Conferences at the University of Oslo and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design allowed a day to visit the Norwegian Folk Museum and the Astrup Fearnley Museum.
The building houses its own Art and Computer Science collection, which comes with a catalog. Here’s Trigger, a 2011 work by Vibeke Jensen where the eyeball follows people moving about.
The primary reason that I was in Oslo was for the Relating Systems Thinking and Design 3 meeting, over a the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. In the courtyard at AHO, an new installation was just being put into place.
The Astrup Fearnley Museum, in the temporary wing, has The Rock, a 2014 work by Tori Wranes, hanging near the entrance.
From the second floor walkway, the movement and sound of The Rock was more apparent.
Walking back through Aker Brygge is a famous “man on stilts” sculpture. It took a bit of searching to determine that the sculptor was Marit Wiklund, who created “Utferstrang” — which translates as “Wanderlust” in 1989.
Oslo is a relatively compact city that can be viewed in a few days. It’s been nice to travel with friends to see the sights.
A 24-hour stopover in Suzhou allowed enough time to visit Jinji Lake and Pingjiang Road, but rainy weather deterred us from visiting the classical gardens.
On our 26-day journey, we only scheduled 24 hours in Suzhou. The city is on the main train line between Beijing to Shanghai — actually only an hour east of Shanghai. We arrived at Suzhou North Railway Station, and had a long taxi ride to our hotel west of the Jinghang Canal. Thus gave us an experience of suburban Suzhou, with Yushan Lu station nearby the shopping mall.
With Jinji Lake a destination sight, we rode the not-very-busy subway at rush hour through the city centre to the east side at Dongfang Zhimen (Gate of the Orient) station. The building outside that subway stop looked to be a concert hall with no performances that day.
Jinji (Golden Rooster) Lake is manmade. Knowing that, the concrete shore is less surprising.
After dinner, we walked along the shore in the dark. Vendors featured lit-up toys.
Looking westward, the higher buildings in central Suzhou were prominent.
Four days of family vacation in Bejing included the China Ethnic Culture Park, the Ming Tombs, Great Wall at Badaling, Forbidden City, Xidan, and the 798 Art Zone.
In the ultimate family trip, we started a 26-day journey of China and Vietnam in Beijing. By the end of the trip, we would have 8 people in the group. On our first stop in Beijing, five of us flew together.
We picked a hotel near the Olympics site. We knew the location was by the Beitucheng metro station in north central Beijing, but hadn’t appreciated that there would be a pond just east.
The pond east of the hotel is on the west side of the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park. Headed out for sightseeing on our first morning in Beijing, we thought that we might spend an hour or two in the culture park, and then move on. Once inside, we rediscovered the park was much larger than anticipated. The existence of the park focused on ethnicity is itself a surprise, as the vast majority of the country is populated by Han Chinese. The south end includes reproductions of buildings in the Uyghur style, as would be found in the Xinjiang northwestern region of China.
On the east side of the Ethnic Park was a large bridge depicting the She (Hakka) region in southwest China.
From the Gelo house, we could look at stream depicting the Maonan ethnic minority, both from the southern China.
The Co-Create 2013 conference was the motive for travelling to Finland in the summer. I spent more time in Hameenlinna than Espoo.
In contrast to my winter visits to Finland, the timing of Co-Create 2013 conference meant an opportunity to visit in the summer. Minna and Petri now live in Hameenlinna, which is cottage country 100 km north of Helsinki. As a way of beating jet lag, Minna suggested that we bicycle along the paths north by the lake (Vanajavesi).
In town, the Finnish sense of humour shows up at the HAMK University of Applied Sciences with a milk pier, for which the design is patented. It’s outside the dairy. Students produce products which the local neighbours enjoy.
Petri and Minna have a big back yard. The weekend was warm enough for brunch under the gazebo, but not warm enough for shorts.
One tourist attraction open on Sundays is the glass outlet in the town of Iitala.
London was on the way home after the meeting in Hull, so we scheduled three days for some family touring.
Routing back from the ISSS 2011 meeting in Hull, Diana, Adam, Thuy and I stopped over for a few days in London. From King’s Cross, we rode the underground to go to the hotel in Earl’s Court. I might have checked the map more closely, as the West Kensington or West Brompton stations would have have been closer. Our luggage is on wheels, but we had a long walk.
Our sightseeing started around Pimlico, where we unexpectedly found a summer show of graduate works at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. The installation by Minji Lee was one of the more intriguing.
We budgeted a few hours to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum. The venue is mammoth, so we tried to be selective, wending our ways through the mazes of hall.
My fifth visit to Japan included not only a tour of familiar sights, but also a day trip to Enoshima, Kamakura and Yokohama.
Since Tokyo is so many time zones from home, I arrive a few days and go sightseeing to beat jet lag. On my fifth visit to Japan, I was the first of our meeting to arrive, with the group gradually gaining mass. I checked into the usual hotel, in an high rise tower overlooking the tracks by Tamachi station.
On a mission from DY, my first destination was Harajuku. I went looking for crafting supplies at the Daiso (100 yen) store.
The products aren’t made in Japan, but the variety is wider than in other branches internationally.
A few blocks further east, the Design Festa Gallery changes its installations rapidly, with emerging artists showing their work for nominal costs.
The variety of work includes paintings, photographs and sculpture by mostly Japanese artists.
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 […]
