December saw lots of events with family and friends, for birthdays as well as holidays
Toronto, Ontario; Markham, Ontario; Richmond Hill, Ontario
Gourmet Malaysia Restaurant: Family lunch starting with vegan versions of roti canal, mock chicken, mock shrimp, spring rolls, and mango salad. Beef rendang ordered on special request. First in a series of December events, it’s a busy month not only for holidays, but for birthdays. (Gourmet Malaysia Restaurant, Sheppard Avenue East, Scarborough, Ontario) 20241207Industrial Arts, Steelcase Art Projects: Hanging by the west window and a partially demolished wall, Deanne Gene (2024) Self-Inventory might be described as a shield, or a nest with portholes. Following the Face/Waste multi-artist exhibition, the artwork is made of garbage, including a lot of plastic bags, invasive plants, and kitchen discards. Large space in the northern suburbs, the family arrived with the first snowfall outside. (Industrial Arts, Steelcase Art Projects, Steelcase Road East, Markham, Ontario) 20241207St. Michaels Hospital: Walked in for x-ray of left knee, images taken with pant legs rolled up in standing position, and lying down horizontally for skyline view. Pain that started a few days ago is subsiding, but family practice is thorough in trying to determine cause at appointment next week. Excellent health care system in Ontario! (St. Michael’s Hospital, Queen Sttreet East, Toronto, Ontario) 20241209St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica: A quiet oasis in the middle of the city, occupied by only maybe 5 worshippers late on a Monday afternoon in December. Completed and blessed in 1848, the current state of the church shows how buildings well-maintained can endure. Just down the street from the St. Michael’s College School, and the hospital. (St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica, Bond Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20241209Centre for Social Innovation Spadina: Accommodating a request for vegan hot chocolate drink with crumbled candy canes, on top of whipped coconut cream. Dinner included delicious Afghan aush soup noodles with beans, we couldn’t figure out the mystery spices from looking up recipes online. CSI Holiday Party at Spadina location, after years going to Annex, got to meet some new people and missed some regulars. (Centre for Social Innovation, Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20241212Koffler Arts: Community group Sketch Working Arts (2022) Hear Us is a graffitied phone booth ironically without a phone. Originally was part of Reconstructions of Home public art exhibition shown on The Bentway in spring 2022. Temporarily part of the Another Decade show celebrating artists who have called the Youngplace hub a working home. (Koffler Arts, Youngplace, Shaw Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20241213Koffler Arts: In foreground, Flavio Bell (2024) Spherox is a transparent tower box full of colourful hollow balls of many diameters. In the background, dia assembly by non-speaking autistic artist Adam Wolfond with critical disabilities researcher Estee Klar. Pieces showing in the Another Decade exhibition at the Youngplace community hub. (Koffler Arts, Youngplace, Shaw Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20241213California Sandwiches: Afternoon walking tour from Little Portugal led into Little Italy, to sample original Toronto veal sandwich in kaiser bun, with eggplant sandwich for me. He said it was larger than a cake that he might have had to celebrate his birthday. Continued over to Cafe Diplomatico, a neighbourhood restaurant where it’s still possible to order just a cup of Americano. (California Sandwiches, Claremont Street, Toronto) 20241213
Tranzac Club: Relaxed gig with #ColletteSavard lead vocal without instruments, as broken arm not full recovered. #KevinBarrett lead guitar, #RebeccaCampbell guitar, #MeganWorthy keyboards, #JohnSwitzer bass. #MartinWorthy drums. Easy groove on Copper Moon, with space for guitar solo. Southern Cross space is barely larger than a livingroom, friendly audience would seem to include a lot or regulars. (Tranzac Club, Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20241214
Denison Centre: Mid-morning extended family intercept meeting to accommodate conflicting lunch schedules. Hard to keep track of cousins’ kids growing up. Chose seating outside Chinese bakery in suburban mall as on the path to destinations. (Denison Centre, Denison Street, Markham, Ontario) 20241214
Perfect Chinese Restaurant: Simultaneous pull of party crackers at extended family lunch, with table for the youngers, and table for the elders. Wide variety of Chinese dishes to meet the spending minimum for private room, so many leftovers sent home afterwards. Karaoke bridging from boomers to Gen Z requires selective musical choices. (Perfect Chinese Restaurant, Sheppard Avenue East, Scarborough, Ontario) 20241214
Perfect Chinese Restaurant: Extended family group shot, in pause after long series of Chinese courses, before dessert soup was served. Karaoke subsequently ensued, in the private room. A rare opportunity to gather cousins a little farther out of town for a relaxed Sunday afternoon. (Perfect Chinese Restaurant, Sheppard Avenue East, Scarborough, Ontario) 20241214Riverside neighbourhood: Following the family tradition of stuffed stockings on Christmas Eve, we do have a fireplace that contains a television, not logs. Untraditional holiday dinner of pizza, avocado salad, and mango coconut tapioca pudding. For my birthday, I requested not gifts of more things, but instead decluttering a house for fewer things. (Riverside neighbourhood, Toronto, Ontario) 20241224Dragon Pearl York Mills: Christmas Day lunch buffet, after an hour of sampling selections. Served as sherpa for my father making choices, roast beef and bacon aren’t normally served in his retirement home with Chinese residents. Subsequent food coma for most, with some having to look forward to dinner with families on a separate lineage. (Dragon Pearl Buffet, York Mills Road, Don Mills, Ontario) 20241225
Jefferson Richmond Hill: Deep fog on suburban street just south of Oak Ridges Morraine. Extra caution required on the drive 40km north of downtown Toronto. Saturday lunch with cousins, including out-of-town family members. (Jefferson Richmond Hill, Ontario) 20241228<
Jefferson Richmond Hill: Lunch gathering cousins from across the city, and from down south. Original plan for Afghan food thwarted, Pakistani alternative had everyone reaching for yogurt to tame the spice. Short breaks for toddler taking nap, and practising potty training. (Jefferson Richmond Hill, Ontario) 20241228
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 […]
