Don't just do something, stand there! Reflections on the counterintuitive behavior of complex systems, seen through the eyes of System Dynamics, Systems Thinking and simulation.
From a box of tea:
Sit cross-legged or in a chair with spine straight and feet flat. Curl your tongue down its length and extend slightly past lips, inhale deeply through tongue and exhale through nose. Continue for 1 to 3 minutes. Finally, inhale, pull tongue in and hold breath briefly, exhale and relax. Feel the cool burst of refreshment.
Before doing this exercise or participating in any exercise program, consult your physician.
Hello, doctor? Is it OK if I breathe?
The equinox brought a strange confluence of two recent posts: Brian Eno on intuitive design, via TOP.
The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates “more options” with “greater freedom.” Designers struggle endlessly with a problem that is almost nonexistent for users: “How do we pack the maximum number of options into the minimum space and price?” In my experience, the instruments and tools that endure (because they are loved by their users) have limited options.
Although designers continue to dream of “transparency” – technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt – both creators and audiences actually like technologies with “personality.” A personality is something with which you can have a relationship. Which is why people return to pencils, violins, and the same three guitar chords.
I’m blogging from a 757, somewhere over the North pole, returning from a sustainability meeting in Iceland. The world below is a wilderness of sea ice and clouds. I’d expect brilliant white, but there’s actually a brown haze over the landscape. It’s stratified, much like the odd sight of half-white, half-brown clouds one occasionally sees when flying into a polluted city. Where does it come from? Chinese coal fumes? Russian fires? American SUV tailpipes? Icelandic airplane exhaust?
I’m on my way home from the 29th meeting of the Balaton Group, held in Iceland. Iceland seems to be rising gracefully from it’s financial crisis, with introspection into the values that led to it and a renewed interest in sustainability. Author Andri Magnason visited us at dinner, and talked a bit about Iceland and his wonderful book, Dreamland – A Self-help Manual for a Frightened Nation. I picked up a copy in the airport (can’t get it at amazon yet) and got halfway through on the plane – I highly recommend it.
Another Magnason project is a book of Bonus Poetry, named for and spoofing the Icelandic Walmart.
You are what you eat
My grandfather was 70% water
He was 70% the stream
that trickled past his farm
he was the 30%
the sheep that grazed on his mountain
he was the fish swimming in his lake
he was the cow eating
in his field
he was the stream, he was the grass,
the mountain and the lake
I am not 70% water
perhaps 15% mineral water
the rest is beer and coca cola
I am italian pasta, swiss cheese
danish pork and chinese rice
american ketchup
runs through my veins
you are what you eat
I am a miniature of the world
no
I am a miniature of Bonus
Next week I’m off to the EMF Snowmass conference on climate change impacts and integrated assessment. I’m more excited about the great minds than the great venue, though I can’t complain about the latter. Except this: “to ensure your safety, the steep road winding its way from the mountain’s base to the Top of the Village is heated in the winter to keep it dry.”
The temperance movement may have won the prohibition war (temporarily), but a minor battle was lost just down the road from here, in Butte.
Despite the reformers’ best efforts, Butte’s demimonde was larger and seedier than ever by 1910. That year the federal census recorded Butte’s highly transient population at more than 39,000 and enumerated more than 250 prostitutes. In 1910 when temperance crusader Carrie Nation came to Butte, “booze joints” in nearby Anaconda sported signs that read: “All Nations Are Welcome Except Carrie.” Butte’s morally upright citizens, who had invited Nation, welcomed her with open arms, yet her performance failed to match their expectations. With a flourish and a crowd in tow, the stout sixty-three-year-old Nation charged down the length of Pleasant Alley. Once back on Mercury Street, she stormed into the Irish World, where she met her match in madam May Maloy. The two women joined in a scuffle, and Nation emerged the obvious loser. It was a moment savored by May’s patrons and celebrated with drinks all around. – Ellen Baumler, Montana Historical Society
Nation died 6 months later.
Prohibition was a personal triumph for Carrie Nation, and a disaster for the American nation. In her Smith College commencement address, Rachel Maddow translates that into some great personal advice. She makes the case very nicely for ethics that help us transcend short term pressures and build a future we can be proud of. It’s tough to convince people to act when the dynamics of life are worse-before-better, but the vivid image of Carrie’s hatchetations leading a nation to ruin are effective.
Incidentally, industrial alcohol is still poisoned with methanol today.
Hoisted from the comments – thanks to Cherilyn.
Oct 19-21, 2010 — Boston Mass USA
Climate Interactive and SEED Systems are offering a powerful three-day workshop for innovative climate, energy, and sustainability leaders from business, non-profit, government, and university sectors, led by Drew Jones and Sara Schley.
Attend to develop your capacities in:
• Systems thinking: Causal loop and stock-flow diagramming.
• Leadership: Vision, reflective conversation, consensus building.
• Computer simulation: Using and leading policy-testing with the C-ROADS/C-Learn simulation.
• Policy development: Attendees will play the World Climate exercise.
• Climate, energy, and sustainability strategy: Reflections and insights from international experts.
• Business success stories: What’s working in the new low carbon economy and implications for you.
• Building your network of people sharing aspirations for climate progress.
We will stay connected and collaborate to accelerate progress.
For more information and to register please visit http://climateinteractive.org/events
No, not that silly one.
Controlling Growth by Controlling Attractiveness
In Woodstock, Vermont, everyone’s mad about a highway. In other places the issue is a sewer system or a school. The real issue, of course, is growth. According to Jay Forrester’s Attractiveness Principle (Forrester is a professor of systems analysis at MIT) there’s only one way to control growth — control attractiveness.
…
In a free society if any place is unusually attractive, folks will — no surprise — be attracted there. The most mobile people (the young, the rich, the educated) will get there first. The place will grow until its attractiveness has been reduced by crowded highways, or unemployment, or scarce housing, or pollution, or just plain visual blight. (The most mobile people have moved on by then). When the place is no more attractive than anywhere else, then and only then will it stop growing. What else can stop it?
…
The attractiveness of a place is a complex combination of climate, economy, amenities, scenery. No one can define attractiveness exactly, but people make up their minds about it every day by deciding to move from Hartford or Boston or Westchester County to Vermont (that’s the direction they’re moving at the moment). Millions of human judgements weigh Vermont’s clean air against Boston’s job market and Manhattan’s cost of living. The very different mixes of attractiveness and unattractiveness in those places may seem incommensurable, but people make their comparisons, and eventually attractiveness evens out everywhere.
…
The normal instinct of public officials, including those of Woodstock, is to fix problems and make their community perfect. The more perfect they make it, the more new people show up. What Woodstock needs to do, Forrester would say, is decide what kinds of imperfection it’s willing to live with.
A crowded, unsafe highway? If that’s unacceptable, then choose something else. Super-restrictive zoning, perhaps, or an absolute limit on new curb cuts, or higher property taxes (I know, they’re already too high, but not high enough to stop people from moving in). Bad schools. Bad air. No jobs. Developments so ugly you might as well live in New Jersey. Some sort of whopping surcharge on those developers. Either Woodstock chooses its form of unattractiveness, or the growth process itself chooses.
It takes awhile to absorb the implications of the Attractiveness Principle, because it turns conventional thinking upside down (Forrester is good at doing that). Its implications are not good news for the sort of people who live in Woodstock. The Principle says you can’t live in a privileged bubble of attractiveness, unless you are perpetually young, rich, educated, and on the move at the head of the attractiveness wave. It says that growth is your problem wherever it occurs. It says the only way to be sure of living in an attractive place is to be committed to the attractiveness of every place.
From the Donella Meadows Archive
