Toronto, Ontario
Perfect Chinese Restaurant: Double set dinner of lobster, peking duck, chicken, steamed fish plus extra hotpots was too much food again. Occasion started as birthday celebration, but then moved date to include family visiting from Bay Area. Large family means that there’s always an excuse to get together. (Perfect Chinese Restaurant, Sheppard Avenue East, Scarborough, Ontario) 20170902Consensas: Systems journals for @consensas @ftjco. @ryantaylor prefers hardcopy for handwritten annotations, I’ve moved to softcopy for font sizing on tablets. Five cartons of Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Systemic Action and Practice Research some ISSS conference books and General Systems Yearbooks from 1998; plus Organization Science since 1994. Metaphorically old wine for new bottles, inside packaging courtesy of the LCBO. (Consensas, Parliament Street, Cabbagetown, Toronto, Ontario) 20170903Second City: Intermission in Sunday sketch comedy early show, free improv would be really late after second show. Family is seated house right. Second City Toronto has upstairs balcony, larger venue than Second City Chicago. (Second City Comedy Club, Mercer Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20170903Ashbridges Bay Park: Southwest view from peninsula sees moorings of yacht club, smokestack from Hearn Generating Station, and CN Tower in the distance. Portlands are landfill into the original Ashbridges Marsh, now deep enough for sailboats. (Ashbridges Bay Park, Toronto, Ontario) 20170905DCSIL UToronto: Academic workshop @CoopsCanada #platformcoop, learning together with panel on current research (DCSIL Dept. of Computer Science Innovation Lab, Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto) 20170908Appel Salon: Main day of @CoopsCanada #platformcoop conference, with presentations from both emerging and established organizations. Knowledge base is nascent on digital platforms, multi-stakeholder coops seem complicated. Typing during day and posting blogs online at night is tiring. (Bram & Bluma Appel Salon, Toronto Public Library) 20170909Beeton Hall: Intensive workshop @CoopsCanada #platformcoop, with practicalities of legal, governance and financing. Questions on “if you had to do it again, what would you do differently” from firms both Canadian and international insightful. (Beeton Hall, Toronto Public Library) 20170910Cafe Boulud: Family celebration in French restaurant, an extravagance with servers mindful of food sensitivities to butter and gluten. Pulled braised rabbit petit plats, Canadian oysters and Parisian steak tartare all a departure from our normal cuisines. (Cafe Boulud, Yorkville, Toronto, Ontario) 20170910Princess of Wales Theatre: Fan zone with security guards keeping order, yet no movie stars in sight near the main screening room of the Toronto International Film Festival. Nearby financial institutions and Metro Hall running business as usual, relatively unimpacted by the inconvenience. (Princess of Wales Theatre, King Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20170911Ikea: Vackis alarm clock at $1.99 was cheaper than the package of Knackebrod Rag rye crispbread made in Finland. DY really misses her old Braun with the luminous hands, quality analog products are now hard to find. (Ikea, Provost Drive, North York, Ontario) 20170914HoSu: From UK to Toronto @hubofallthings community with @jonathanholtby briefing @cognetfx . Update since meeting in London last December, there’s been a lot of progress. Poke and sushi! (HoSu Bistro, Yonge Street, midtown Toronto, Ontario) 20170915Onsite Gallery: Make your own @ONSITEatOCADU Raise The Flag street party, material, stencils, paint, brushes provided. Outside public grand opening of new cultural space for art, design and new media. New show with works from the Indigenous Art Collection, 2000-2015. (Onsite Gallery, OCADU, Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20170916Lambert Lounge: Systems Thinking Ontario recap discussion from ISSS and ASC meetings over the summer. Selected content as a starting point, conversation wandering according to the ideas of the attendees. (Lambert Lounge, OCADU, McCaul Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20170920Victoria College Chapel: Used book sale fills the pews, pipe organ not in use late on Saturday afternoon. Inventory seems depleted halfway through the event days, volunteers said the first day was jammed with people. Minor purchase of two paperbacks, we have cartons of our own castoffs ready for donation. (Victoria College Chapel, Charles Street West, University of Toronto, Ontario) 20170923Riverside: Rare occasion with entire family in town, so Chinese beef stew plus last minute duck and BBQ pork. Unusual congregation in front of television to watch Star Trek Discovery premiere. (Riverside neighbourhood, Toronto, Ontario) 20170924Gould Street: Unexpected installations for @timberfever @RyersonDAS design-build competition in middle of pedestrian mall. Shells of reading room with books scattered, in case passersby pause for some literary edification. (Gould Street, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario) 20170926EdiDX: Wrong theory @sdadich @EditDX is not ignoring the rules, or failing fast. It’s making all of the right choices, building consensus to find common values, and then breaking one thing. Otherwise, everything converges to look the same and is boring. www.wired.com/2014/09/wrong-theory/ (EditDX, 21 East Don Roadway, East Harbour, Toronto, Ontario) 20170929EditDX: Prosthetic @unyq Lisa Ludwig @eythorbender @EditDX personalized style, 3D printing economics brings cost within government copayment ranges. Success on legs, now focus on orthodics for scoliosis, starting from medically approved designs, iterating with aim to reduce design time from 1 hour to 5 minutes. (EditDX, 21 Don Roadway, East Harbour, Toronto, Ontario) 20170927EditDX: Innovation @ActuaCEO @EditDX with youth, build confidence with doing science; show role models in middle years; and then build skills. Need to invest in the innovation capacity of youth. Using technology is a small part of being digitally literate. (EditDX, 21 Don Roadway, East Harbour, Toronto, Ontario) 20170929EditDX: Panel @jamescowan @rsomerson @codezebra Luigi Ferrera @EditDX on The Future of Design Thinking. Designers accustomed to messy, iterative process, as opposed to business people who want to systematize to be comfortable. Artists may be even more comfortable with radical disruptive change than designers. Digest at https://ingbrief.wordpress.com/2017/09/29/20170929-1635-future-of-design-thinking-editdx/ (EditDX, 21 Don Roadway, East Harbour, Toronto, Ontario) 20170929EditDX: Waterlicht @SRoosegaarde @EditDX says design should create experiences that you can’t download. Virtual flood shows how high water could reach without human intervention. Also Van Gogh path as demo of smart highways that charge in daylight and glow in nighttime. Smog Free project starts with tower that cleans air, next will attempt smog free bicycle with Ofo bike sharing in China. (EditDX, 21 Donway Road, East Harbour, Toronto, Ontario) 20170930
Sky Dragon: Mid-autumn festival dinner on a busy a Toronto weekend. Streets blocked for Nuit Blanche and Invictus Games, delaying arrivals. (Sky Dragon, Spadina Chinatown, Toronto, Ontario) 20170930
Digging into philosophies underlying the systems sciences, pragmatism seems to have been a strong historical foundation for some research streams. In ongoing discussions, Gary Metcalf and I have been approaching pragmatism from two directions. Gary has been tracking from mid-1800s forward, listening to the audiobook The Metaphysical Club, with a history of figures living through […]
The ties between systems thinking and pragmatism are apparently strong, but the breadth in the philosophy of pragmatism can be confusing. Within the tradition, one of the threads is called nonrelativistic pragmatism, proposed by systems luminaries C. West Churchman with Russell L. Ackoff, descending from the work of philosopher Edgar A. Singer, Jr. A concise […]
A luminary in the systems movement, C. West Churchman, showed some respect for Chinese philosophy, with the I Ching (Yi Jing) in particular. Deborah Hammond was encouraged by West Churchman into joining and becoming a historian of the systems movement. In her 2003 book, Hammond wrote of her conversations with Churchman, back into his days […]
The 1969 publication of Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, edited by Fred E. Emery as a Penguin Modern Management paperback, can be regarded as a milestone. The articles date from the 1940s to the 1960s, when the first wave of systems thinking was on the rise. For the June session of Systems Thinking Ontario, we stepped […]
Within the Systems Thinking Ontario community, we were fortunate to have Nenad Rava step up to explain how the Sustainable Development Goals came to be, and relate them to systems change. This May session of Systems Thinking Ontario was a quick follow-on for the March edition on Ecological Limits to Development: Living with the SDGs. […]
The book Ecological Limits to Development: Living with the Sustainable Development Goals, published in 2002 by Routledge, was released as open access in 2023 by Taylor-Francis for readers who don’t have access to a university library. For the March edition of Systems Thinking Ontario, we were honoured to celebrate the release with editor-coauthors Kaitlin Kish […]
Following the first day lecture on Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1 for the Global University for Sustainability, Keekok Lee continued on a second day on some topics: * Anatomy as structure; physiology as function (and process); * Process ontology, and thing ontology; * Qi ju as qi-in-concentrating mode, and qi san as qi-in-dissipsating mode; and […]
The philosophy of science underlying Classical Chinese Medicine, in this lecture by Keekok Lee, provides insights into ways in which systems change may be approached, in a process ontology in contrast to the thing ontology underlying Western BioMedicine. Read more ›
In conversation, @zeynep with @ezraklein reveal authentic #SystemsThinking in (i) appreciating that “science” is constructed by human collectives, (ii) the west orients towards individual outcomes rather than population levels; and (iii) there’s an over-emphasis on problems of the moment, and…Read more ›
In the question-answer period after the lecture, #TimIngold proposes art as a discipline of inquiry, rather than ethnography. This refers to his thinking On Human Correspondence. — begin paste — [75m26s question] I am curious to know what art, or…Read more ›
How might our society show value for the long term, over the short term? Could we think about taxation over time, asks @carlotaprzperez in an interview: 92% for 1 day; 80% within 1 month; 50%-60% tax for 1 year; zero tax for 10 years.Read more ›
For the @ArchFoundation, #TimIngold distinguishes outcome-oriented making from process-oriented growing, revisiting #MartinHeidegger “Building Dwelling Thinking”. Organisms are made; artefacts grow. The distinction seems obvious, until you stop to ask what assumptions it contains, about the inside and outside of things…Read more ›
The selection of readings in the “Introduction” to Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2, Penguin (1981), edited by Fred E. Emery, reflects a turn from 1969 when a general systems theory was more fully entertained, towards an urgency towards changes in the world that were present in 1981. Systems thinking was again emphasized in contrast […]
In reviewing the original introduction for Systems Thinking: Selected Readings in the 1969 Penguin paperback, there’s a few threads that I only recognize, many years later. The tables of contents (disambiguating various editions) were previously listed as 1969, 1981 Emery, System Thinking: Selected Readings. — begin paste — Introduction In the selection of papers for this […]
In a recording of the debate between Michael Quinn Patton and Michael C. Jackson on “Systems Concepts in Evaluation”, Patton referenced four concepts published in the “Principles for effective use of systems thinking in evaluation” (2018) by the Systems in Evaluation Topical Interest Group (SETIG) of the American Evaluation Society. The four concepts are: (i) […]
How might the quality of an action research initiative be evaluated? — begin paste — We have linked our five validity criteria (outcome, process, democratic, catalytic, and dialogic) to the goals of action research. Most traditions of action research agree on the following goals: (a) the generation of new knowledge, (b) the achievement of action-oriented […]
After 90 minutes on phone and online chat with WesternUnion, the existence of the canton of Ticino in Switzerland is denied, so I can’t send money from Canada. TicinoTurismo should be unhappy. The IT developers at Western Union should be dissatisfied that customer support agents aren’t sending them legitimate bug reports I initially tried the […]
