What is the economy? People used to tell stories about the exchange of goods and services in terms of flows and processes — but over the last few hundred years, economic theory veered toward measuring discrete amounts of objects. Why? The change has less to do with the objective nature of economies and more to do with what tools theorists had available. And scientific instruments — be they material technologies or concepts — don’t just make new things visible, but also hide things in new blind spots. For instance, algebra does very well with ratios and quantities…but fails to properly address what markets do: how innovation works, where value comes from, and how economic actors navigate (and change) a fundamentally uncertain shifting landscape. With the advent of computers, new opportunities emerge to study that which cannot be contained in an equation. Using algorithms, scientists can formalize complex behaviors – and…
European Union for Systemics (EUS) – 11th EUS International Congress Hellenic Society for Systemic Studies (HSSS) – 17th National & International Conference Systemic Design Thinking for Creativity Online Attendance 06-09 October 2021 Athens, Greece
Exploring complexity and the implications for leadership and decision making in a changing world. In conversation with Marco Valente.
Arnaldo Pellini
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Oct 6 · 10 min read
How can systems thinking enhance stewardship of public services?
15 OCT 2019
Karen Gardner, Sue Olney, Luke Craven, Deborah Blackman
PUBLISHER
Public Service Research Group (UNSW Canberra)
System stewardship is emerging as a new way of thinking about the role of government.
14 October 2021 | 5pm – 6.15pm AEDT
Described as “a new way of working that allows governments and their agents to effectively influence and steward systems from which outcomes emerge”, system stewardship is seen as being critical to contemporary public service practice. But what does it mean and look like in practice?
Join this conversation to explore the concept of system stewardship, and how to encourage more of it within and across government agencies, so that our systems work to serve the people who they are supposed to benefit.
Speakers:
Toby Lowe (Visiting Professor in Public Management at the Centre for Public Impact)
Lynn Mumford (Director of Development and Strategic Partnerships, Mayday Trust)
Kym Peake (Former Secretary, Victorian Department of Health and Human Services)
Lil Anderson (Chief Executive of Te Arawhiti – the Office for Māori Crown Relations)
“Systems Thinking: Trial & Learning” a presentation by Gene Bellinger on October 12, 2021 12:00 GMT as part of the Open University Systems Thinking in Practice Jubilee
If you’re like me, you’ve been avidly consuming supply-chain news and analysis lately. Semiconductor shortages and stuck container ships are the charismatic megafauna everybody is watching, but I’m primarily watching for more mundane little things that surprise me in some way. I’m hoping they will serve as clues that point to new ways of thinkingabout supply chains, because I think our existing mental models are failing us.
A big reason is that we thinksupply chains are old and well-understood parts of the world (after all, ships still ply trade routes that have been in use for millennia), but as I will argue, they’re not. Supply chains as they exist today are as young and mysterious as the internet. The ongoing supply chain crisis is at least as novel an event in human history as the recent big Facebook outage. Arguably more novel.
And we won’t take supply chains seriously enough until we remystify them in a way that forces us to make up new frames that center their recently evolved novel aspects rather than their ancient and familiar aspects. Frames that encompass the entire vast scope of things that move along global supply lines today. Not just shipping containers full of durable manufactured goods, but bulk-carried materials, air-shipped perishables, seafood, livestock, piped materials, electricity, and so on. Viewed this way, the internet is just one supply chain among many, a bits-and-bytes-specific member of a cohort of technologies that date approximately to the 1960s.
October 18 (the third Monday of the month, dodging Canadian Thanksgiving) is the 94th meeting for Systems Thinking Ontario. The registration will be on Eventbrite at https://ee-st.eventbrite.ca.
Ecological Economics and Systems Thinking
For this session, Katie Kish and David Mallery will lead a discussion on Ecological Economics in two parts.
(1) Where is Ecological Economics going with Systems Thinking?
In the “Critical Pluralism” paper (see below), the newest generation of EE scholars is portrayed as taking a regenerative approach to research and learning. This is best navigated with critical pluralistic approaches well-developed in systems thinking. The shift might be better supported through a wider set of systems tools, which might also have complementary effects on systems methodologies.
(2) What could a 30-year research agenda for Ecological Economics be?
The “Paying Attention” paper (see below), is one in a special section of “Ecological Economics: The next 30 years”.
Katie has been working for the Global Footprint Network, that uses big data to produce the Ecological Footprint Accounts. Applying this data on individual and group behaviour change raises questions on the role and ethics associated with big data.
The special section of the journal aims to find synergies between existing work and how to evaluate matters that have urgency and importance. Katie welcomes discussion on any of these papers, and is providing access to a private cache (to those without access to a university library).
Biographies:
Katie Kish is the Senior Development Officer for the Footprint Data Foundation through the York Footprint Initiative and lecturer of Ecological Economics at the Haida Gwaii Institute, UBC. Her career has largely focused on capacity building for the international ecological economics community and training emerging scholars on the effective use of systems methodologies.
David Mallery is currently an instructor in the Ecological Economics course at York University. He is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Environment and Urban Change, examining the epistemological predicaments associated with mainstream quantitative methodologies informing environmental and economic policy.
Venue:
The link for a Zoom conference will be sent upon preregistration.
Kish, Katie, David Mallery, Gabriel Yahya Haage, R. Melgar-Melgar, M. Burke, C. Orr, N. L. Smolyar, S. Sanniti, and J. Larson. 2021. “Fostering Critical Pluralism with Systems Theory, Methods, and Heuristics.” Ecological Economics 189 (November): 107171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107171. (cached on academia.edu )
Topic 2:
Kish, Kaitlin. 2020. “Paying Attention: Big Data and Social Advertising as Barriers to Ecological Change.” Sustainability 12 (24): 10589. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122410589. (cached on academia.edu )
Farley, Joshua, and Kaitlin Kish. 2021. “Ecological Economics: The next 30 Years.” Ecological Economics 190 (December): 107211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107211. (special section in private cache, released on registration on Eventbrite).
Registration on Eventbrite includes links to the cache of journal articles.
The Fifteen Fundamental Properties
Pages 144-235 of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order Volume One: The Phenomenon of Life contain a theory of beauty as perceived by humans, conveyed in fifteen “fundamental properties.” Not every property occurs in every beautiful object, but in very beautiful buildings and objects, many of these properties are usually apparent, baked into the logic, structure, and detail.
Here I will briefly explain the fifteen fundamental properties, with reference to an early 20th century ivory dog netsuke and a Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture.
DRS 2022
25th June — 3rd July
We have recently lived through extraordinary times where design in many forms has been necessary to counter the enormous problems we have faced and continue to face in our conflicting coexistence.
How has the discipline of design research responded?
Can design and design research bring the insights and methods needed to transform conflict into collaboration?
Join us in Bilbao for DRS2022, a hybrid conference with unique participation opportunities and a showcase for the best in design research. Whatever your orientation to design research we encourage you to participate, to show the true diversity and potential of our discipline.
DRS2022 is hosted by the city of Bilbao in association with the University of the Basque Country (Universidad del País Vasco) and the wider ecosystem of local academic and design institutions. In 2014 Bilbao became a member of the UNESCO City of Design network. As such, it hosts a permanent Design and Creativity Council with a mission to promote design-oriented urban policies and to integrate goals related to the cultural and creative industries into local development plans. Bilbao recently joined the Global Destination Sustainability Index with a commitment to meet specific guidelines for the development of more sustainable conferences.
DRS2022 is also hosted online in a hybrid mode, with opportunities for new interactions between the place-based and online conferences. The extended conference format will give you the chance to experience the energy and creativity of Bilbao wherever you choose to participate from.
Thalys has been in the news this week – because its proposed merger with Eurostar is supposedly back on…
… so it’s time to examine why a rent seeking monopolist firm like Thalys can even exist on the Brussels-Paris route
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Alexander Bogdanov
For more information, please see here.
Submission Deadline: 15 January 2022
Please note all special issue papers must be submitted through the ScholarOne site: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/srbs
(Previously published in: The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov (eds.). Cambridge MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Book, 2001, pp. 499-538.)
Complex systems are characterised by randomness and disorder and are difficult to understand. This year’s Prize recognises new methods for describing them and predicting their long-term behaviour.
One complex system of vital importance to humankind is Earth’s climate. Syukuro Manabe demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models.
About ten years later, Klaus Hasselmann created a model that links together weather and climate, thus answering the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic. He also developed methods for identifying specific signals, fingerprints, that both natural phenomena…
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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