Toronto (out of an ankle cast, started physiotherapy)
Martin Centre: Doctor said ankle can come out of cast, although extra caution would prescribe 2 more weeks. Now in street shoes, no bouncing, physiotherapist is deferred for 2 weeks in case hard pressure is applied. DY and I stopped by Chinatown for shopping, with me on crutches, lower leg has turned numb. Wearing court shoes in the house instead of sandals, feeling my way after the injury 9 weeks ago. Not even a new ultrasound since Dec. 27. (Martin Family Centre, St. Michael’s Hospital, Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20180301 UToronto Art Centre: Figures of Sleep exhibition @MueckRon (2002-2002) “Untitled (old woman in bed)” on loan from National Gallery of Canada. Hyperrealistic sculpture slightly smaller than real life, spotlit in a dark room. Show closes tomorrow. Standing on two legs after yesterday coming out of the two-month cast, both the injured and uninjured limbs are out of shape. (University of Toronto Art Centre, King’s College Circle, Toronto) 20180302 Toronto Light Fest: Illuminated long house may not be official art installation, but the shell of a patio on Gristmill Lane. Next to last night of Toronto Light Festival a destination for some walking exercise with crutches. Near-freezing temperatures, but no snow, lots of photographers out. (Gristmill Lane, Distillery District, Toronto, Ontario) 20180303 East York Town Centre: Mall walking on crutches, should soon graduate to cane. Enclosed shopping centre in Thorncliffe Park is central to Pakistani and Afghan community. Bulletin board in supermarket has homemakers offering special cooked breakfast on weekends, presumably too much work for fully employed weekday employees. (East York Town Centre, Overlea Boulevard, East York, Ontario) 20180305OCADU Grad Studies: Lecturing @OCADU_SFI with @redesign and Jeremy Bowes, on “Architecting for Wicked Messes” for “Understanding Systems and Systemic Design” class. Full-time cohort opted for a more loosely structured studio room, students spread out at tables and chairs. (OCADU Graduate Studies, 205 Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20180307 St. Michael’s Hospital: Statue at the official address at the east entrance on Bond Street, the conventional entrance is at the south on Queen Street, or emergency off Victoria Street. Quiet halls with administrative offices lead to elevators to busy floors. (St. Michael’s Hospital, Bond Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20180308Onsite Gallery: Wool hand-tufted textile @ONSITEatOCADU@alexkeha (2015) “Stele” (which is defined as “the central core of the stem and root of a vascular plant”). Part of The Sunshine Eaters exhibition, artists and designers looking at land, plants, flowers and trees. (Onsite Gallery, OCAD University, Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20180309 Sumac Creek Health Centre: Portrait in @BennyBing series @TheDanielsCorp Regent Park Rotating Gallery for March, on the walls by doctors’ offices and treatment rooms. In regular office hours, are only the sick, injured, and medical professionals privileged to view the collection? Appreciating art as therapy in addition to other healing services. (Sumac Creek Health Centre, Regent Park Boulevard, Toronto, Ontario) 20130312 Athlete’s Care, The Beach: First visit to physiotherapist for Achilles tendon recovery. Scheduled appointments twice per week for the month until we get on the plane for Shanghai. Flexibility of right ankle is at 25% of left ankle. Initial exercises assigned to stretch for mobility, strength will be the next priority. Went shopping, bought foam roller stick. (Athlete’s Care, The Beach, Queen Street East, Toronto, Ontario) 20180313OCADU: 69th meeting of @StronglySustain with web conferencing, featuring update on Flourishing Enterprise Innovation Toollkit Project. Watched experience report video from a First Explorer. Participants included both some from the founding, through to some coming new to the work. Had post-meeting discussion on activities in parallel communities. (OCADU, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20180313Yorkville: Looking southeast, Cumberland Terrace low plaza on Bay Street built in 1974 contrasts to the new One Bloor skyscraper at Yonge Street, the current tallest building in Toronto (since the CN Tower labelled a freestanding structure, not a building). The Manulife Centre on Bloor Street is also vintage 1974. We don’t visit this upscale neighbourhood often, yet it’s biking distance from home. Some personal business led us to check into some other shops. (Bay Street at Cumberland Street, Yorkville, Toronto, Ontario) 20180315Riverside district: Mastered homemade vegan black bean soup in Instant Pot. Day 3 on dietary portfolio prescribed by Dr. David Jenkins at UToronto and St. Michael’s Hospital, inventor of the glycemic index. Had negotiated with researchers for a menu without psyllium or plant sterol margarine, then spent 2 days reading journal articles to determine grams of viscous fibre, soy protein and pulses for consumption. Clinical trial published 2015 shows Portfolio Diet reduces LDL cholesterol, but adherence is only 48% compared to DASH diet with non-significant improvement but has 105% adherence. (Riverside District, Toronto, Ontario) 20180318 UToronto iSchool: Talk by @GeoffreyCBowker “How the West was Won by Data”. Full room for lecture by prominent academic, as part of a quick visit serving as external examiner in a Ph.D. defense, Long day for a professor coming from Pacific Time into Eastern Time. Digest at https://ingbrief.wordpress.com/2018/03/19/2018-03-19-1610-geoffrey-bowker-how-the-west-was-won-by-data-utoronto-ischool/ . (UToronto iSchool, Bissell Building, St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20180319SystemsThinkingTO: Earlier selfie with @wjbellows reconnected @jp2connect to me, social tie through the Ackoff S3 program. Agenda for SystemsThinkingTO meeting was an open conversation with Bill Cooper to W. Edwards Deming, and the blend of ideas from multiple sources. (LoyaltyOne offices, King Street East, Toronto, Ontario) 20170322Snow Lion Meditation Shop: Selected buckwheat hull pillow to replace one that predates my current spouse. This shop offers smaller ones to be used as meditation cushions, we chose the largest for our bed. We may continue to look for just hulls, 5 lbs. should fill the old pillowcase. (Snow Lion Mediation Shop, Pape Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20180328
St. Michael’s Hospital: Signed up for MyChart personal record app at Patient Registration on Donnelly wing south, after seeing new brochure. Appointment with orthopedic surgeon about Achilles tendon confirmed healing, the additional mobility and strength is left to the physiotherapist. (St. Michael’s Hospital, Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20180329
Two years after submitting an academic manuscript and responding to double-blind reviews, “Rethinking work, with the pandemic disruption” has now been published in the International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior (IJOTB) as earlycite. The article has a DOI (Document Object Identifier), and should be streamed with an official volume and issue number soon. The […]
The 128th meeting of Systems Thinking Ontario was convened in person. The classroom was filled with current students, alumni, our regular participants, and a few curious newcomers. Moderated by Zaid Khan, the conversation was sparked by Stephen Davies and myself (David Ing) on the evolving styles in learning systems thinking. Stephen has been leading SFIN-6011 […]
The “Understanding Systems” SFIN-6011 course is a requirement in the master’s program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCADU. For winter 2025, the class is now led by Stephen Davies, breaking the incremental evolving of content since 2008. While still on faculty at OCADU, the original course designer Peter H. Jones is now a Distinguished […]
In the 1970s, five ways of knowing were established by C. West Churchman in The Design of Inquiring Systtems. In the 1990s, his student Ian Mitroff carried on the tradition and extended that work in The Unbounded Mind. Now in the 2020s, the technology of Generative AI opens up opportunties to query or request responses […]
For readers with an interest deeper than the 15-minute presentation given in August, the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Socio-Technical Perspectives in Information Systems (STPIS 2024) have now been formally publishied. The invited paper on “Reifying Socio-Technical and Socio-Ecological Perspectives for Systems Changes: From rearranging objects to repacing rhythms” was reviewed by the […]
The 125th meeting of Systems Thinking Ontario coincided with the closing day for the RSD13-RSDX online program. As a regular systems convening group, we’ve had monthly meetings since January 2013. Zaid Khan moderated a discussion including me (David Ing), Tim Lloyd, Allenna Leonard, and Kelly Okamura. We recollected starting as a spinoff from Design with […]
David L. Hawk (American management theorist, architect, and systems scientist) has been hosting a weekly television show broadcast on Bold Brave Tv from the New York area on Wednesdays 6pm ET, remotely from his home in Iowa. Live, callers can join…Read more ›
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 ›
In 2024, WordPress Studio was released, making installation on a local computer simpler. The instructions were modified from MacOS to Ubuntu Linux, by Daniel Kossmann, “How to install WordPress Studio in Ubuntu Linux” | Jun 15, 2024 at https://www.danielkossmann.com/how-to-install-wordpress-studio-ubuntu-linux/ I already had NVM installed, but in Terminal, with the result “command not found”. In the […]
The appreciation of change is different in Western philosophy than in classical Chinese philosophy. JeeLoo Lin published a concise contrast on differences. Let me parse the Introduction to the journal article, that is so clearly written. The Chinese theory of time is built into a language that is tenseless. The Yijing (Book of Changes) there […]
In trying to place the World Hypotheses work of Stephen C. Pepper (with multiple root metaphors), Nicholas Rescher provides a helpful positioning. — begin paste — Philosophical perspectivism maintains that substantive philosophical positions can be maintained only from a “perspective” of some sort. But what sort? Clearly different sorts of perspectives can be conceived of, […]
Finding proper words to express system(s) change(s) can be a challenge. One alternative could be diachrony. The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions for diachronic, the first one most generally related to time. (The second is linguistic method) diachronic ADJECTIVE Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “diachronic (adj.), sense 1,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3691792233. For completeness, prochronic relates “to […]
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 […]
