onomatopoeia » commentary

innovation vs design?

pia — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:07:20 +0000

Here are some examples of articles/texts that address the conflation or relationship between design and innovation (I will keep adding to this):

John Thackara’s ‘In the Bubble. Designing for a Complex World’

Business Week, Innovation vs. Design

‘Getting Schooled in Innovation’, Business Week, Jan 3, 2005
“When people talked about innovation in the ’90s, they really meant technology. When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design.”

On this blog, they ask does design have a role in rule making? Or, is design a way of innovating new systems based on new rules? They make this distinction: “Design is testing the rules and innovation is the result.”

oxytocin + the emergent property of love.

pia — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 05:51:34 +0000

Oxytocin is a hormone involved in the process of giving birth, but has also been called the ‘hormone of love‘ and is claimed to be active in feelings of trust . In one report, it is discussed as part of an idea about love as an emergent property of the mammalian autonomic nervous system.

Cancer as a talent.

pia — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:18:31 +0000

Eva Vertes looks to the future of medicine | Video on TED.com.

This is a talk by a 19yr old who is trying to find a way to approach cancer in radically new ways. It had me returning to a future fiction story I started to write in the early-mid 90s, in which the capacity to develop cancerous cells had become a ‘talent’, because we had worked out how to manipulate cancer in desirable directions once it appeared. So, for instance, if you developed bowel cancer, you might direct this cancer into the capacity to digest certain substances in more efficient ways, or a brain cancer might allow for new sensory/thought processing capacities. Basically, the idea was that because cancer cells are versatile, we could use them as design tools.

In what Eva is saying here, cancer cells are perhaps initially part of a repair mechanism. So, perhaps we can fine tune this repair response, as she suggests, but towards new designs for bodily capacity.

love latex?

pia — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:45:45 +0000

How to make your own latex leggings | Making Latex Clothing.

this has got them twittering :-)

and it might just get me making
(not pants though).

extreme change

pia — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 10:28:47 +0000

So what the hell’s going on in the Eastern States of Australia in the last month? Massive floods in the north, drought and unprecedented fire storms in the south, and now earthquakes in Victoria and a cyclone brewing in Queensland. Climate change is what they call it. All this in the midst of the global financial crisis and, in the past days, the numbers showing that Australia is now in recession. Everything seems to be extreme and on the move: an all pervasive climate of change.
Remember the opening line of the web film EPIC 2015?
“It is the best of times, it is the worst of times”.
With the help of google, i now know this refers to a quote from Charles Dickens, which you can read here.
The reason I looked this up was that Philip Adams also refers to it in his column in the today’s weekend Australian magazine. His article is more-or-less a call for wary optimism: that in this time of doom, gloom and radical upheaval, we can still be optimistic about the future, but we should not simply expect the best to happen, but attempt to actively make it happen (well, he says we should “demand” it, but i think we need to be a little more creative than just making demands).
It turns out that Adams is a little cynical of the following, but this is what caught my eye:
“The worst of times? No, these are the best of times, an opportunity for unprecedented creativity. For ideas and innovations in economics, in politics, in environmental strategies.”
While we should be wary of either blind optimism or gloomy doomsayers, constructing future scenarios that enter into a energetic, engaged enthusiasm about possibilities seems vitally important in this climate of change.

emergent devolution

pia — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:54:47 +0000

If the evolution of species is a clear case of emergence, this article would seem to point to a case of emergent devolution, where the demise of a species (honeybees) is arising without any simple cause being attributable.

new scientist article

becoming animal

pia — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 11:14:56 +0000

The rather mind mind-boggling news about the Californian woman giving birth to eight babies (and she already has six), made me think of Patricia Piccinnini’s work, particularly her piece ‘The Young Family’:

The Californian brood was the result of IVF, the embryos being artifically implanted (they apparently didn’t expect all of them to ‘take’). Interesting how biotechnology is leading us closer to our animal companions.

Architecture and processing change

pia — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:49:09 +0000

For many, architects largely offer frameworks for boutique living and institutional arrangements. Ushering in formal expressions of individual luxury and collective organisation, they are servants of power.
This is a caricature. The role of architecture and architects is, can, and should be far more active, experimental and ethically inclined in it’s contribution than such a caricature suggests.
The dimensions of life with which architecture works are many and complex, and the relationships between them are tricky. Formal arrangements affect what we can do and how we can function, how we feel in psychological and physiological ways, and how we understand our relationships with others and the world, or environment, in general.
Amidst this vast and multi-dimensional terrain there is one tricky issue that particularly interests me: the role of formal arrangements in terms of comprehending change.
Processes of change are always occurring, in radically variant degrees and kinds. For reasons I won’t elaborate on right now, it takes longer for us to form a cognitive understanding of events than to grasp those events in a more ‘sensed’, felt or aesthetic way: we can feel and respond to a change far in advance of our capacity to ‘think it through’. The act of designing can be a way of approaching and forming pre-cognitive understandings of what’s happening. Design is an act of expression and an exposure, to others and to oneself, of the forms of organisation through which we feel-think our way through the world. We ‘show’ ourselves how we are ‘wired’ through the things we make, at the same time as we develop and change that ‘wiring’ of relations through negotiating this very act of showing.
So, to return to the beginning of this post, the role of architects and their designs can be far more active in both comprehending, organising and generating change than the ‘servant of power’ caricature suggests.

radioactive journey

pia — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:55:29 +0000

chernobyl-land-of-the-wolves
If you ever consider becoming a nuclear power supporter, have a read through this site. It is very illuminating. One inquisitive, brave woman on a motorcycle takes you on a tour through the remains of the Chernobyl disaster. This is rich material that links with some research done earlier on contamination as an issue: contaminated life

open source urbanism

pia — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:21:50 +0000

Scott Mitchell and Rory Hyde’s project web site is worth a look. Two clever people, doing a very interesting project:
opensourceurbanism