London, Ontario; Toronto, Ontario; Mountain View, California; San Jose, California; Oakland, California; Alameda, California; Vancouver, British Columbia; Boston, Massachusetts
London, Ontario; Toronto, Ontario; Mountain View, California; San Jose, California; Oakland, California; Alameda, California; Vancouver, British Columbia; Boston, Massachusetts
Restaurant solarium: Pendant lights above booths, in Greek restaurant for lunch. Comfortable, casual space on a grey, rainy day. Music from the 1970s sets mood for baby boomers. On the way home from Michigan, venue chosen serendipitously. (Four Seasons Restaurant, London, Ontario) 20151201Armenian lunch: Zataar, beef manakeesh, kishek with sujuk, moutabbal, tabbouleh, then a half order of mixed BBQ platter. Extraordinary flavour when the food arrived hot to the table, declining as it cooled in the approaching winter. Celebration of DY’s birthday deferred to weekend when family could be together. (Paramount Fine Foods, Yonge Street, Toronto) 20151206Terminal 1 Christmas: December not yet cold, so holiday cue is a reminder of family times to come at end of month. Departing on flight to California, so thoughts of snowflakes even farther away. (Toronto Pearson Airport Terminal 1, U.S. gates, Toronto, Ontario) 20151208The Milk Pail Market: Grocery shopping at an institution with a history of local produce back into the 1970s. Found Comice pears, plus many other fruits and vegetables to stock up nephew’s refrigerator. They’re known for their cheese selection, which isn’t an attraction for me. (The Milk Pail Market, Mountain View, CA) 20151208Santa Teresa County Park: Facing east, the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton is far away in the distance. Walked out from IBM Almaden towards summit, along road where cars are blocked from water reservoirs and power transformer stations. (Santa Teresa County Park, San Jose, CA) 20151209Julian Street Inn: Designed by Christopher Alexander in 1988 in the style of a country inn, a shelter for the homeless demonstrates the practical side of a Berkeley professors known as an architectural theorist. Down the street from San Jose Arena (now SAP Center) that was completed in 1993. (Julian Street Inn, San Jose, California) 20151209Deepening systems knowledge: Lunch with Ian Mitroff @MitroffCrisis discussing complexity vs. complicatedness, and ways of teaching systems thinking to students. Ian had a copy of “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph Tainter on his shelf, and said that he would read it on my recommendation. (Oakland, CA) 20151210San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art: With Jack Park @gardenfelder, viewing Jim Campbell (2011) “Exploded View (details)” of 1152 LEDs hanging by wire, electronics showing low resolution images from various perspectives in a 360-degree walkaround. Artist had former career as a Silicon Valley engineer, now designs pieces where lights are programmed and often constructed in three dimensions. (San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, California) 20151111East Ocean Restaurant: In line for Sunday dim sum, sampling Chinese restaurants for future nuptial festivities. In California East Bay, have to drive across multiple cities to reach authentic banquet scale venues. (East Coast Seafood Restaurant, Alameda, California) 20151213Cows near the summit: IBM leases some of its land to cattle ranchers near Santa Teresa County Park. Early morning arrival for meetings had greeting of mooing, just across from the parking lot. (IBM Almaden, San Jose, California) 20151215Accelerated Discovery Lab: Former library space has been repurposed so that researchers and industry practitioners can collaborate in a central, open space. Workshop on Mycroft Cognitive Mediator moved out of windowless meeting room for an hour, in a change on scenery. Presentation includes Labbook prototype currently under research. (IBM Almaden, San Jose, California) 20151215Rainy Vancouver waypoint: Direct SanFran-Toronto flight cancelled, so earlier flight via Vancouver makes up some time. Luggage missing, should eventually be delivered to house. Domestic security inspected zhong rice dumpling wrapped in banana leaves, recognised by ethnic Chinese screener. (Vancouver International Airport, British Columbia) 20151217Queen Street Viaduct: Dusk on Christmas Eve, biking westward to see how much the city is shutting down for the holidays. Unusually warm for December, prospects for snow anytime soon seem far away. (Queen Street Viaduct, Riverside, Toronto, Ontario) 20151224Serano Bakery: Family-run Greek neighbourhood bakery, for crusty whole wheat bread and taramasalata. An exercise destination, biking uphill in below-freezing weather, past two artisanal bakeries who offer products at twice the price. Large store with sweets for dessert. Will sample with family at dinner tonight, and judge whether we’ll become repeat customers. (Serano Bakery, East York, Ontario) 20151228MIT Sloan School of Management: In 1982, I was #2 on a list of 1 for a PhD program in Management Information Systems at the MIT Sloan School, applying with a Masters degree from Northwestern U. with high recommendations. Went to UCLA PhD program, dropped out first day, then to U. British Columbia for 2 years before dropping out. Really need to finish this PhD at Aalto U. in 2016, as have been around graduate schools for so long. The MIT decision going another way would have been a completely different life. (Siteman Dining Room, MIT Building E-62, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 20151231
Institute of Contemporary Art Boston: Tara Donovan (2003) “Untitled (Pins)” is a precise cube of size 17 straight pins. Behind, right, is Philip Taaffe (1983) “Untitled III”, a linoprint collage on muslin on canvas. On left is Shannon Ebber (2011) “XIS” archival pigment prints. Exhibits on 4th floor of gallery, quick stop of Silver Line bus from downtown to airport. (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston) 20151231
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 […]
