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

Author: Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535793
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
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

Author: Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535823
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 495

The Road that is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile

Author: Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262660990
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
Pendleton-Jullian discusses influences behind the Open City - the work and working methods of Surrealist French poets, the words and creative attitude of Le Corbusier, the heritage of the South American landscape and culture.

Value Creation Principles

Author: Bartley J. Madden
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119706629
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
PRAISE FOR VALUE CREATION PRINCIPLES "In Value Creation Principles, Madden introduces the Pragmatic Theory of the Firm that positions the firm as a system fueled by human capital, innovation, and, at a deeper level, imagination. He challenges us to understand how we know what we think we know in order to better discover faulty assumptions that often are camouflaged by language. His knowledge building loop offers guideposts to design experiments and organize feedback to facilitate early adaptation to a changed environment and to avoid being mired in ways of thinking rooted in 'knowledge' of what worked well in the past a context far different from the context of today. His book explains a way of being that enables those who work for, or invest in, business firms to see beyond accounting silos and short-term quarterly earnings and to focus on capabilities instrumental for creating long-term future and sustainable value for the firm's stakeholders. I can't recommend this astounding book enough especially given its deep and timely insights for our world today." John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist for Xerox Corp and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); co-author with Ann Pendleton-Jullian of Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World "In contrast to existing abstract theories of the firm, Madden's pragmatic theory of the firm connects management's decisions in a practical way to a firm's life cycle and market valuation. The book promotes a firm's knowledge building proficiency, relative to competitors, as the fundamental driver of a firm's long-term performance, which leads to insights about organizational capabilities, intangible assets, and excess shareholder returns. Value Creation Principles is ideally suited to facilitate progress in the New Economy by opening up the process by which firms build knowledge and create value, which is a needed step in revising how neoclassical economics treats the firm." Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University; co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution "Bartley Madden rightfully points out that both textbook and more advanced economic theories of the firm fail to address the concerns of top management and boards of directors. He offers a tantalizing pragmatic alternative that directly connects to quantitative changes in the firm's market value. His framework gives recognition to the importance of intangible assets, and his pragmatic approach is quite complementary to the Dynamic Capabilities framework that strategic managers implicitly and sometimes explicitly employ." David J. Teece, Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business, Faculty Director, Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

The Charisma Machine

Author: Morgan G. Ames
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262353903
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
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

Author: Mario Biagioli
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537931
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
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

Author: Michael Truscello
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262358727
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
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

Author: Aliki Nicolaides
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100386015X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
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

Author: Ryan Ellis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026235778X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
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.

Downtime on the Microgrid

Author: Malcolm McCullough
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262357011
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Something good about the smart city: a human-centered account of why the future of electricity is local. Resilience now matters most, and most resilience is local—even for that most universal, foundational modern resource: the electric power grid. Today that technological marvel is changing more rapidly than it has for a lifetime, and in our new grid awareness, community microgrids have become a fascinating catalyst for cultural value change. In Downtime on the Microgrid, Malcolm McCullough offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the cascade of white papers on smart clean infrastructure. Writing from an experiential perspective, McCullough avoids the usual smart city futurism, technological solutionism, policy acronyms, green idealism, critical theory jargon, and doomsday prepping to provide new cultural context for a subject long a favorite theme in science and technology studies. McCullough describes the three eras of North American electrification: innovation, consolidation, and decentralization. He considers the microgrid boom and its relevance to the built environment as “architecture's grid edge.” Finally, he argues that resilience arises from clusters; although a microgrid is often described as an island, future resilience will require archipelagos—clusters of microgrids, with a two-way, intermittent connectiveness that is very different from the always-on, top-down technofuture we may be expecting. With Downtime on the Microgrid, McCullough rises above techno-hype to find something good about the smart city and reassuring about local resilience.