metabolo.org - ecology

Closer to e-book reality: Amazon Kindle

gva — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:32:49 -0600

Just announced last month is the strangely styled and potentially disruptive new e-book reader from Amazon, dubbed "Kindle." I don't know about you but that title makes me think of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451... Get video, images and blurbs from Amazon or google it for alternate perspectives.

Chief on the features list is wireless connectivity -- with no monthly fee -- using Sprint's high-speed (EVDO) network, more like an advanced mobile phone than a laptop with wi-fi. The gadget sells for 400. USD and early sign seem to suggest success -- it's sold out between now and Christmas....

Could be interesting to see how this entry plays into the emerging ecologies of literate media and media literacy.

Report from Massive Change Global Visionaries Symposium

gva — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 21:19:23 -0600

Just returned from the Massive Change Global Visionaries Symposium in Chicago. As a co-creator of the Massive Change exhibition I wanted to see it in the first US showing. Another aim was to study the public event and possibly seek out some of the speakers for a symposium I'm co-organizing with colleagues at the Beal Institute. The event was eye opening and highly enjoyable.

Overall my favorite speakers were Stewart Brand, futurist and author of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Clock of the Long Now, and How Buildings Learn; Gunter Pauli, founder and director of Zero Emissions Research Initiative of the United Nations University in Tokyo (Zeri.org), founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, and Mary Czerwinski, cognitive psychologist and principal researcher at Microsoft. Brand and Pauli were certainly the most dynamic.

Other speakers were Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse; Dayna Baumeister, cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild; Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, and syndicated columnist; John Todd, biologist and ecological designer, and Reginald Modlin, Director of Environmental Affairs for Daimler Chrysler.

Stewart Brand presented first and he was superb. Soft-spoken and persuasive, he is a master inter-disciplinarian and unromantic humanist. His presentation was the only one with visuals, very polished with dense information demographics, many photos, sound clips, transitions, etc. Not as typographically sophisticated as Al Gore's show but equally dense. Brand focused on the city, its pivotal place in the pantheon of human creativity, its long history and the dynamic economic and demographic forces transforming it worldwide, in every continent and across all income strata. Overall he gave a picture of optimism about the creativity and resourcefulness of human communities to solve problems.

Gunter Pauli, based in Tokyo, described some of his initiatives in designing radically green urban / industrial communities at very large scales. Much of his work is in the developing world, e.g. Gaviotas in Colombia. These communities can leapfrog past current toxic practices and install new infrastructure that uses closed-loop, "waste=food" principles to achieve high employment, zero emissions, ample food production, etc.

Here's a helpful third party commentary [http://www.planeta.com/planeta/02/0209gaviotas.html]:

Pauli, in some ways a younger version of [Paolo] Lugari, has some spot-on things to say. He is most definitely on The Right Track. Kind of a permaculturist-social-justice-guy with a penchant to use fairy tales to illustrate his points....
...ZERI's focus is on taking things that are considered "waste" and finding new uses for them.
...The trick to "zero emissions" is to use the "waste" of one of the five kingdoms as food for another.

In person Pauli is outspoken and imaginative, frequently alluding to his work with children and seeming to celebrate these same qualities in them -- they don't filter their ideas of what's possible. Not an easy personality, but much better than that. Pauli was on stage with Reginald Modlin, Director of Environmental Affairs for Daimler Chrysler, who was cagey, dry, and sycophantic. No surprises and few big ideas from the global manufacturing giant.

Next were Dayna Baumeister and John Todd. One very interesting moment of that talk arose through a question afterward by Stewart Brand regarding GMO's -- actually he scooped me as I was going to ask the same question. Brand pointed out that certain bacteria swap genetic material all the time, and that many scientists who understand biology thoroughly, including stellar minds like E.O. Wilson, are less disturbed by GMO than others who are not trained in biology. Todd gave a thoughtful answer that GMOs are a distraction in that he's more interested in the symphony of ecological relationships, rather than the admittedly interesting soloists or featured organisms.

Jimmy Wales and Mary Czerwinski offered slightly differing views on emerging digital media. Most telling comment in that session came from Wales who imagined that the open, volunteer-driven model of wikipedia would be a temporary architecture that would soon have to be replaced by a more restricted and conventional model. To his surprise, the need to install controls on the model never materialized. In fact he continually has to explain to the media that the organization's controls are less restrictive than they imagine. Simple rules, like requiring individuals to be members for four days before they can edit, have effectively dampened most of the troll-like behaviour in the system.

In the last session Hazel Henderson held court and Gregg Easterbrook held his own. Henderson captivated the audience with ideas such as unmeasured value creation within the "love economy," and the need for broader alternatives to the money-based economic indices, like triple bottom line and the Calvert Henderson index. Both speakers dealt with notions of wealth and politics, and the overall picture was one in which material prosperity has shown steady increases in recent decades. The passing of Milton Freidman was noted and some audience members noted that we've never really tried pure market economics because of massive subsidies for entire industries, including oil and gas.

Green Machine (Radical Ecofactories) | Fast Company

gva — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:16:01 -0500

"Gunter Pauli's radical eco-factories completely eliminate pollution. They also rewrite the rules for growth, productivity, and profit."

Metabolism: The sum of all biochemical processes involved in life

gva — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:54:10 -0500

Definitions of "metabolism" from Answers.com

me·tab·o·lism
n.

1. The chemical processes occurring within a living cell or organism that are necessary for the maintenance of life. In metabolism some substances are broken down to yield energy for vital processes while other substances, necessary for life, are synthesized.

2. The processing of a specific substance within the living body: water metabolism; iodine metabolism.

[From Greek metabole, change, from metaballein, to change : meta-, meta- + ballein, to throw.]

Selected translations for: Metabolism

Dansk (Danish)
n. - metabolisme, stofskifte

Nederlands (Dutch)
metabolisme, stofwisseling

Français (French)
n. - métabolisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Metabolismus, Stoffwechsel

Italiano (Italian)
metabolismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - metabolismo (m)

Español (Spanish)
n. - metabolismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - ämnesomsättning

About Metabolo: From Mechanics to Mimesis

gva — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 23:56:21 -0500

Far from becoming tamer, the far-reaching effects of electric technology that were presaged by Marshall McLuhan seem to be waxing wilder, penetrating ever more deeply into our personal and social lives. Is it alarm we’re sensing, or the thrill of recognition – a quickening? Are we attempting to maintain control, or building a portrait of our environment and ourselves that is beginning to rival the responsiveness and creativity of the natural world?

We wonder aloud whether we’ve traded too much privacy for convenience and access, meanwhile scarcely noticing that all these musings have migrated into that ever-widening and ever-converging data stream that suddenly seems more real and more -- accessible? -- than ever before. This veritable Mississippi of data offers more manipulability and meaning as the tools, their default settings, and their recombinant interactions increasingly evidence startling levels of transparency, empathy and relevance to daily life....

Our brains, our bodies, our social relationships, the webs of life that nourish and sustain our physical selves and natural environments, no longer are these being taken for granted, denigrated, made incidental -- at any rate, not in the same blind and wholesale way. On the contrary, these are being methodically rediscovered and appreciated as irreplaceable, unique, meaningful, and worthy of support, research, emulation, connection, amplification, celebration.

As a candidate for the Master of Science degree in Integrated Digital Media at Polytechnic University, I offer this space to the investigation of these developments and these questions.

In this discursive space I intend to share and solicit interdisciplinary research interrogating emergent effects at the intersection of three organizing discourses: technology and design; biology and social behavior; ecology and environment. The diagram that follows illustrates broad relationships and selected patterns characteristic of the intersections:

I will survey the literature pertinent to these intersections, including historical texts as well as emerging theoretical and practical developments from both academic and professional sources. The underlying theoretical and methodological framework and vocabulary will be informed by the closely related discourses of cybernetics, systems thinking, complexity, and network studies. My objective will be to document and explicate applicable laws and principles in order to forge a new level of synthetic understanding with an eye to guiding the design and implementation of beneficial systems.

To assist the analysis and communication of my findings I intend to use appropriate techniques in media production that may include data modelling, visualization, and/or motion graphics. The resulting thesis will seek to articulate and demonstrate design principles in response to the critical question: “Can we learn to design for emergence, in order to develop and distribute more human-friendly and ecologically responsive social and technical systems, by studying and mimicking deep patterns originating in the realms of biology and social behavior?”

Following is a preliminary and partial list of sources to be consulted:

Biomimetics; Sociomimetics; Social Software; Networks
Barabasi, A. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Perseus Books; 2002.
Benyus, J. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. William Morrow; 1997.
Hock, D. Birth of the Chaordic Age. Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 1999.
O’Reilly, T. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228
Reed, D. P. The Law of the Pack. Harvard Business Review; Feb. 2001
Surowiecki, J. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books; 2004.

Commons; Cooperation
Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books; 1985.
Bricklin, D. The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm August 7, 2000.
Creative Commons. http://www.creativecommons.org
Hardin, G. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 1968;162:1243-48.
Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books; 2000.
Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books; 2002.
Rheingold, H. and Institute for the Future. http://www.cooperationcommons.com/
Wright, R. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon; 1999.

Cybernetics; Systems Thinking; Complexity
Capra, F. The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living. Anchor Books; 2002.
Weiner, N. Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. M.I.T. Press; 1961.
Weiner, N. The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin; 1950.

Emergence
Fromm, J. Types and Forms of Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0506028
Fromm, J. Ten Questions About Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0509049
Helms, M. Design That Improves With Use. Ambidextrous. http://www.stanford.edu/~judywen/ambidextrous/page36-39.pdf
Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner; 2002.
Van Alstyne, G. From Induction to Incitement: Inside the Massive Change Project. What People Want: Populism in Architecture and Design. Ed. Michael Shamiyeh. Birkhäuser; 2005:188–205.
Van Alstyne, G. and Logan, R.K. Designing for Emergence and Innovation: Redesigning Design. Publication pending; 2006.