by stuart candy at 9:16 AM
"Form Follows Fable"
A Futures Salon with Bryan Boyer
Friedman Room, Saunders Hall 624
2pm-330pm, Wednesday 1 April 02009
Once all the zoning laws have been cited, the richness of the site exposed as constructed, the minutia of fabrication turn out to be simply minutia, the algorithms run their course, the discipline disbanded, and the history books pillaged bare and then burnt... what is left to stand on? What tiny, shoddy piece of ground may the designer find to plant their feet, grab hold of their bootstraps, and make manifest a project? There's no ground left at all; we're all astronauts orbiting a toxic earth, a hunk of rock on which we find it increasingly difficult to agree upon anything. The boundaries and edges that architects have been trained to exploit - between cultures, places, ideologies - are vanishing with the breathable air of our atmosphere.
Finding themselves floating, the architect now awakens and does what any sufficiently bored person would: they dream up stories that explain the universe, their place in it, the things around them, and their own output. In its best moments, architecture, much like a fable, operates as an alternate reality engine by giving shape, texture, and orientation to the vacuum. Letting Form Follow Fable yields a rich architecture of mysteries and clues that is designed to be legible to the client, the public, and fellow architects alike...BRYAN BOYER is a designer and writer working at the intersection of architecture and politics. Equally at home in the worlds of critical design theory and practice, since 02004 he has been Senior Editor at the online architecture hub, Archinect.com, and he is currently in residence at the Finnish innovation agency, Sitra. Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boyer's internationally-noted Master's thesis project critically and controversially reimagined the United States Capitol building.
The FUTURES SALON is an occasional colloquium series held by the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and has previously featured author-activist Bill McKibben, Jamais Cascio, cofounder of Worldchanging and research affiliate at Institute for the Future, and Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation.
This event is presented with the cooperation of the UHM Department of Political Science.
[Images from
Our New Capitol courtesy of Bryan Boyer]
by dator at 9:37 AM
Computational Social Science is an emerging field "that leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data at a scale that may reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors" that have never been seen before.
See SCIENCE, Vol. 323, 6 February 2009, p. 721-3.
Every time we send an email, make a mobile phone call, swipe our credit card, are caught on a public surveillance video camera and the like this digital information is stored and retained for years. It so far is not available for social science research. If and when it is, with proper safeguards for privacy and the like, it will allow researchers to see patterns of behavior on a scale never even remotely approached.
"To date, research on human interactions has relied mainly on one-time, self-reported data on relationships". All we have had is a blurry snapshot. Soon, we may have data on millions of those relationships over time enabling us to see and understand patterns that were invisible to us before.
Among other things, "such data may provide useful epidemiological insights: How might a pathogen, such as an influenza, driven by physical proximity, spread through a population"?
And many more such patterns of interaction.
Since it is also subject to abuse, developing protocols for using these data is imperative, but if done right, the leap in understanding could be immense.
Read the article.
by dator at 12:38 PM
The pathological economy.
Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, recently gave a kind of "State of the Country" address to the National People's Congress. He spoke at length about challenges to China's economy because of the ongoing global economic collapse. According to a report on the talk by Michael Wines, in the New York Times, Wen "reserved some of his strongest words for the Chinese consumer, whose legendary frugality has kept China's consumer goods and services industries from growing anywhere near the rate of the national economy. Wne said bolstering consumer demand must become 'a long-term, strategic principle and a basic point of departure for stimulating economic growth.'"
If there ever was an utterly honest statement of the utterly stupid and indeed pathological idiocy of the current global economic fantasmogram, this is it: unless people can be forced to buy products they don't want, the system will fail. So don't be frugal, Comrades! Don't save. Don't stop contributing to energy and materials waste and to environmental destruction by refraining from buying unwanted products. NO! Shop till you drop. Consume like there is no tomorrow in order to keep the system staggeringly alive for one more day (though, if you do continue to consume to your--and everyone's--maximum ability, there indeed will be no tomorrow)!
Of course, it is not just the crazy "Communists" in China. This is exactly the same logic behind the Capitalist bailouts and stimulus packages of the US government--our government steals wealth from future generations and gives it to banks so they will loan it to people brainwashed by advertising and other exhortations so they will buy, buy, buy.
The government also gives "stimulus" money to individuals and organizations so they too will buy, buy, buy (or hire, hire, hire), not so much because anyone really needs the products to be bought--much less the jobs to be filled--but simply to keep the insanely destructive system going by keeping people busy at needless jobs so they can be eligible for more credit so they can go further into debt by acquiring needless products.
Sick, sick, sick.
Surely we can do better.
Of course we can! It is no mystery. Simply transition at all deliberate speed to the alternatives offered for decades by Hazel Henderson, James Robertson, Herman Daly, Paul Hawken, Ira Rohter, and many others!
Jim Dator
