Category: Social-Technical
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Design, Agency and Pragmatic Imagination
The books “Pragmatic Imagination” and “Design Unbound” from Ann Pandleton-Jullian and JSB ( John Seely Brown) explore to a great detail the need for new creative “imagination” into a practical form. The reasoning builds on the ideas of entanglement, expressed in my previous entry. A great lecture from 2015 is availavle on the video-section of…
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Enlightement or Entanglement?
Two great articles build on this idea of the need to get more attention to the connections and relations in between, compared to the specialised detailed view, or to have the multidisciplenary view of entanglement, compared to tradition we learned rom the enlightement. In the 2020 article “Wisdom of stakeholder crowds in complex social–ecological systems“,…
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Digital Twins: Societies are not machines, & optimization is a too narrow approach
I already did mention the importance of VVUQ when considering operational digital twins. More elaborated is the work from teh ETH Zurich team (Dirk Helbing & Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo), Digital Twins: Potentials, Limitations, and Ethical Issues. Rather than aiming for perfect digital twins, a predictable future, and total control, one should use computer simulation technology…
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Collective Intelligence & information pooling or aggregation
The review article on “Information aggregation and collective intelligence beyond the wisdom of crowds” describes how collective decision-making is a robust behavioural feature of groups for humans and other gregarious animals. Pooling individual information is also fundamental for modern societies, in which digital technologies have exponentially increased the interdependence of individual group members. Cognitive and…
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A radical realignment between grown and built environments
Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli architect and designer known for pioneering the field of Material Ecology. Formerly a tenured professor at MIT, founder and director of The Mediated Matter Group; she now runs her own lab, called Oxman, in Manhattan. She discussed her manifesto and accompanying film Nature x Humanity in a live interview. “How might we leverage design…
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Avoiding “Fake News” – also at old age – not as hard as one might think.
Ryan C. Moore & Jeffrey T. Hancock just published “A digital media literacy intervention for older adults improves resilience to fake news”. This article gives promising news on the awareness and actions one can to avoid fake news and misconceptions. The intervention was a 1-hour, self-directed series of interactive modules designed to teach concepts and…
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Your spatial navigation ability links with the entropy of your city street networks
I already mentioned the importance of space-time decisions, Individual differences in information seeking, the importance of anology (for AI), The importance of spatial thinking and the Active Inference principle (the brain is an “inference engine” that seeks to minimize “prediction error.”) It all comes togethers in a great article in Nature: “Entropy of city street…
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Beware of the lens you apply on gender
Inspired by Deric’s MindBlog entry of today, I like to make a reference to a avorite quote (also on my home-page): If the map doesn’t agree with the ground the map is wrong” Gordon LivingstonToo Soon Old, Too Late Smart The manly art of self-promotion – or maybe the female alternative, is building a map and…
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Education shapes the structure of semantic memory and impacts creative thinking
Quotes from some a recent article, presenting intersting insights on semantic memory and creative thinking. “Education is central to the acquisition of knowledge, such as when children learn new concepts. It is unknown, however, whether educational differences impact not only what concepts children learn, but how those concepts come to be represented in semantic memory—a…
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Bullshit Jobs – Will it change after the pandemics?
I finished reading the great work of David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs, and especially liked the list of five types of entirely pointless jobs: I does not take a lot of intellectual power to connect all five to the pure essence of what I call “the information lens“, blocking the insight from the reality, or the…
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