Systemic design and its discontents: Designing for emergence and accountability

“Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal-minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us! (Wiener, 1950)” In this paper we seek to advance the discourse and prospective impact of systemic design through challenges and opportunities centred in perspectives from psychology and ethics. We argue that systemic design is adolescent. It has a growing sense of its power and potential, yet it is prone to clumsiness and yawning lapses. To advance its role in fostering inclusion and flourishing, how might we lead systemic design to greater maturity, responsibility, self-awareness, in a word, to accountability? We assess that systemic design is on track to fulfill its potential as a holistic practice and discourse, akin to an advanced form of service design. Yet for this to happen the community must undertake more careful processes of development. Systemic design needs to balance its ambition and confidence with humility and ethical commitment. Toward this end we propose that systemic design covet skills, insights and awareness from its ‘aunts and uncles’. We indicate that greater use of psychology is needed to inform descriptive work, and more ethics is needed to uphold normative purposes. We advocate developing systemic design theory and practice through the further introduction of concepts from social and group psychology, as well as ethical governance. This groundwork is timely and needs-based, as it sheds light on potentially manipulative techniques at the intersection of choice, persuasion, influence, politics, and other nonlinear, societal forces. Our proactive goal is to better equip systemic design to address complex problems at the level of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including equity, diversity and inclusion. We examine developments at the intersection of democracy, social media and automation that are highly unsettling, including the use of Facebook users’ data by Cambridge Analytica in the context of the Brexit campaign and the 2016 US election. In this light we articulate an urgent and remedial call for the systemic design community to develop and uphold a code of professional ethics and conduct, not unlike those adopted by engineers, doctors, management consultants and planners. Pathways We ask, has psychology successfully lent its wisdom to other disciplines? Indeed, behavioural economics is one pathway that has found significant value and traction. This project, which synthesizes demonstrably irrational human motivations and biases into the brittle, positivist models of classical economics, has begat a more resilient and mature hybrid. We take encouragement from experiment and exploration in arenas that hold strong interest for systemic design: policy, governance, community development, economic cooperation, innovation. To better understand inherent systemic design’s risks, and establish historical and critical context, we ground this study with reference to early twentieth century work, including Norbert Wiener, considered “father of cybernetics,” and Freud’s American nephew, Edward L. Bernays, portrayed as “father of public relations.” More than any single figure Bernays understood and anticipated spaces and practices of persuasion including marketing, public relations, and consumer psychology. In the early twentieth century Bernays pioneered forms of ‘advertising without advertising’, that is to say product placement. His works provide considerable architecture for modern mass culture. From their titles alone we may glimpse both the power and pitfalls of industrial, design-fueled techniques of persuasion: Propaganda, 1928; Public relations, 1952; The Engineering of Consent, 1955. Our brief critical review reveals that Bernays ideas are unsettling in their relevance to contemporary concerns and its frank assertion that democracy requires guidance and constraint by a shadowy elite. Bernays’s work has never been well known to the public. This is all the more surprising considering his long and influential shadow. We argue that his work is critical to understanding the use and misuse of persuasion for social purposes. Bernays describes ‘engineering consent’ as follows: “Use of an engineering approach—that is, action based only on thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs. (Bernays, 1955)” Purposes We lay out tactical scaffolding for the psychological maturation of systemic design through a discussion of projects led by the authors. Here the values, design principles and choices demonstrate alternatives to the twentieth-century manipulation model and to other inherited, status quo approaches. Skelton outlines the open software platform Betaville, a massively participatory, editable, urban mirror world project elaborated by an international network of partners and collaborators. Van Alstyne presents Strategic Innovation Lab, a large, decade-old Toronto-based social lab dedicated to envisioning possible and preferable futures through participatory foresight. Our strategic goal is to better prepare the systemic design community for two purposes. We want to address complex problems at the level of UN SDGs, including reduction of poverty, hunger, inequality, consumption, and GHG emissions, while boosting wellbeing, sanitation, social justice, innovation, and strong institutions. More troublingly we want to stem and mitigate consequences arising from broad design and deployment of automated and augmented systems in which emergent dynamics lead to unsettling social and political effects. This work extends and deepens the theoretical framework “Designing for Emergence” (Van Alstyne & Logan, 2007), presented in RSD5 Toronto (Van Alstyne & Logan, 2016). Understanding innovation and knowing how we might give rise to desirable, emergent processes within systems requires us to understand emergence — bottom-up forces of morphogenesis. As one exchange at RSD6 pointed out: We don’t design systems, we design pathways through systems. In summary, the purpose and process we are advocating for the systemic design community is to advance our maturity and thereby our positive impact for the many, not the few. In other words, we want to learn to act more responsively and responsibly, to do both risk-taking and risk-management. Is this enterprise deeply intertwined with psychology and ethics? Clearly. Does this describe the primary opportunity and challenge facing Systemic Design as a community? We think it does

Analyzing student travel patterns with augmented data visualizations

Visualization and visual analytics tools can provide critical support for experts and stakeholders to understand transportation flows and related human activities. Correlating and representing quantitative data with data from human actors can provide explanations for patterns and anomalies. We conducted research to compare and contrast the capabilities of several tools available for visualization and decision support as a part of an integrated urban informatics and visualization research project that develops tools for transportation planning and decision making. For this research we used the data collected by the StudentMoveTO (Toronto) survey which was conducted in the fall of 2015 by Toronto's four universities with the goal of collecting detailed data to understand travel behaviour and its effect on the daily routines of the students. This paper discusses the usefulness of new software which can allow designers to build meaningful narratives integrating 3D representations to assist in Geo-spatial analysis of the data

Stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in meteoric water during the Cryogenian Period

We measured δ18O and δ2H values of muscovite and carbonate mineral separates from metamorphosed carbonate-bearing mudstone layers in late Tonian to early Cryogenian strata, including Sturtian glacial deposits, which were deposited in a coastal setting at an approximate paleolatitude of 30-35°S and now crop out on Islay and the Garvellach Islands, Scotland. From these values, we calculated δ18O and δ2H values of meteoric water that equilibrated with clay at diagenetic conditions which we infer were reached shortly after deposition (i.e. before the end of the Cryogenian Period) because sediment accumulation was rapid due to fast subsidence at that time. This calculation required removal of the effects of exchange with reservoir rocks, metamorphic volatilization and mixing with metamorphic fluids on δ18O and δ2H values. The values we calculated for meteoric water fall within the 2σ ranges δ18O = -1 to -4 ‰ and δ2H = 0 to -23 ‰, respectively. These ranges are similar to present day values at equivalent latitudes. This finding is consistent with sediment accumulation in the Cryogenian Period having occurred in a climate similar to present day (Ice Age) conditions. This conclusion is not at odds with the Snowball Earth hypothesis because one of its predictions is that sediment accumulation occurred as the climate warmed at the end of panglaciation, a prediction supported by sedimentological evidence of multiple glacial advances and retreats in our study area and elsewhere

1960: Abilene Christian College Lectures - Full Text

Table of Contents: Theme Speeches: Christian Faith in the Modern World Basis of Faith - Leonard Mullens - 9 Authority in Christianity - John T. Smithson, Jr. - 27 Origin and Preservation of the Bible - Neil R. Lightfoot - 44 Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible - David H. Bobo - 62 The Unity of the Bible - Jack Meyer - 91 Faith and Reason - Joe Sanders - 115 The Reasonableness of Supernaturalism - Virgil Trout - 126 The Present Statue of the Doctrine of Organic Evolution - J.D. Thomas - 146 The Nature of Man - Roy F. Osborne, Jr. - 181 Modern Challenges to Christian Morals - Carl Spain - 199 The Christ, Whose Son is He? - Gordon Teel - 232 Special Speeches Teaching the Word of God in Korea - L. Haskell Chessfire - 255 The Influence of Christian Education - Judge Jack Pope - 276 Mission Opportunities in the Far East - Harry Robert Fox - 288 Mission Work in Austria - Robert Skelton - 303 Report from Switzerland - Heinrich Blum - 313 The Work in Nigeria - Rees Byrant - 320 The Training of Evangelists in Foreign Fields - Reiner Kallus - 331 Christian Scholarships - Everett Ferguson - 340 Evangelizing the World - A.R. Holton - 349 Panel Discussions The Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls The Scrolls and the Text of the Bible - Paul Rotenberry - 357 The Relation between the Religion of the Essenes and that of Early Christians - Jay Smith - 366 Biblical Interpretation Expediency and Pattern Authority - J.W. Roberts - 381 Examples in Pattern Authority - Thomas B. Warren - 392 Mental Health and Sin The Present State of Mental Health Knowledge - Donald R. Sime - 409 The Relationship of Mental Health Problems to Sin - Paul Easley - 421 The Teenager The Problems of Youth - Mack Wayne Craig - 432 Influences for Good - Wyatt Sawyer - 443 The Benefits of Abilene Christian College To the Church - Hulen Jackson - 451 To The Home - Robert S. Bell - 459 \u27To the Community - Louie Welch - 465 Expenses At Abilene Christian College - James C. Kerr - 469 The Graduate School at Abilene Christian College What I Am Getting Now in the ACC Graduate Program - Harold Vanderpool - 475 How the ACC Graduate Program Has Stood Up - Everett Ferguson - 481 What the ACC Graduate Program Ought To Be - Frank Pack - 486 The Importance to the Church of the ACC Graduate Program A.R. Holton - 490 Beware: Large File Size Uploaded by Jackson Hage

The genome sequence of the ringlet, Aphantopus hyperantus Linnaeus 1758

We present a genome assembly based on an individual female Aphantopus hyperantus , also known as Maniola hyperantus (the ringlet butterfly; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae), scaffolded using data from a second, unrelated specimen. The genome sequence is 411 megabases in span. The majority of the assembly is scaffolded into 29 chromosomal pseudomolecules, including the Z sex chromosome

Ethnicity, gender, deprivation and low educational attainment in England: Political arithmetic, ideological stances and the deficient society

Attainment data on England’s school pupils are more extensive in coverage, detail, quantity, accessibility and of higher quality than monitoring statistics routinely available in other European countries. These data facilitate investigation of low attainment in England’s schools and its relationship to ethnicity, gender and poverty. This article reviews longitudinal sample studies and extends this with simpler presentations of England’s national attainment statistics for education over 5 years up to 2014. The analyses show recurrent correlations of low attainment with specific ethnic minority groups, with gender and most strongly with low-income sections of society. There is a strong case, from these data and other research, that these inequalities are rooted in social and economic factors outside the school, created and sustained by neoliberal economic practices and elitist structures. It is argued that reducing the proportion of children growing up in poverty will have a bigger impact on raising average attainment levels than focusing on in-school factors

Soft city culture and technology: the Betaville Project

Soft City Culture and Technology: The Betaville Project discusses the complete cycle of conception, development, and deployment of the Betaville platform. Betaville is a massively participatory online environment for distributed 3D design and development of proposals for changes to the built environment– an experimental integration of art, design, and software development for the public realm. Through a detailed account of Betaville from a Big Crazy Idea to a working "deep social medium", the author examines the current conditions of performance and accessibility of hardware, software, networks, and skills that can be brought together into a new form of open public design and deliberation space, for and spanning and integrating the disparate spheres of art, architecture, social media, and engineering. Betaville is an ambitious enterprise, of building compelling and constructive working relationships in situations where roles and disciplinary boundaries must be as agile as the development process of the software itself. Through a considered account and analysis of the interdependencies between Betaville's project design, development methods, and deployment, the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose "public works" must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure

The Way Time Passes in Places Like This

This catalogue documents an exhibition of 44 works on paper from the Kamloops Art Gallery’s permanent collection, curated by artist C. Skelton. The curator provides brief interpretations of selected works in the exhibition, and reflects on the spatial/temporal characteristics of museums and art galleries. Includes list of work