#aboutdesign

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American Express card designed by Alexander McQueen (2004)

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“The Society of Mind” by Marvin Minsky is a foundational work in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Rather than treating the mind as a single unified entity, Minsky proposes that the mind is made up of many smaller “agents” — simple processes that work together in complex ways, like a society.

This book is structured as a series of short, interconnected essays that explore how intelligence, perception, learning, memory, and emotion can emerge from the cooperation of these agents. It blends philosophy, psychology, computer science, and neuroscience, offering a modular theory of consciousness.

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Stelarc

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"wave is a dynamic system in catastrophe, as a result ofits internal organizational instability"

".. because a wave is a dynamic system. It consists of flows of water , which are its parts, and the relations between those flows, which are governed by the natural laws of systems of water that are investigated by the science of hydrodynamics.

The appearances of the wave, its shape and the happy white crest, are actually outputs of this system. They are what they are because the system is organized in the way that it is, and this organization produces an inescapable kind of behaviour.

The cross-section of the wave is parabolic, having two basic forms, the one dominating at the open-sea stage of the wave, and the other dominating later. As the second form is produced from the first, there is a moment when the wave holds the two forms: it has at this moment a wedge shape of 120°. And at this point, as the second form takes over, the wave begins to break—hence the happy white crest.

Now in terms of the dynamic system that we call a wave, the happy white crest is not at all the pretty sign by which what we first called an entity signalizes its existence. For the wave, that crest is its personal catastrophe. What has happened is that the wave has a systemic conflict within it determined by its form of organization, and that this has produced a phase of instability. The happy white crest is the mark of doom upon the wave, because the instability feeds upon itself; and the catastrophic collapse of the wave is an inevitable output of the system.

I am asking “Did you know?” Not “did you know about theoretic hydrodynamics?” but “did you know that a wave is a dynamic system in catastrophe, as a result ofits internal organizational instability?”

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Desigining Freedom by Stafford Beer

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Luigi Colani, Passenger Aircraft, 1977. Photograph courtesy of Colani Trading Ag. -Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

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Walter Pichler, TV Helmet (Portable Living Room), 1967. Photograph by georg Mladek. Photograph courtesy of galerie Elisabeth and Klaus Thoman/ Walter Pichler.

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Metabolism.

Metabolism. Metabolist architects employed biological metaphors, recalled technoscientific images, and evoked the notion of a recreatable genetic architecture in vernacular forms. They strove to mediate between an urbanism of large technical, and institutional infrastructures and the individual freedom with an architecture of customized cells and adaptable temporary configurations of dwellings, which could expand and shrink according to need. With biological language, Metabolists connected traditional models with a historic, universally applicable, and structuralist spatial conceptions. They thus created a base for international communication.

— The Architecture of Metabolism. Inventing a Culture of Resilience. Meike Schalk, Assistant Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Östermalmsgatan 26, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden— Metabolism Reconsidered. Raffaele Pernice, Wasdea University Japan link

Urbanism. If there is to be a “new urbanism” it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous defi- nition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the new only about the “more” and the “modified.” It will not be about the civilized, but about underdevelopment.

— What Ever Happened to Urbanism? Rem Koolhaas. S,M,L,XL, OMA, (with Bruce Mau), The Monicelli Press, New York, 1995, pp. 959/971.

Read: https://www.are.na/block/29720089

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Whole Earth Index Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1969

“The Whole Earth Catalog functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.”

Published: Fall 1969 Collection: Whole Earth Catalogs Links: Internet Archive, Download PDF