 12, meetings twice per week in person. Non-technical facilitator encourages peers to work out understanding together. Found…Read more ›
The WordPress O2 plugin with P2-Breathe theme results in a Facebook-like or Twitter-like streaming interface. The idea was first presented in 2013, evolving from the P2 theme in 2009 (originally launched as Prologue in 2008) when hosted on wordpress.com. “Beau…Read more ›
Talk at the Centre for Human Ecology, Glasgow, announced at http://www.che.ac.uk/tim-ingold-talks-about-the-sustainability-of-everything-10th-sept-2016/ Video posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncLv9Gk7XrI and https://vimeo.com/182572764 This digest was created by editing the text transcript generated by Youtube. View the video yourself for a more authentic reproduction. Lapses, grammatical…Read more ›
In deciphering Yin-Yang and Five Elements (Five Phases) thinking, #Kaptchuk (1983) has a footnote and then an appendix that clarifies the way forward for appreciating foundations of Chinese medicine favouring the former.
The field theory in psychology by #KurtLewin 1943 derives from classical field theory (viz. electromagnetism and gravitation), predating quantum field theory (viz. subatomic particles). For psychology, Lewin wrote in 1943 how history (and a subjective view of the future) matters. It is correct that field theory emphasizes the importance of the fact that any event […]
Many who cite #KurtLewin haven't read the original 1947/1951 writings, say @strategybuild @ToddBridgman @kgbphd with the "refreezing" part of "unfreezing → changing → refreezing" emerging in a subsequent career of an idea that can be traced genealogically and archaeologically.
Human organizations may learn from wolves, with groups of 2 to 6 taking down elk, and cooperative expert groups of 9 to 13+ taking down larger bison. #DanielMacNulty, #AimeeTallian #DanielRStahler #DouglasWSmith (2014).
Meeting effectiveness is reduced after 7 people are involved, say @BainInsights consultants #Blenko, #Mankins, #Rogers. Follow the Rule of Seven for meetings. Who should come to a meeting is always a sensitive issue, and the basic precept is often “The more the merrier.” But more is rarely better when it comes to making decisions. Our […]
