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.
For those who haven’t read the 1965 Emery and Trist article, its seems as though my colleague Doug McDavid was foresighted enough to blog a summary in 2016! His words have always welcomed here, as Doug was a cofounder of this web site. At the time of writing, the target audience for this piece was […]
In the famous 1965 Emery and Trist article, the terms “causal texture” and “contextual environment” haven’t been entirely clear to me. With specific meanings in the systems thinking literature, looking up definitions in the dictionary generally isn’t helpful. Diving into the history of the uses of the words provides some insight. 1. Causal texture 2. […]
Towards appreciating “action learning”, the history of open systems thinking and pioneering work in organization science, the influence of Action Learning Group — in the Faculty of Environment Studies founded in 1968 at York University (Toronto) — deserves to be resurfaced. 1. Trist in Canada 2. Environmental studies, and contextualism in organizational-change 3. Action learning, […]
The news that Doug McDavid — my friend, colleague, and one of the original cofounders of the Coevolving Innovations web site in 2006 — had passed, first came through mutual IBM contacts. More details subsequently showed up on LinkedIn from Mike McClintock. Doug left us on May 9, while working at his desk, likely in […]
One of the challenges with the development of pattern languages is the cross-appropriation of approaches of techniques from one domain (i.e. built physical environments) into others (e.g. software development, social change). The distinction between pattern language and form language is made by Nikos Salingaros. Design in architecture and urbanism is guided by two distinct complementary […]
The 1995 article by Spinosa, Flores & Dreyfus on “Disclosing New Worlds” was assigned reading preceding the fourth of four lectures for the Systemic Design course in the Master’s program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University. In previous years, this topic was a detail practically undiscussed, as digging into social theory and the phenomenology […]
In web conference, #HermanDaly says #EcologicalEconomics used to get attacked from the right, now it's from the left. Panel @revkin @jon_d_erickson @ktkish @sophiesanniti #TimCrowshaw #KatieHorner livestreamed #sustainwhat .Read more ›
Complementing the idea of a @longnow , @nfergus provokes the challenge of a #shortthen as the online social media platforms distract the larger perspectives on history.Read more ›
Social ecology and environmental psychology described @dstokols @Social_Ecology , interviewed by @katiepatrick . References #WilliamsJames on attention. Book on Social Ecology in the Digital Age released in 2018.Read more ›
Concerns on #personaldata should be reframed as interpersonal, says @sheldrake , less the nodes and more the edge connections. “I want to take back control” superficial, @hartzog says control doesn’t scale. Agency is about negotiation in the world, more rhizomatic…Read more ›
Doing science should be wayfinding (pathfinding), says #TimIngold , gaining grounding in the art of paying attention, towards research as the pursuit of truth. Truth is more than objective facts, where science and art are embraced with materials, so that we can see the quality inside the natural world as it forms, rather than as […]
We should be more vigourous, says @MazzucatoM , in debating differences between value extraction and value creation, and between profits and rents. Lecture at Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford U., January 2019Read more ›
Proponents of #SystemsThinking often espouse holism to counter over-emphasis on reductionism. Reading some definitions from an encyclopedia positions one in the context of the other (François 2004).
Saying “it doesn’t matter” or “it matters” is a common expression in everyday English. For scholarly work, I want to “keep using that word“, while ensuring it means what I want it to mean. The Oxford English Dictionary (third edition, March 2001) has three entries for “matter”. The first two entries for a noun. The […]
It's been challenging to find sources that specifically define two-word phrases -- i.e. "systemic change", "systematic change", "systems change" -- as opposed to loosely inferring reductively from one-word definitions in recombination. MartinReynolds @OpenUniversity clarifies uses of the phrases, with a critical eye into motives for choosing a specific label, as well as associated risks and […]
The term "environmental" can be mixed up with "ecological", when the meanings are different. We can look at the encyclopedia definitions (François 2004), and then compare the two in terms of applied science (i.e. engineering with (#TimothyFHAllen @MarioGiampietro and #AmandaMLittle, 2003).
While many outside of the field of architecture like the #ChristopherAlexander #PatternLanguage approach, it's not so well accepted by his peers. A summary of criticisms by #MichaelJDawes and #MichaelJOstwald @UNSWBuiltEnv is helpful in appreciating when the use of pattern language might be appropriate or not appropriate.
Systems thinking should include not only thinking about the system, but also its environment. Using the term "field" as the system of interest plus its influences leaves a lot of the world uncovered. From the multiple definitions in the International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics , there is variety of ways of understanding "field".
