Introduction to the United Nations Development Program

Dear Synthesis Folks and friends,

Notes from Behind the Scenes: Preparing the landing strip for our #NextGen Accelerator Labs (PART 1,  PART 2)

These Medium articles provide some background to the #NextGen people in the United Nations Development Program with whom Vangelis and I are working to build the alternate reality + role playing scenario game:  “Navigating Crisis 2020” …

The allied younger generations in that program seem be maturely embedded in their respective nations' socio-political and economic milieus, open to ways of thinking that are fresh for that sector,  and committed to ameliorating effects of structural violence.   This comes across with some urgency in my direct conversations with some of the younger staff in South Asia, Africa, South America.  

It will be interesting to see how we can step up our game with experiential / enactive methods that are more rigorous, affectively engaged, and thoughtful than the “innovation” or “accelerator” exercises typical in the “progressive” business / design / technology  world.  It will also be enlightening to work outside the ideological scaffolding of commercial high tech typical of media labs in the United States and Western Europe.  Minimax design in action: from unplugged … custom tech, in that order.

Xin Wei

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UNDP awards Synthesis Sea Change 2020 horizon scan

Good news: the United Nations Development Program has awarded Synthesis / ASU the contract for doing the Horizon Scan for emerging techniques, technologies, design methods, and learning sites that prepare the United Nations Development Program staff and constituents to meet unpredictable, inextricably entangled sociotechnical and environmental challenges.     Thanks to Sander for lending his experience and reputation to this brief but intense project.  And thanks to Theo Eckhardt and Emily Fassett for working intricately with the United Nations and Knowledge Enterprise to forge this exceptional consultancy.  

Project Title:
Sea Change 2020
Duration:
29 September 2020 - 31 December 2020
Principal faculty:
Prof. Sha Xin Wei, AME, Synthesis, ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems
Prof. Sander van der Leeuw, SHESC, ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems 
Dr. Brandon Mechtley, Synthesis, Synthesis
+ a PhD research assistant with Synthesis


 (This is independent of the Alternate Reality game / RPG that Synthesis is developing for UNDP's #NextGen event, also this Fall.)                                                                                           
Xin Wei
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Synthesis B21 Prototyping Social Forms: Ylfa Muindi developing “im-mediate relations” with forests and other “ex-dividuated” non-human others

Dear Building21 friends and Prototyping Social Forms folks:  

Thursday June 18, we’ll be meeting in the PSF zoom room at 3:00 - 4:30pm (ET), a half-hour later than usual. If that works for people, we’ll confirm this as our regular schedule.

Tomorrow’s speaker is Ylfa Muindi, who will describe her approach to facilitating encounters with the natural world. Her talk will focus on a current work-in-progress: a series of audio programs that will guide listeners through synesthetic exercises so as to prepare them for a variety natural encounters. This new project aims to connect people from many different walks of life, but especially those who feel alienated from forests, to the incredible lives within forests via a variety of storytelling experiences which are designed to work our empathy muscles, expand our sensual capacities (using all available senses to experience the natural world around us), and deepen our connection to and respect for nature.

You can hear more about the project in this podcast interview, starring both Ylfa and Muindi:

A conversation w/ Ylfa Muindi, about a work-in-progress. Ylfa is working a series of audio programs that will guide listeners through a series of synesthetic exercises and natural encounters.  Ylfa’s work aims (i) to heighten our senses for “ex-dividual” experiences and (ii) to encourage us to develop “immediate relations” with forests and other “ex-dividuated” non-human others. We invite you to take a listen and to share this conversation with others.

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Coccia / Reversing The New Global Monasticism / homes, mated things, and care


A beautiful motivation for portals and sutured spaces, telematically mated objects  — objects that are always so that one is aware of and changes state depending on its siblings' state wherever its siblings may be in the world (thanks to tcp-ip + orc or some other network protocol).  

What of there are things X that always come as a set of initially indiscernibly identical, but responsive siblings,  that cannot be owned separately by just one person?  What if they are designed such that N siblings are always to be adopted by N people?  (Simplest case is twins.)

But more profoundly from the point of view of lived experience, the thing’s state and behavior is then sensitive to its relation not only to you / your home, but to wherever else it's homed as well.      It is crucial NOT to think of these things communicating with each other — NOT transmitting data “from" one “to" the other.   But instead design “the” thing so one relates to it as if it exists in more than one place simultaneously —  in but also not in your home, much like a cat.


Coccia / Reversing The New Global Monasticism / homes, things, and care

A beautiful motivation for portals and sutured spaces, telematically mated objects I’ll say more in my next email, but let me offer you the chance to enjoy Coccia’s graceful and thoughtful essay…

Emanuele Coccia / Reversing The New Global Monasticism … https://fallsemester.org/2020-1/2020/4/17/emanuele-coccia-escaping-the-global-monasticism?fbclid=IwAR3y3dUGCXxy9mHutgEGGmatLLho4D4NT7fmfgQCjvlsIHxNWM5qKuvJ_dE

sutured augmented learning spaces, diagrammatic, 5/8 2 PM MST

See Zimin Proposal (augmented learning environment) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vLwEIvjrWbPanZ2ZLKFOBzEvIzyrkTwmkfkARBTyOgQ/edit

Diagrammatic Master Doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k0Up-3Q0YvZbbBJwmaeqRN0RfsAJeDwGQzaoAmbn7CM/edit

Possible courses and workshops:

• Digital Culture / Media studies / Computational thinking; Media choreography for non-coders (Leonardo?) • Augmented sutured learning environments + diagrammatic + ecology of things • Place-labs (Dartington, Leonardo) • Alter-Economics: alter-finance (EGS, UNDP) • Emergence, Individuation, Ontogenesis, complex systems (EGS, UNDP)

• Trans-course portfolio

Collective intentionality and the further challenge of collective free improvisation

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-020-09484-y?fbclid=IwAR08IWwX_T0sdEp5SU_DqQgtm16lWjq_OZq2Up3bJH8r2iY0-EZR6-wv0xA

Collective intentionality and the further challenge of collective free improvisation

Abstract

The kind of collective improvisation attained by free jazz at the beginning of the sixties appears interesting from the perspective of contemporary debates on collective intentionality for several reasons. The most notable of these, is that it holds a mirror up to what analytical philosophers of action identify as “the complexly interwoven sets of collective intentions” that make a group more than the sum of its parts. But at the same time, free jazz poses a challenge to these philosophical theories of collective intentionality, because what happens is not planned in advance but arises from spontaneous interactions in the group. The second and no less decisive reason is that jazz musicians act together in a very distinctive way, which casts into clear relief the interplay between togetherness and agonism, individual freedom and group commitment, which is contained in every human interaction. In other words, in free jazz we find what Hannah Arendt calls the “paradoxical” or “twofold” character of “human plurality.” Starting with the analysis of two paradigmatic case studies—Charles Mingus’s Folk Forms No. 1 and Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation—my main concern in this paper is to provide a phenomenological account of the individual-yet-plural intentionality that emerges and runs through the improvisatory process in the free jazz case. After having made the negative point that this phenomenon represents a challenge to the analytical theories of collective intentionality, I shall argue that it can be accounted for from a phenomenological perspective. My basic thesis is that the overall cohesiveness of the improvisatory process must be regarded as a meaningful realization of an overall feeling, shared and shaped together by musicians over time—and not as the execution of an advanced plan.