Toronto, Ontario; Vancouver, BC.
Planters East York Civic Centre. With frost coming, does the city put cabbages into its planters? I’m not a gardener, so I don’t recognize flora well. (East York Civic Centre) 20111112 1549Pantages fixture. Bentwood hanging electrical light in the Rehearsal Hall of the Pantages Hotel. While the venue name suggests entertainment, the Canon Theatre is down the street. Today’s meeting is technical briefings with the usual PowerPoint. Long room, good sound reinforcement for presenters. (Toronto) 20111115 1540Red eggs for 100-day birthday party. Traditional Chinese symbol and celebration that baby will live. Our sons had one-month haircut parties, a little longer gives new mom an opportunity to catch up more on sleep. Ten course meal followed. (Markham) 20111119 2003Vancouver Chinatown gate on Pender Street. Dusk comes early in Vancouver, on walk from west to east Pender Street. Noticed more Chinese herbalists in 2 block radius than we have in Toronto. Encountered one of East Side Cultural Crawl sites, artist live/work space on third floor of Main Street building. (Vancouver) 20111120 16:36Container cranes, Port of Vancouver. Eastward view from Seabus headed south to Vancouver. Illustrates city as a working port on the Pacific Rim. Ferry route uses Port as landmark, then turns slightly west for Waterfront Station. Rainy morning had short respite before participation continued for rest of day. (Vancouver, BC) 20111121 1054Vancouver Art Gallery, 2nd floor landing. Collection leans towards the conceptual at Vancouver Art Gallery, lots of phenomenology in contemporary and last century works. Tuesday night admission by donation, visited with DY. Photographing art is not permitted, but some building features are scenic (Vancouver, BC) 20111122 1956Stainless steel text, Burrard St. and Cordova St. Public art installation on west face of Vancouver building tower at Canada Place. Liam Gillick (2009) “Lying on top of a building the clouds / looked no near than when / I was lying on the street”. With no spaces between the words, reading the text would be better on a non-rainy day to decipher the meaning. City of Vancouver Public Art Program, presumably in cooperation with the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, where it’s installed. (Vancouver, BC) 20111124 1258
YVR, mountains to north. A clear day in Vancouver, after a week of steady rain. There was snow on the ground when I arrived. (Vancouver, BC) 20111125 1208
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 […]
Rhythm and pitch are primordial to language. Susan Rogers, after a career becoming Prince's recording engineer, turned to complete a PhD in psychology focused on music cognition and psychoacoustics.Read more ›
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 ›
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 […]
