Toronto, Ontario
TUJazz: Multipad @Larnell_Lewis@TUJazzFest masterclass, making music with 12 triggers rolling each through 4 banks of samples in suspended chords. Previewing concert later in the evening, where most of new album will be played. Session started with some drumming, then counting to 3 while clapping to 4, followed by questions and answers in the philosophy of learning to become a musician. (Toronto Undergraduate Jazz Festival, Mel Lastman Square, North York, Ontario) 20180908TUJazz: Main stage @TUJazzFest@marilou.buron from Montreal. Bandleader calling out solos from the keyboard. Ensemble relaxed, filled out program to finish with the blues. (Toronto Undergraduate Jazz Festival, Mel Lastman Square, North York, Ontario) 20180908TUJazz: Professionals @TUJazzFest@Larnell_Lewis said @TaraKannangara would perform unrehearsed. Beside @robnchrisca in a smooth performance. Busy musicians lining up gig schedules. Years are flying by, as Don Grolnick’s “Nothing Personal” (1987) by Michael Brecker has become a jazz standard. (Toronto Undergraduate Jazz Festival, Mel Lastman Square, North York, Ontario) 20180908Richmond Station: Chef’s table facing an open kitchen with a New Canadian repertoire. Custom tasting menu, accommodating a smattering of non-dairy, gluten-free and vegan dietary restrictions, each dish coming as a surprise based on the chef’s judgment. The start of a leisurely 3-hour family celebration of RDI’s 25th birthday. (Richmond Station, Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20180910Richmond Station: Fifth course into the custom tasting menu, rare beef tenderloin as another surprise dish. Our server asked if we were getting full, and we asked for bags for leftovers. About 2.5 hours into the 3-hour family celebration of RDI’s 25th birthday. (Richmond Station, Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20180910CSI 215: Housecooling party @csiTO@tonyasurman reminiscing over 14 years in this venue, vacating occupants to move 459 feet across the street to the purchased and renovated property at 192 next week. Asked members to bring the spirit of this place to the new building. Broke her train of thought abruptly, noticing the newborn cradled by father, foreseeing a next generation of social innovator. (Centre for Social Innovation, Robertson Building, 215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20180914Roncesvalles: Crowds @PolishFestival steady with families. Walked slowly northbound from Queen Street to Bloor Street, passing multiple music stages, church book sales, restaurant kiosks. Pierogi and sausages abound, with Toronto multicultural cuisines well represented at other stations. Long bike ride cross town, called for rest before riding back. (Roncesvalles Avenue at Wright Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20180915 Lane S College E Euclid: Late afternoon #LightUptheLaneways @lanewayproject@StART_Toronto unveiling of murals on garage doors by local street artists. Painters started in morning, some still in progress on larger surfaces. Discovered this laneway doesn’t yet have a distinctive name, an opportunity for the motivated. (Lane South College East Euclid (south of College Street, between Euclid Street northbound and Palmerston Street southbound) Little Italy, Toronto, Ontario) 20180916 The Ossington: Interview @mervatim by @emilymkeeler relates history of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers leading to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, for the launch of The Personality Brokers book. Entertaining stories from English professor author and audience on misuse of projective personality techniques by managers. My teachings express human beings as more multidimensional, and I prefer the Keirsey temperament sorter more strongly aligned with Carl Jung. (The Ossington, Ossington Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20180917St. Michael’s Eye Clinic: Ophthalmological surgeon @StMikesHospital with model of eye, explaining posterior capsule opacification that was causing haziness in the left eye, following surgery for a trauma-induced cataract repaired in 2006. Performed YAG laser capsulotomy to open up an aperture through epithelial cells proliferating towards the visual axis. Procedure was painless, with a minor sensation of hearing clicking inside my head, when the laser was on. Preparation took a few years, working through prescription eye drop variants that would eventually reduce eye pressure. (St. Michael’s Hospital Eye Clinic, Queen Street East, Toronto, Ontario) 20180918 Systems Thinking Ontario: Debriefing by @AllennaLeonard@redesign@zaid___khan on @ISSSMeeting@asc_cybernetics conferences this summer. Impressions on the content of the meetings, plus extra context filled in for those who don’t know the organizations. Trial balloons in discussion, as we all tried to make sense of #systemsthinking. (Systems Thinking Ontario, Lambert Lounge, OCADU, McCaul Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20180919 Onsite Gallery: Measuring and Being @pete5000 lecture, visiting from London while @ONSITEatOCADU had programmed Diagrams of Power exhibition. Quantified Self now records statistics digitally, the data assemblage can reinforce a belief system, or be a critical visualization of unexamined ways of thinking. Historically, this goes back to industrialization, when clocks also changed perceptions of time. This talk may evolve on the way to publication as a book chapter. (Onsite Gallery, OCADU, Richmond Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20180920Victoria College: En route to @VicCollege_UofT booksale, noticed Northrup Frye bench statue by Darren Byers and Fred Harrison installed in 2012. Browsing through non-fiction selections, discovered but declined to buy three cybernetics books obscure for even university libraries, by researchers I know. Saw an inscription inside one book, that may have revealed the original donor. (Victoria College, University of Toronto, Queen’s Park Crescent, Toronto) 20180921Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto: Hiba Abdallah + Justin Langlois (2018) “Failing is a matter of perspective” dartboard idea doesn’t quite ring for preschooler. Opening data for new arts institution in a 55,000 square foot former industrial space, attracting large crowds. (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sterling Road, Lower Junction, Toronto, Ontario) 20180922Dentonia Park: Before sunset People & Trees @SarvenazRayati still setting up installation @artsinparksTO. Figures of bamboo sticks and paper mache are undoubtedly more impressive lit up in the dark, but then the trees would be harder to see. (Dentonia Park, Crescent Town, Toronto, Ontario) 20180924 CSI 192: First salad day @csiTO, second official day in new building after the move across the street. Acknowledgement of traditional lands, plus back stories from DECAs. Conversation tables set up with suggested discussion starters on the theme of home. Contributed homemade daikon carrot pickle resulting from spouse having bought too many root vegetables. I’m not Vietnamese, but can follow a simple recipe. (Centre for Social innovation, 192 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20180925 Regis College: Agenda @RegisCollege film series, led by Monty Williams, S.J., departs from previous sessions. Spiritual conversation isn’t discussion about the movie, it’s about the ways each individual is touched by the work, and then observing the responses from others in a small group. The 2016 documentary of “Fire at Sea” tells a story of villagers in Lampedusa, the southernmost island of Sicily, closest landfall for migrants crossing the sea from Tunisia. (Regis College, Wellesley Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20180926Toronto City Hall: Pre-dusk @nuitblancheTO, @ibrahim_mahama drapes jute sacks over the roof edges of building facing @npstoronto, drawing attention to complex trade networks of a global economy and invisible labour. I’ve previously seen Coal Sacks by this artist @saatchi_gallery in London, so both the materials and the observers move. (Toronto City Hall, Nathan Phillips Square, Queen Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20180929
St. Charles Clock Tower: Firehall #3 tower built in 1872 has heritage designation, in progress of restoration integrated with the new Halo Residences. Steel reinforcements are visible inside the front doorway, and the base is surrounded by yellow beams, probably related to a relocation slightly north. Venue was famous as a tavern from the 1950s into the 1970s, with the rise of the gay movement. (488 Yonge Street at Grosvenor Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20180930
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 […]
