Toronto, Ontario; Salt Lake City, Utah; Minneapolis St. Paul, Minnesota.
Talk on “Elements of a networked urbanism”, Peter Greenfield, speaking at OCAD Toronto. Presentation at a college of design started with 1999 history on (web) user experience and ubiquitous computing, eras through which I was active mid-career in the information technology industry. Looking forward, I don’t require convincing (Toronto, Wednesday) 20101110 1800Rainy day in old Toronto neighbourhood, too wet for children, only users are a man with two dogs. Parkette north of King Street at deadend of Sackville Street (Toronto, Sunday) 20101114 1615Salt Lake Art Center view of lower gallery showing “Go West”, an exhibition of 20 contemporary artists. Opportunity for a minor diversion, when planned ahead. It is just across the street from the hotel where I am staying (Salt Lake City) 20101117 1720
Long wall of paintings by employees and youths at the Minneapolis St. Paul Airport, as part of The National Arts Program. An outlet for personal creativity, adding destination features to a long corridor between gates. I saw the hanging wires installed 3 days ago on the outbound leg (Friday, MSP) 20101119 1415
While most people visiting Australia would probably stay in Sydney and take the ferry across the harbour to the north shore, we were already staying in a suburb on the north side. From the North Ryde station, we rode the CityRail to Chatswood, tranferring at St. Leonards for the 143 bus to Manly. This put us near the Manly wharf, where we saw children playing on the rock sculpture on the plaza.
Walking away from the ferry wharf, the pedestrian promenade to the beach is called The Corso. On a Sunday morning in a Sydney winter, the benches were empty.
The children’s playground had a few climbing on the equipment.
Fountains emerging from the sidewalk would be more popular if more children were around.
After a short stroll, we arrived at Manly Beach, which faces northeast into the Tasman Sea.
Our sons, feeling the effects of jet lag, were happy to sit on the step and look out to the sea.
On the Saturday, we had arranged for a meeting around lunchtime in The Rocks. We had enough time in the morning to start one CityRail station south of our destination, and walk northeast. Near the Wynyard station, we encountered the Australian Aboriginal Art Gallery down a flight of stairs on George Street.
There was a broad selection of didgeridoos, which our sons didn’t recognize.
The shopkeeper accommodated us with a demonstration.
The pots and paintings were interesting, but not the style likely for our livingroom.
Taking a print back on plane might have been manageable, if we wanted to carry a packing tube.
Coming out of the basement storefront, we walked back into the brilliant sunlight.
Wynyard Park was shaded by trees and surrounded by high rise towers.
Excursion to Hvitträsk, the home/studio of architect Eliel Saarinen, and childhood home of Eero, who grew up around his father’s work. Kirsti and Jari pointed out the traditional Finnish touches in the home, interesting of the light of the father creating in a more traditional style while the son developed the modernism. The exhibits showed a number of unrealized plans, which makes we wonder about the relationship between architects and clients in years before I was born. After touring the house, we walked down to the lake, where Kirsti was searching for Finnish chanterelles. (Kirkkonummi, Finland) 20101003 1230Montreal waterfront along the St. Lawrence River, viewed from the Ile Sainte Helene. Sightseeing detour, telling our sons about their grandfather bringing us to Expo 67 when we were children (Montreal, Saturday) 2010100 1830Chinese herb ingredients for decoctions for three days to battle excess heat due to travel fatigue. Recognized ginger root, everything else looks like twigs and leaves. Boil in 3 cups of water for 40 minutes. Apothecary suggested not eating chicken for three days (Toronto, Sunday) 20101017 1530Sunday brunch buffet at Taverna Cretekou, relaxed Mediterranean atmosphere, bouzoukis on the speakers, family of three generations speaking French at the next table. I am just passing through on the way to meet Kent, enjoying a low stress roast lamb sandwich (Alexandria, Virginia, Sunday) 20101024 1300Abingdon Plantation, on the National Register of Historic Places, is an enclosed grassy mound that includes a ruin, found in between the rental car garage and Terminal B of Reagan National Airport in Washington DC. Millions of people pass nearby, but how many would care to stop for even a moment, to look at the plaque? Is this the American appreciation of history? (Washington, DC) 20101026 1330
Toronto, Ontario; Helsinki, Finland; Espoo, Finland.
Fountain and boardwalk by City of Toronto Parks and Rec department, marsh and cattails by mother nature. Woodbine Park north of Lakeshore Drive is nearby Ashbridges Bay, so this planned park is reasonably close to the pre-settlement state (Toronto, Thursday) 20100902 1830Seeing off Noah for his flight to Beijing for 2 years at Renmin University. He won’t see this photo because both Tumblr and Facebook are blocked in China. We configured his blog, Google and Skype this morning. (Toronto, Sunday) 20100905 1330Melanie Doane in trio at the Shops at Don Mills on outdoor stage. Saw her last at the Horseshoe Tavern circa 2000, which became the Melvin Live album. She joked at the comparison with Tiffany playing shopping malls in the 1990s. (Toronto, Friday) 201009010 1930Big hole in the ground, in Regent Park redevelopment, south of Dundas Street, east of Sherbourne. Work in process, tax dollars at work (Toronto) 20100922 1830Lisa Rochon, Globe and Mail architecture critic, launches Revell Toronto Helsinki symposium, introducing the influence of Finnish functionalist modernist architect, Viljo Revell on Canada with the design of Toronto City Hall. 20100923 1845Quiet afternoon at Kamppi, where I am used to seeing festivals. Weather cooler than in Toronto. Number of people wearing hats outnumber the one person I saw in shorts. (Helsinki, Sunday) 20100926 1600
Iconic view of the main building of the former Helsinki University of Technology, which was stylized as their logo. In the consolidation into Aalto University, the logo is an alphabetic A. I like the old logo better! (Espoo, Finland) 20100927 1815
After our visit to the aquarium, we continued our walk along the east side of Cockle Bay, southbound. Looking west, Pyrmont Bridge would have taken us to the west side, if we were to walk across the pedestrian span.
Looking southwest, the hotels and casinos near the harbour are developments circa 2000.
The east side of the harbour is known as Cockle Bay Wharf, with restaurants, shopping and entertainment
The birds around the concrete pond looked delicate, but were sturdy metal sculptures.
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 […]
