Theory Culture and Society has just published the special issue Against Ontology: Chinese Thought and François Jullien. I think this may be an important hinge not only for the polyphonic seminars that Muindi Fanuel Muindi and I are preparing with Cécile Malaspina for the Collège International de Philosophie, but also more widely, for a richer, reciprocal conversation between Chinese and Euro-Anglo thought.
Deeply insightful, original work on hybridizing analog with digital systems that can adaptively attune to boundlessly more complex signals, as a model for more-than-individual, material attunement and orientation, and coordination. (hybrid in Simondonian sense…. A mature paper is in press at Angelaki…
Synthetic cognition: a hybrid
Joshua Bacigalupi
2020
A hybrid system is proposed leveraging the diverse strengths of designed digital and evolved cognitive systems. This project will create a buildable and testable system capable of doing increasing amounts of useful work within the system's dynamic and complex environment. Please visit IforAM.org(tm) for more information about Synthetic Cognition.
Clarification: There are many kinds of machines. There are functional machines that have fixed relationships between all their parts. These machines include most all human fabricated machines to date including the subset of digital machines, which are Turing equivalent.
This project in synthetic cognition proposes a novel type of machine, which is not limited to fixed internal relations among parts. I call this new type "Superimposed Computation". This new type is discussed further in this short video:
http://tinyurl.com/cjaugjx
More summary videos about this project can be found here:
http://iforam.org/media
More specifically, here's a link to a summary of a talk focusing on the theory given at the cybernetics symposium at Asilomar last year:
http://bit.ly/19cpRv4.
Paper published as of 12/13 on the theory portion of this talk:
http://bit.ly/1huybdmContact me if interested in reading paper.
A full research proposal is here:
http://iforam.org/media/publications
And, a summary of the proposal is here:
http://tinyurl.com/7ccj9rk
Pedro Lopes @ U Chicago CS has a provocative research program that invites critical attention.
"integrating interfaces with the human body—exploring the interface paradigm that supersedes wearables. These include:
muscle stimulation wearables that allow users
to manipulate tools they have never seen before or that accelerate
reaction time, or a device that leverages
the smell to create an illusion of temperature.”
(Pedro came from Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam, also worth tracking…)
I'm not at all advocating that we blindly adopt such techniques in our fashion+tech work. Indeed, it may be timely to look ahead of the state of industrial craft (e.g Google+Levi's Jacquard )
and see where critical-creative attention ought to bite.
Cheers!
Xin Wei
From: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati <pr@carloratti.com>
Date: April 18, 2023 at 7:57:41 AM EDT
To: SHAXINWEI@gmail.com
Subject: Reimagining e-Mobility with the World’s Largest Board Game
Reply-To: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati <pr@carloratti.com>
Reimagining e-Mobility with the World’s Largest Board Game
newsletter APRIL 2023
REIMAGINING E-MOBILITY WITH THE WORLD’S
LARGEST BOARD GAME
Italo Rota and CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati present “Walk the Talk”, an installation which dramatically transforms Milan’s Botanical Garden into a 3,500-square-meter interactive game. Over 400 energy-harvesting luminescent tiles form multiple pathways, engaging players in the discourse underlying the future of urban mobility. Developed for Eni, the project is on view during Milan Design Week through April 26, 2023.
More information and images available upon request through pr@carloratti.com.
Architect Italo Rota and international design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati have unveiled a project for Milan Design Week 2023 that transforms the city’s Botanical Garden into the largest game board in the world. Designed as an accessible “choose your own path” adventure, “Walk the Talk” challenges players to discover and reflect on everyday choices for a sustainable mobility. The installation features energy-harvesting tiles that produce dynamic light and sound effects during day and night. The project is developed for global energy company Eni as part of the Design Week’s INTERNI Re-evolution exhibition, and will be open to the public until 26th April 2023.
The “Walk the Talk” path is structured as a metaphorical stroll around Milan, featuring the city’s major landmarks. It is made up of over 400 wooden tiles and 32 different types of icons spread across 3500 square meters. Each one represents either an obstacle or a solution to the game’s theme of urban mobility: from traffic to public transportation and electric car sharing. Players – either alone or in tandem with others – navigate their way through the city by finding sustainable solutions to challenges such as overcrowded neighborhoods or lack of pedestrian areas. Their route depends on the choices they make, as they encounter various crossroads and intersections along the way.
The path’s colored tiles are produced with a combination of special luminescent varnishes and films which harvest and store energy during the day and release a prolonged glow after dusk. This glowing effect is enhanced by a low-intensity lighting system throughout the garden, adding an atmospheric quality to the space and allowing visitors to play the game after dark. The “Walk the Talk” path is designed along with game designer collective Blob Factory Gaming studio, and with graphic design concept by studio FM milano.
“Walk the Talk” uses the gaming framework to form a dialogue between the visitor and Milan’s much-loved Botanical Garden. It provides a participatory way to engage with this historical location and with the city, as well as an experience that people can share.” says Italo Rota, founder of Italo Rota Building Office.
“The future of mobility presents substantial challenges which require collective understanding and participation,” says Carlo Ratti, founding partner at CRA and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab: “At a time when digital gamification is everywhere, we wanted to experiment with a physical game board - one of the largest ever made. “Walk the Talk” is an accessible experience to help jumpstart an important conversation about the future of mobility.”
CRA has explored the theme of sustainable urban mobility in a variety of projects, both as a design studio and by drawing on research conducted by Carlo Ratti’s MIT Senseable City Lab. Projects include the New Deal Paris, an exhibition project envisioning how Paris’ highway might look like in 2050 with the widespread adoption of autonomous mobility; and Anas Smart Road, a collaboration with Italy’s leading road agency ANAS to implement a digitally-integrated highway to improve safety conditions and traffic management. In the city of Milan, CRA has designed the master plan for MIND-Milano Innovation District (former site of 2015’s World Expo), featuring offices, research centers, the future Science Campus of the University of Milan, and a neighborhood planned for shared, self-driving shuttles.
DOWNLOAD HI-RES IMAGES + READ THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE
CREDITS
Walk the Talk
A project by Italo Rota and CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati
Client: ENI
Location: Orto Botanico, Brera, Milan, Italy (opening times: 10:00-22:00)
Part of INTERNI Design Re-Evolution exhibition within the Milan Design Week 2023
Opening dates: 18-26 April 2023
CRA Team: Carlo Ratti (founder), Andrea Cassi (Partner in Charge), Chiara Morandini (Project Manager), Gabriele Sacchi, Gary di Silvio, Gianluca Zimbardi
Italo Rota Team: Italo Rota, Francesca Grassi
Developed with Blob Factory Gaming Studio; Graphic concept by studio FM milano
Photo credits: Marco Beck Peccoz
Video credits: Davide Bernardis (creative direction), Andrea Zendali (videographer)
More information is available upon request: pr@carloratti.com
VISIT US AT MILAN FURNITURE FAIR Not to be missed: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati is at Milan’s Furniture Fair this year with Wood You Believe?, a project developed for Gruppo Saviola, the international leader in the manufacturing of fully recycled timber panels. The experimental pavilion, designed by CRA with Italo Rota, features a striking facade made from four tons of discarded wooden objects, granting waste materials a second life – a key tenet of the Circular Economy. Check out the preview photographs here - more to come soon! Open until April 23, 2023.
IN PROGRESS: EXPO 2030 ROMA Three cities are left in the race to host the World Expo 2030: Rome, Riyadh, and Busan. This week, the secretary of the Bureau International des Expositions lands in the Italian capital for an official inspection visit - one of the most crucial steps of the selection process. As CRA led the team which developed the master plan for Rome’s bid to the international exhibition, you can read more about the project vision in Carlo Ratti’s op-ed for Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s most respected dailies.
ASPEN INSTITUTE ROUNDTABLE
MILAN, IT
21 APRIL
Carlo Ratti will host a panel discussion by the Aspen Institute, dissecting design of the new generation through the lenses of technology and sustainability.
ANNUAL INVESTMENT MEETING
ABU DHABI, AE
8-10 MAY
In this annual global congress, Carlo will moderate a conversation exploring how cities can navigate transformational technologies of the future.
If autonomous vehicles are to become the cornerstones of future urban mobility, the roads on which they move are just as important in making transportation smoother and greener. CRA talked with CNN about how flexible design schemes – such as modular pavements to assign usage of the same road to different groups at different hours – could help drivers and pedestrians alike.
A preview of Walk the Talk – Moving Energy, the installation created by Italo Rota and CRA for Eni, was spotlighted by Dezeen as one of the 12 “unmissable exhibitions” during Milan Design Week. Visitor enter a life-size “game board” with light and sound effects spread across the garden, and find their way through by engaging with ideas on sustainable mobility. See it in person at the Brera Botanical Garden!
Monocle’s April issue features an interview with Carlo Ratti on integrating nature into urban spaces. Digital technologies could be a useful device to accelerate it, but more importantly, we need to identify the right approach to use them: trials and errors are inevitable, and feedback loops are key to perfecting designs to make cities greener and more livable.
Flatburn is the latest addition to the City Scanner series by MIT Senseable City Lab directed by Carlo. The open-sourced platform empowers individuals to build their own low-cost, solar-powered sensing devices to monitor the air quality of their areas, before engaging with the community to analyze the data. Find out more in Fast Company’s coverage.
Carlo’s op-ed addresses the debate around 15-minute cities: conspiracy theories claim that they confine within their neighborhoods. In fact, 15-minute cities give their residents the freedom to access everyday necessities within a short distance. Thus saving longer commutes for leisure and socialization.
Emanuele Rossetti, CEO of CRA Group, explains in this interview how AI and robotics are adopted across the company. From a robot bartender startup to decarbonization oriented infrastructure that manage thermal heat storage, they make cities “come alive” and become more responsive to our needs.
CRA is hiring! We are looking for new talents to join our offices in Turin and New York. To discover all the vacancies and send in your application, visit our JOBS page. We look forward to working with you!
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NEW YORK
LONDON26 corso Q. Sella
10131 - Torino, Italy
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Professor Sha Xin Wei will offer a workshop at CrossLabs on
Navigating Indeterminacy and Experiential Experiment
26 April 2023, 19:00-22:00 EST (Youtube stream)
After rapidly rehearsing some fundamental mathematical, conceptual, and methodological challenges to present day complexity science, we’ll explore alternatives for next-gen science of complex adaptive systems, drawing from mathematics, theoretical biology, process philosophy, and the art and technologies of responsive environments.
Dear Colleagues,
It is my great pleasure to invite you both to a unique conference on a topic that is currently emerging in debates in a wide range of disciplines confronted with the question why, while there is
an acknowledged urgency to deal with climate change, environmental change and socio-political change, so little is actually happening. It brings together a very interesting group of high-level speakers, both academics
and practitioners on environmental change. It is to be held May 15-17, in the auditorium of the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm. It is organized by the Para Limes Foundation in the Netherlands and sponsored by ASU, Princeton, the Stockholm Resilience Center
and the Beijer Institute for Environmental Economics. The meeting will be webcast and is thus accessible to ASU faculty and students!
…
HERE you
find a poster for the conference and the conference page for the website. You can REGISTER from
both.
Many, many thanks for any help you can give me in publicizing this.
Yours truly,
Sander van der Leeuw
School of Complex Adaptive Systems
Global Futures Lab, ASU
Dear Friends!
Sam Aros Mitchell
27 Nov 2021, Mn Artists
"Reframing the concept of spectatorship: on witnessing, the impossibility of non-places, and how observation means being affected by every living being…"
This may be familiar to friends in dance and performance who have been working with resonant intentions, but it’s worth further transduction, yes?
With fond greetings :)
Xin Wei
• UNESCO Open Learning Course on Anticipatory Governance, 31 Oct 2021 to 30 Aug 2022
• Rika Preiser, Associate Professor
Centre for Sustainability Transitions, Stellenbosch University, South AfricaUNESCO Chair in Complexity and Transformative Futures
My publications focus on how complexity thinking (as a form of relational knowing) can inform areas of sustainability, social-ecological resilience, inequalities and global change, ethics, the arts, and transformative futures research. All these areas are shaped by complex dynamics and a diversity of conflicting values and worldviews that unfold and respond in the face of fundamental uncertainty and change.
A remarkable resource for complexity thinking, transformative futures, anticipatory governance, critique as stricture. I met Rita as one of the happy discoveries at the Anticipations Conference. (might also want connect to the World Bank folks who Muindi and I bumped into at Anticipations.)
From her research statement:
FOCUS:
From a philosophical perspective, the acknowledgement of complexity requires that we engage critically and ethically with the assumptions of what we perceive to be real, intelligible, and relevant in the world. I am interested in exploring theories, concepts and methods that can help us understand the characteristics and behaviors of interconnected complex human-environment interactions and the ethical implications these pose to the challenges we currently face on our planet. I work in inter- and transdisciplinary intersections across academia and societal domains to synthesize and integrate complexity-based scholarship, inquiry and engaged research practice to foster multiple ways of knowing, learning and teaching.
My publications focus on how complexity thinking (as a form of relational knowing) can inform areas of sustainability, social-ecological resilience, inequalities and global change, ethics, the arts, and transformative futures research. All these areas are shaped by complex dynamics and a diversity of conflicting values and worldviews that unfold and respond in the face of fundamental uncertainty and change.
1 ) Complexity and Transformative Futures
In March 2022, I was awarded the UNESCO Chair in Complexity and Transformative Futures for the period 2022-2027. The aims of the UNESCO Chair are to establish capacity building in complexity literacy and social futures research, practice and outreach.
In March 2022, I was awarded the UNESCO Chair in Complexity and Transformative Futures for the period 2022-2027. The aims of the UNESCO Chair are to establish capacity building in complexity literacy and social futures research, practice and outreach.
The aim of this UNESCO Chair will be to apply the implications of a complex systems-based approach to understanding change processes, by drawing on current insights from the field of Anticipation and Futures literacy to inform transformative processes.
…
My research in this field of interest aims to develop conceptual and practical tools for addressing the misalignment between societal values (ethical, aesthetic, cultural, environmental) and economic value by convening transformative spaces where students, practitioners and decision makers can interrogate the assumptions that inform traditional ways of thinking and doing and to allow safe- enough spaces for reflecting on the limitations that outdated value systems and approaches have on re-imagining transformative processes. This includes developing and building on Futures Literacy as pioneered by UNESCO, and tapping into recent advances in understanding the notion of anticipation and other evolutionary theories of change.
2) Interacting across difference
Notions of ‘diversity’ or ‘difference’ have come to be a central feature in recent theorising in de- coloniality, social-environmental justice and equity.
Notions of ‘diversity’ or ‘difference’ have come to be a central feature in recent theorising in de- coloniality, social-environmental justice and equity.
…
foresight literacy is not the same as futures literacy
Thinking semantically (HI / human intelligence:),
planning,scenario rehearsals,futures thinking,strategic foresight,anticipation, standing in readinessall have very different implicit assumptions on who does this, on whose behalf, — in other words who has power to enact what, mixed with how know-that and know-how are distributed.
Systems thinking, complexity adaptive systems science, abductive heuristics are skill-sets orthogonal to the actor-structures above,I think.
Helga Wild et al have a professional (i.e. making a living outside academy) consultancy practice using mixtures of participatory design, deep ethnography for organizational learning that can be a resource for this offering…
Synthesis Alter-Eco / Prototyping Social Forms friends and fellow travelers!
Here are the recordings from the two techniques workshops and the curated panel that we convened at the Anticipations Conference ASU
18 November 2022
Special thanks to Muindi Muindi for the lucid and inspiring presentations, and for leading these sessions, with key contributions from Mark Balzart (Austria), Vangelis Lympouridis (California), Desiree Foerster (the Netherlands), and Dulmini Perera (Germany), and with Teoma, John, Satinder as well.
I have to say that our sessions created a buzz at the conference, which had 300 participants from 50+ countries in Asia, Africa, as well as EU, UK and the States. There are several conversations with old and new friends that we may well carry on.
Anticipations 2022 marks the end of this cycle of meetings of Synthesis' Alter-Eco / Prototyping Social Forms. We decided over the past few months that there will be no more regular weekly meetings after this November conference, at least for now. Thanks everyone who participated in this precious stream over the past three years. It’s been an inspiring and comforting incubator for us.
Some of us — Muindi, Desiree, Teoma, John, Satinder, … — expressed interest in working on publications or some sort of seed-balls to share our work from the past few years in more durable and widely accessible forms. (This could be some converntional opportunity like a special issue of Leonardo or something more experimental like a diagrammatic polylogue…)
Everyone is invited to join this — do get in touch if you’re interested. Keep an eye out for this project and other events to come!
Thanks to Muindi F. Muindi who created this flyer for the workshops + panel that the Synthesis PSF group is presenting at the Anticipation Conference at ASU, tomorrow Friday Nov 18. The workshops are in-person hands-on experiences, but do get in touch in case you’d like to peek…