Mentally busy month with a conference coming to town, and maintaining the regular pattern of local meetings, travel around town only by bicycle.
Toronto, Ontario
OCADU Great Hall: Figure @OCAD assembled from many materials by Sarah Juliet Nadler, part of the Frutti exhibition, Florence off-campus program. Sheet to the left either fell down due to poor adhesive, or the figure rose in the night to pull it down. (OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20181103Congee Queen: Sisters-in-law on both sides of our family on short visits through town, we voted for Sunday lunch with greater variety than dim sum. Discussions included where and who to visit on the upcoming holiday season. I over-ordered by a few dishes, so we had leftovers to take home. (Congee Queen, Sheppard Avenue East, Scarborough, Ontario) 20181104Spoke Club: Design ladder @hallahelga@honnunarmidstod with DesignTOFest promoting @IcelandNatural. Step 1 No design; Step 2 Design as a style; Step 3 Design as a process; Step 4 Design as innovation; as illustrated by @designcentret . Design March @honnunarmars cited as the biggest design festival in the work per capita. With population of 330,000, everyone in Iceland knows @bjork or her mother. (The Spoke Club, King Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20181105 Regis College: Lawren Harris (1968) Abstraction A, shows a sun-like form emitting light. This painting hangs in theological school of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) at the University of Toronto. The room is within line-of-sight of the receptionist, and most passing through the college probably have never taken a second look. (Regis College, Wellesley Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20181107 Power Plant Gallery: Vivian Suter “La Canicula” exhibition @ThePowerPlantTO of canvases created with nature. Works were moved both indoors and outdoors her home in Panajachel, Guatemala, marked by insects and weather. Visitors appreciating the installation, walking around the hangings. (Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Harbourfront, Queen Quay’s West, Toronto, Ontario) 20181108Climate Ventures: Systems thinking peer circle @csiTO, on @longnow history, @stewartbrand How Buildings Learn pacing layers. Fast gets all the attention; Slow has all the power. Also covered James March ambidextrous organization, and Pierre Bourdieu Algeria 1960. Second session, trying to meet every 3 weeks. (Climate Ventures, Centre for Social Innovation, 192 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20181112Renaissance Basecamp: Welcome by @chriskutarna to Renaissance Basecamp @Basecamp3 #rebase #basecampTO . Full day of teams working Rethinking in tables, having prepared with online discussions in weeks preceding. Most people meeting each other for the first time face-to-face. (Artscape Sandbox, Adelaide Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 2018114Books on Pattern Language: Selecting from bookshelf for #WickedProblems #SystemsApproach #PatternLanguage show-and-tell at #SystemsThinking Ontario session at #ClimateVentures @csiTO tonight. Publications cross architecture, software development, social change. https://wiki.st-on.org/2018-11-21 (Centre for Social Innovation, 192 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20181121 Bissell Building: Understanding #Tablets in Early Childhood Education @rhondamcewen@KDMI Semaphore speaker series @UofTInfoFaculty. Research based on communication theory by #NiklasLuhmann. Attentional deficits in children are already there, but tablets make it worse. Not much better than flash cards, as developers don’t encourage instructing or exploring concepts, mostly tap and drag, dumbing down rather than featuring other modes (e.g. blowing into a device). Gestures can change the way that knowledge is conceptually understood, not just on working memory, but long term memory. (Knowledge Media Design Institute and Semaphore Labs, Bissell Building, University of Toronto School of Information) 20181121Systems Thinking Ontario: Books to browse at #SystemsThinking Ontario #ClimateVentures @csiTO. Discussion on #WickedProblems, #SystemsApproach, #Pattern Language tracked through history with #HorstRittel, #CWestChurchman, #ChristopherAlexander. Focus from 1964 Notes on the Synthesis of Form through to October 2018 @PLoPCon and #PUARL #Purplsoc meetings. (Climate Ventures, Centre for Social Innovation, Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20181121Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine: Medal and trophy for Professor David Lam, recognition of “Outstanding Doctor” by the Chinese Government, including founding the oldest acupuncture school in Canada. He declined to travel to China for the ceremony, so the honours were shipped to him. I haven’t visited in 5 years, and wanted a more systemic diagnosis combined with experiences in both Chinese and western medicine. Prescribed not a single herb, but a complex combination. (Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Dupont Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20181123 Systems Thinking TO: Champagne toast for #SystemsThinkingTO second anniversary, led by @DerailleurAgile. Played Triangles game from the #SystemsThinkingPlaybook, emphasizing system behaviors and conceptual errors in (i) autonomous behavior and (ii) magnification. (Systems Thinking TO, LoyaltyOne, King Street East, Toronto, Ontario) 20181127 Unify Toronto: Panel on #UnifyToronto Land Use Summit @DrawdownProject meeting #6 of 7 sectors. @lmiresk, @AndrewJamesKnox for @transitionTO, #KevinBest, #RyanNess for @TRCA_News, #SeanThomas for @UofTForestry. Sketching by @playthink , emphasis on relevance from global study to action in Greater Toronto (Unify Toronto, Drawdown Toronto, Friends House, Lowther Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20181128
Olga Korper Gallery: Steel letterforms of #RustGarden by @DonovanSiegel are 707,349 characters from the 1945 #TwoSolitudes novel by #HughMacLellan on the perceived lack of communication between Anglophone and Francophone communities. Sign @OlgaKorper Gallery encourages walking on the artwork that fills the main space. Ephemeral art has some people spelling out words on the bench backs. (Olga Korper Gallery, Morrow Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20181130
The idea of managers being proactive only dates back to 1964, as classes of functions described by Abraham Zaleznik: homeostatic, mediative, and proactive. Predispositions may or may not be altered through educational development.
Fit the people around an organization; or an organization around the people? Working backwards, say @MitroffCrisis + #HaroldLinstone, from current concrete choices to uncertain futures, surfaces strategic assumptions in a collective decision, better than starting with an abstract scorecard to rank candidates.
Should we do, or not-do? Russell Ackoff, over many years, wrote about (negative) potential consequences: There are two possible types of decision-making mistakes, which are not equally easy to identify. (1) Errors of commission: doing something that should not have been done. (2) Errors of omission: not doing something that should have been done. For […]
The final publication of the October 2016 Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium workshop "Some Future Paths for Design Professionals: DesignX and Systemic Design" was published as “Systemic Design Agendas in Education and Design Research” in FormAkademisk, following 2 years of rewrites, reviews and revisions.
Federated wiki is deployed on a node.js server, an environment which has become available on some cPanel shared hosting providers. Here are some instructions written while restoring a wiki site originally installed in 2014-2015 on a cloud provider.
Reading The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, reminded me of a PhD course at UBC with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, before they were recognized as Nobel prize candidates.
The story of #JosephNeedham by @simonwwriter, about the scholar behind the 27-volume Science and Civilisation in China starting in 1954 and continuing after his death in 1995. Arriving in China in 1942, Needham discovered gunpowder, printing and the magnetic compass…Read more ›
Talk at @gtalug on Let’s Learn Tech Online @torontolibrary with @p2pu @CiscoNetAcad @TorontoESS. Linux Unhatched online course conducted in groups of 8 to 12, meetings twice per week in person. Non-technical facilitator encourages peers to work out understanding together. Found…Read more ›
The WordPress O2 plugin with P2-Breathe theme results in a Facebook-like or Twitter-like streaming interface. The idea was first presented in 2013, evolving from the P2 theme in 2009 (originally launched as Prologue in 2008) when hosted on wordpress.com. “Beau…Read more ›
Talk at the Centre for Human Ecology, Glasgow, announced at http://www.che.ac.uk/tim-ingold-talks-about-the-sustainability-of-everything-10th-sept-2016/ Video posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncLv9Gk7XrI and https://vimeo.com/182572764 This digest was created by editing the text transcript generated by Youtube. View the video yourself for a more authentic reproduction. Lapses, grammatical…Read more ›
Plenary presentation by Tim Ingold, at the 2nd @AIBR_ International Conference of Anthropology. The 2nd AIBR International Conference of Anthropology brings together anthropologists from different parts of the world under the theme “Identity: Bridges, Thresholds, and Barriers.” [….] [6:58] So…Read more ›
In deciphering Yin-Yang and Five Elements (Five Phases) thinking, #Kaptchuk (1983) has a footnote and then an appendix that clarifies the way forward for appreciating foundations of Chinese medicine favouring the former.
The field theory in psychology by #KurtLewin 1943 derives from classical field theory (viz. electromagnetism and gravitation), predating quantum field theory (viz. subatomic particles). For psychology, Lewin wrote in 1943 how history (and a subjective view of the future) matters. It is correct that field theory emphasizes the importance of the fact that any event […]
Many who cite #KurtLewin haven't read the original 1947/1951 writings, say @strategybuild @ToddBridgman @kgbphd with the "refreezing" part of "unfreezing → changing → refreezing" emerging in a subsequent career of an idea that can be traced genealogically and archaeologically.
Human organizations may learn from wolves, with groups of 2 to 6 taking down elk, and cooperative expert groups of 9 to 13+ taking down larger bison. #DanielMacNulty, #AimeeTallian #DanielRStahler #DouglasWSmith (2014).
Meeting effectiveness is reduced after 7 people are involved, say @BainInsights consultants #Blenko, #Mankins, #Rogers. Follow the Rule of Seven for meetings. Who should come to a meeting is always a sensitive issue, and the basic precept is often “The more the merrier.” But more is rarely better when it comes to making decisions. Our […]
