Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 1

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 1
Author: Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262535793

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 2

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 2
Author: Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262535823

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

Handbook of Transformative Cooperation

Handbook of Transformative Cooperation
Author: Sandy Kristin Piderit
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780804754064

Transformative Cooperation (TC) presents new ways for individuals and organizations to partner to create a more sustainable future and take people to a higher stage of moral development. This handbook invites readers to consider how businesses can partner with organizations in other sectors of society, including governments and nonprofits, to address global concerns and improve the lives of all. It documents the need for and early examples of cooperative efforts that have transformed the relationships between corporations and the communities in which their employees live and work. The editors begin by issuing a call for TC, explaining the economic and social reasons for working across traditional organization, national, and international boundaries. The book then goes on to explain the dynamics of transformative cooperation, exploring the leadership characteristics that facilitate the transformation and its social benefits. Throughout this handbook, the editors present some of the best designs in transformative cooperation, and conclude by explaining transformative cooperation as a generative possibility. Overall, the editors and contributors argue that TC is about the search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them.

Managing Ocean Environments in a Changing Climate

Managing Ocean Environments in a Changing Climate
Author: Kevin J. Noone
Publisher: Newnes
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0124076610

Managing Ocean Environments in a Changing Climate summarizes the current state of several threats to the global oceans. What distinguishes this book most from previous works is that this book begins with a holistic, global-scale focus for the first several chapters and then provides an example of how this approach can be applied on a regional scale, for the Pacific region. Previous works usually have compiled local studies, which are essentially impossible to properly integrate to the global scale. The editors have engaged leading scientists in a number of areas, such as fisheries and marine ecosystems, ocean chemistry, marine biogeochemical cycling, oceans and climate change, and economics, to examine the threats to the oceans both individually and collectively, provide gross estimates of the economic and societal impacts of these threats, and deliver high-level recommendations. Nominated for a Katerva Award in 2012 in the Economy category State of the science reviews by known marine experts provide a concise, readable presentation written at a level for managers and students Links environmental and economic aspects of ocean threats and provides an economic analysis of action versus inaction Provides recommendations for stakeholders to help stimulate the development of policies that would help move toward sustainable use of marine resources and services

The Pragmatic Imagination

The Pragmatic Imagination
Author: Ann Pendleton-Jullian and
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781367563124

Pragmatic Imagination is a small book that presents a valuable resource for navigating our broadly connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent world. It begins from an assumption that agency in the world today requires a productive entanglement of imagination and action. It then presents a framework for unpacking the imagination as a wide range of mental activity that can be put to purpose in this world. This is the Pragmatic Imagination: a concept and framework of six principles.This book is the last chapter of a larger work. It is both parent and child of a soon to be published five-book system of books called Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, which provides a tool set for agency and impact in our world today. Like a single released before an album, this previews the larger work, introducing concepts and themes that both anticipate and encapsulate the larger project. But also like a single, it can stand along because of the way in which it anticipates and encapsulates the larger project with a singular coherence.

The Charisma Machine

The Charisma Machine
Author: Morgan G. Ames
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262353903

A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why—despite its failures—the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways—starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning. Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

Gaming the Metrics

Gaming the Metrics
Author: Mario Biagioli
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262537931

How the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The traditional academic imperative to “publish or perish” is increasingly coupled with the newer necessity of “impact or perish”—the requirement that a publication have “impact,” as measured by a variety of metrics, including citations, views, and downloads. Gaming the Metrics examines how the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced radically new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The contributors show that the metrics-based “audit culture” has changed the ecology of research, fostering the gaming and manipulation of quantitative indicators, which lead to the invention of such novel forms of misconduct as citation rings and variously rigged peer reviews. The chapters, written by both scholars and those in the trenches of academic publication, provide a map of academic fraud and misconduct today. They consider such topics as the shortcomings of metrics, the gaming of impact factors, the emergence of so-called predatory journals, the “salami slicing” of scientific findings, the rigging of global university rankings, and the creation of new watchdogs and forensic practices.

Infrastructural Brutalism

Infrastructural Brutalism
Author: Michael Truscello
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262358727

How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.

Reimagining Adult Education as World Building

Reimagining Adult Education as World Building
Author: Aliki Nicolaides
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2024-03-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 100386015X

Reimagining Adult Education as World Building offers a new way of thinking about adult education by re-envisaging how adult education works. It explores how the process of world building, or the invention of a new world or a set of concepts, can be translated into actual and feasible action when turning towards complex, real-life problems. Cultivating contexts where adult educators can become change agents, who recognize that the individual and community are intricately entangled, demands that educators grow new capacities, make new tools, develop thicker networks, and cultivate intentional links amongst each other to foster ecologies of transformation. This book shows how educators can create an ecology or environment for transformative thinking where students can learn to collaborate and use world building tools to create new responses to current issues. It begins by explaining the philosophical underpinnings of world building and the tools that translate pragmatic imagination into scaffolds for individual and collective capacity building. It also illustrates how the worldbuilding protocol makes a difference in adult learning and how this pedagogical tool introduces the ecological approach to adult education. Each chapter explores a practical case study, showing how learners have applied worldbuilding tools to complex challenges. Showing how to apply the world building protocol in a classroom setting, this edited collection will be valuable to Adult Education scholars, researchers, practitioners, and learning facilitators.

Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things

Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things
Author: Ryan Ellis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 026235778X

An examination of how post-9/11 security concerns have transformed the public view and governance of infrastructure. After September 11, 2001, infrastructures—the mundane systems that undergird much of modern life—were suddenly considered “soft targets” that required immediate security enhancements. Infrastructure protection quickly became the multibillion dollar core of a new and expansive homeland security mission. In this book, Ryan Ellis examines how the long shadow of post-9/11 security concerns have remade and reordered infrastructure, arguing that it has been a stunning transformation. Ellis describes the way workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats, and others used the threat of terrorism as a political resource, taking the opportunity not only to address security vulnerabilities but also to reassert a degree of public control over infrastructure. Nearly two decades after September 11, the threat of terrorism remains etched into the inner workings of infrastructures through new laws, regulations, technologies, and practices. Ellis maps these changes through an examination of three U.S. infrastructures: the postal system, the freight rail network, and the electric power grid. He describes, for example, how debates about protecting the mail from anthrax and other biological hazards spiraled into larger arguments over worker rights, the power of large-volume mailers, and the fortunes of old media in a new media world; how environmental activists leveraged post-9/11 security fears over shipments of hazardous materials to take on the rail industry and the chemical lobby; and how otherwise marginal federal regulators parlayed new mandatory cybersecurity standards for the electric power industry into a robust system of accountability.