Addressing Risk Governance Deficits through Scenario Modeling Practices

In a world of inevitable regret, those governing risk must build practices that withstand the vicissitudes of actual events by demonstrating that reasonable efforts had been and will continue to be taken despite those harms. However, what is reasonable depends on one’s worldview, and so not giving different worldviews appropriate consideration leads to deficits in the quality of risk governance. This project developed foresight methods for eliciting, discovering, representing, and modeling scenarios which capture the counterfactual forests created by disparate worldviews. These methods employ structural differences between objective and subjective relations toward physical events to delineate the actual points of contention, while maintaining neutrality by remaining strictly grounded in the input of the stakeholders themselves. These methods respect how people frame causal information psychologically, avoiding biases known to affect political judgment. Overall, these methods serve as a reminder that how we ask designs how we think. ii

Permaculture as a Systemic Design practice: Contributions, challenges, and new developments

The discourse on design has often situated it as a science of the artificial, but it has always been necessary to design our interaction with natural systems as well. One tradition for doing so is permaculture, a systemic design approach that aims to develop sustainable (permanent) agriculture and settlements. This paper will present permaculture’s relationship to systemic design, providing historical context to understand its ecological, agricultural, and design origins. Permaculture has made many contributions to systemic design, including simple-toremember lists of guiding ethics and principles, a clever vocabulary of categories that allow the discussion of interactions, a toolbox of design methods for selecting and assembling systems of elements, overall design processes, and some agroecological and social system design insights. However, this exchange of ideas can go both ways, as there are current challenges to permaculture in which systemic design can assist, including forming objectives, assessing appropriate technology, stakeholder engagement, and launching viable projects. From there, this paper highlights new developments that show progress in addressing these challenges, and illustrates that systemic designers can join permaculture practitioners in these efforts. Overall, agroecological design is an area of systemic design that shows much need and promise

2020 media futures trends package

2020 Media Futures is a mul6-­‐industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020; what kind of cross-­‐plaAorm Internet environment may shape our media and entertainment in the coming decade; and how Ontario firms take ac6on today toward capturing and maintaining posi6ons of na6onal and interna6onal leadership. The project asks: In the face of sweeping and disrupDve changes driven by the Internet, how can we help companies in the book, film, interacDve, magazine, music and television industries – Ontario’s CreaDve and Entertainment Cluster – to beNer idenDfy emerging opportuniDes, create more resilient strategic plans and partnerships, boost innovaDon, and compete in increasingly demanding global markets? This document is a product of our ‘horizon scanning’ process. Trends and Countertrends represent direcDonal paNerns in data, a rising Dde of signals, in which, for example, a criDcal mass of headlines about people using Facebook to call for help in emergency situaDons points to a larger trend regarding the increasing mission-­‐criDcal importance of social networks. To date we have idenDfied more than sixty trends at the project website: hNp://2020mediafutures.ca/Trend

Discutindo a educação ambiental no cotidiano escolar: desenvolvimento de projetos na escola formação inicial e continuada de professores

A presente pesquisa buscou discutir como a Educação Ambiental (EA) vem sendo trabalhada, no Ensino Fundamental e como os docentes desta escola compreendem e vem inserindo a EA no cotidiano escolar., em uma escola estadual do município de Tangará da Serra/MT, Brasil. Para tanto, realizou-se entrevistas com os professores que fazem parte de um projeto interdisciplinar de EA na escola pesquisada. Verificou-se que o projeto da escola não vem conseguindo alcançar os objetivos propostos por: desconhecimento do mesmo, pelos professores; formação deficiente dos professores, não entendimento da EA como processo de ensino-aprendizagem, falta de recursos didáticos, planejamento inadequado das atividades. A partir dessa constatação, procurou-se debater a impossibilidade de tratar do tema fora do trabalho interdisciplinar, bem como, e principalmente, a importância de um estudo mais aprofundado de EA, vinculando teoria e prática, tanto na formação docente, como em projetos escolares, a fim de fugir do tradicional vínculo “EA e ecologia, lixo e horta”.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

The Methodological Unboundedness of Limited Discovery Processes

Though designers must understand systems, designers work differently than scientists in studying systems.  Design engagements do not discover whole systems, but take calculated risks between discovery and intervention. For this reason, design practices must cope with open systems, and unpacking the tacit guidelines behind these practices is instructive to systems methodology. This paper shows that design practice yields a methodology which applies across forms of design.  Design practice teaches us to generate ideas and gather data longer, but stop when the return on design has diminished past its cost.  Fortunately, we can reason about the unknown by understanding the character of the unbounded.  We suppose that there might as well be an infinite number of factors, but we can reason about their concentration without knowing all of them.  We demonstrate this concept on stakeholder systems, showing how design discovery informs systems methodology. Using this result, we can apply the methods of parametric design when the parameters are not yet known by establishing the concentration of every kind of factor, entailing a discovery rate of diminishing returns over discovery activities, allowing the analysis of discovery-based trade-offs.  Here, we extend a framework for providing metrics to parametric design, allowing it to express the importance of discovery.Though designers must understand systems, designers work differently than scientists in studying systems.  Design engagements do not discover whole systems, but take calculated risks between discovery and intervention. For this reason, design practices must cope with open systems, and unpacking the tacit guidelines behind these practices is instructive to systems methodology. This paper shows that design practice yields a methodology which applies across forms of design.  Design practice teaches us to generate ideas and gather data longer, but stop when the return on design has diminished past its cost.  Fortunately, we can reason about the unknown by understanding the character of the unbounded.  We suppose that there might as well be an infinite number of factors, but we can reason about their concentration without knowing all of them.  We demonstrate this concept on stakeholder systems, showing how design discovery informs systems methodology. Using this result, we can apply the methods of parametric design when the parameters are not yet known by establishing the concentration of every kind of factor, entailing a discovery rate of diminishing returns over discovery activities, allowing the analysis of discovery-based trade-offs.  Here, we extend a framework for providing metrics to parametric design, allowing it to express the importance of discovery