:

DE sign:
(Deconstructing in-order to find new meanings)

A blogging space about my personal interests; was made during training in Stockholm #Young Leaders Visitors Program #Ylvp08 it developed into a social bookmarking blog.

I studied #Architecture; interested in #Design #Art #Education #Urban Design #Digital-media #social-media #Inhabited-Environments #Contemporary-Cultures #experimentation #networking #sustainability & more =)


Please Enjoy, feedback recommended.

p.s. sharing is usually out of interest not Blind praise.
This is neither sacred nor political.

Saturday, April 14

Everyone a Changemaker


To form and lead this community of communities, Gallardo had to possess what Drayton calls “cognitive empathy-based living for the good of all.” Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive how people are feeling in evolving circumstances. “For the good of all” is the capacity to build teams.




Bill Drayton invented the term “social entrepreneur” and founded Ashoka, the organization that supports 3,500 of them in 93 countries. He’s a legend in the nonprofit world, so I went to him this week to see if he could offer some clarity and hope in discouraging times. He did not disappoint.
Drayton believes we’re in the middle of a necessary but painful historical transition. For millenniums most people’s lives had a certain pattern. You went to school to learn a trade or a skill — baking, farming or accounting. Then you could go into the work force and make a good living repeating the same skill over the course of your career.
But these days machines can do pretty much anything that’s repetitive. The new world requires a different sort of person. Drayton calls this new sort of person a changemaker.
Changemakers are people who can see the patterns around them, identify the problems in any situation, figure out ways to solve the problem, organize fluid teams, lead collective action and then continually adapt as situations change.

For example, Ashoka fellow Andrés Gallardo is a Mexican who lived in a high crime neighborhood. He created an app, called Haus, that allows people to network with their neighbors. The app has a panic button that alerts everybody in the neighborhood when a crime is happening. It allows neighbors to organize, chat, share crime statistics and work together.

To form and lead this community of communities, Gallardo had to possess what Drayton calls “cognitive empathy-based living for the good of all.” Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive how people are feeling in evolving circumstances. “For the good of all” is the capacity to build teams.

It doesn’t matter if you are working in the cafeteria or the inspection line of a plant, companies will now only hire people who can see problems and organize responses.
Millions of people already live with this mind-set. But a lot of people still inhabit the world of following rules and repetitive skills. They hear society telling them: “We don’t need you. We don’t need your kids, either.” Of course, those people go into reactionary mode and strike back.
The central challenge of our time, Drayton says, is to make everyone a changemaker. To do that you start young. Your kid is 12. She tells you about some problem — the other kids at school are systematically mean to special-needs students. This is a big moment. You pause what you are doing and ask her if there’s anything she thinks she can do to solve the problem, not just for this kid but for the next time it happens, too.

Very few kids take action to solve the first problem they see, but eventually they come back having conceived and owning an idea. They organize their friends and do something. The adult job now is to get out of the way. Put the kids in charge.
Once a kid has had an idea, built a team and changed her world, she’s a changemaker. She has the power. She’ll go on to organize more teams. She will always be needed.
Drayton asks parents: “Does your daughter know that she is a changemaker? Is she practicing changemaking?” He tells them: “If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to these questions, you have urgent work to do.”
In an earlier era, he says, society realized it needed universal literacy. Today, schools have to develop the curriculums and assessments to make the changemaking mentality universal. They have to understand this is their criteria for success.
Ashoka has studied social movements to find out how this kind of mental shift can be promoted. It turns out that successful movements take similar steps.
First, they gather a group of powerful and hungry co-leading organizations. (Ashoka is working with Arizona State and George Mason University.) Second, the group is opened to everybody. (You never know who is going to come up with the crucial idea.) Third, the movement creates soap operas with daily episodes. (The civil rights movement created televised dramas with good guys and bad guys, like the march from Selma.)
I wonder if everybody wants to be a changemaker in the Drayton mold. I wonder about any social vision that isn’t fundamentally political. You can have a nation filled with local changemakers, but if the government is rotten their work comes to little. The social sector has never fully grappled with the permanent presence of sin.

But Drayton’s genius is his capacity to identify new social categories. Since he invented the social entrepreneur category 36 years ago, hundreds of thousands of people have said, “Yes, that’s what I want to be.” The changemaker is an expansion of that social type.
Social transformation flows from personal transformation. You change the world when you hold up a new and more attractive way to live. And Drayton wants to make universal a quality many people don’t even see: agency.
Millions of people don’t feel that they can take control of their own lives. If we could give everyone the chance to experience an agency moment, to express love and respect in action, the ramifications really would change the world.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/opinion/changemaker-social-entrepreneur.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

Wednesday, November 29

SCEWC 2017

Smart City Expo World Congress 2017 ::: SCEWC 2017

Society - Advancing the Health and Wellbeing of People in Cities



Cities play an essential role in shaping human health. Indeed, there is evidence to support positive connections between the physical environment and people’s wellbeing. Still, the risks of adverse impacts such as air pollution, congested traffic and equity issues in terms of access to healthcare are poorly developed. What are the basic services to be provided in a digital society? What kind of tools are needed to improve urban health?



Safe Cities - Securing the Digital City: Cyber threats and Responses



As cities embrace digital infrastructures to improve the overall quality of life, new potential cyberattacks due to numerous vulnerabilities may arise. This influences how cities design, implement and maintain their cyberdefences. Distributed ledger technologies offer considerable promise. How can public safety organizations learn to leverage these technologies appropriately? What role can self-assessment tools play in securing the digital city? Keywords: blockchain; cybersecurity; data protection; distributed ledger technology; endpoint security; IoT Security; Low-Power-Wide-Area Network (LPWAN); smart contracts; privacy



Governance - Standards for Smart Cities



In a path towards smarter cities, standardization plays a key role by supporting the widespread adoption of common approaches and ensuring consistent outcomes as well as compatibility among technologies and services. Yet cities are complex and multi-dimensional systems, thus no single standards organization can provide everything needed. How can the standards world better collaborate to serve the needs of cities and their citizens to tackle common challenges?



Plenary Session - Keep Cities Moving: Towards New Mobility Models


Changes in urban mobility no longer follow traditional patterns and policy makers need to deal with an increasing number of alternatives, often supported by digital technologies that respond flexibly to users’ needs. How can urban transport policy better leverage new and emerging mobility choices in cities? How can city leaders better translate current user behavior towards transport to provide sustainable travel and keep cities moving?


Data&Technology - Rethinking Urban Infrastructures in the Digital Age

The infrastructure that cities provide has evolved as needs changed and opportunities arose. Today, sensors check air quality, roadway cameras help with traffic flow and new energy systems have come to fruition. This evolution has the potential to have the greatest impact, as long as it involves citizens and leverages their creativity and innovation. How can local governments rethink urban infrastructures so that they better serve city dwellers?


Sustainability - Affordable Housing and Sustainable Living



Housing affordability has turned into the topic du jour in media as prices have shot up dramatically in many places while gentrification -which occurs when wealthier people arrive in an existing neighborhood and causes changes in the community-, alters the face of cities. What measures urban leaders need to take to promote sustainable living and preserve diversity, a characteristic that make cities so dynamic and desirable in the first place?

Wednesday, November 22

Web Summit 17

Web Summit 2017


Web Summit 2017 - Day 1 - Centre Stage - When the machines outsmart us.. from Web Summit on Vimeo.
Max Tegmark, MIT physicist and researcher, president of the Future of Life Institute and the author of the new NY Times Bestseller "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" presents the most provocative ideas from his book. Will machines outsmart us on all tasks within decades, as many industry leaders believe? If so, how can we make humanity flourish rather than flounder?

Max Tegmark

President, Future of Life Institute


Web Summit 2017 - Day 1 - Centre Stage - Will AI save us or destroy us? from Web Summit on Vimeo.
Will artificial intelligence spell the end of humanity? Let's ask two robots. Einstein and Sophia will debate what AI truly means for those of us made out of flesh and blood.

Professor Einstein Robot

Robot, Hanson Robotics

Sophia the Robot

Chief Humanoid, Hanson Robotics & SingularityNET

Ben Goertzel


Chief Scientist, Hanson Robotics & SingularityNET


Friday, November 17

1.61803398875 Design Hoax?

1.61803398875 Design Hoax?
Is the Golden Ratio Fact or Fiction? 

I've already posted a video lecture by Stanford Mathematics Professor, Keith Devlin titled Mathematical Thinking, it discussed where the Golden Ration has proved valid and where it was a complete fiction... 

There have been several articles also posted on the subject entailing that the famous Golden Ratio is a complete historical design hoax! that was passed on by many architects, builders and made an ideal of by many throughout history!? With no scientific background what so ever...
Following will embed article share by Co.Design & Arch Daily 
Enjoy...


The Golden Ratio: Design’s Biggest Myth

The golden ratio is total nonsense in design. Here’s why.

In the world of art, architecture, and design, the golden ratio has earned a tremendous reputation. Greats like Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí have used the number in their work. The Parthenon, the Pyramids at Giza, the paintings of Michelangelo, the Mona Lisa, even the Apple logo are all said to incorporate it.







It’s bullshit. The golden ratio’s aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don’t use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There’s also no science to really back it up. Those who believe the golden ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam.

WHAT IS THE GOLDEN RATIO?

First described in Euclid’s Elements 2,300 years ago, the established definition is this: two objects are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. The value this works out to is usually written as 1.6180. The most famous application of the golden ratio is the so-called golden rectangle, which can be split into a perfect square, and a smaller rectangle that has the same aspect ratio as the rectangle it was cut away from. You can apply this theory to a larger number of objects by similarly splitting them down.
In plain English: if you have two objects (or a single object that can be split into two objects, like the golden rectangle), and if, after you do the math above, you get the number 1.6180, it’s usually accepted that those two objects fall within the golden ratio. Except there’s a problem. When you do the math, the golden ratio doesn’t come out to 1.6180. It comes out to 1.6180339887… And the decimal points go on forever.
“Strictly speaking, it’s impossible for anything in the real-world to fall into the golden ratio, because it’s an irrational number,” says Keith Devlin, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. You can get close with more standard aspect ratios. The iPad’s 3:2 display, or the 16:9 display on your HDTV all “float around it,” Devlin says. But the golden ratio is like pi. Just as it’s impossible to find a perfect circle in the real world, the golden ratio cannot strictly be applied to any real world object. It’s always going to be a little off.

THE GOLDEN RATIO AS MOZART EFFECT

It’s pedantic, sure. Isn’t 1.6180 close enough? Yes, it probably would be, if there were anything to scientifically support the notion that the golden ratio had any bearing on why we find certain objects like the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa aesthetically pleasing.
But there isn’t. Devlin says the idea that the golden ratio has any relationship to aesthetics at all comes primarily from two people, one of whom was misquoted, and the other of whom was just making shit up.
The first guy was Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar who wrote a book called De Divina Proportione back in 1509, which was named after the golden ratio. Weirdly, in his book, Pacioli didn’t argue for a golden ratio-based theory of aesthetics as it should be applied to art, architecture, and design: he instead espoused the Vitruvian system of rational proportions, after the first-century Roman architect, Vitruvius. The golden ratio view was misattributed to Pacioli in 1799, according to Mario Livio, the guy who literally wrote the book on the golden ratio. But Pacioli was close friends with Leonardo da Vinci, whose works enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity in the 19th century. Since Da Vinci illustrated De Divina Proportione, it was soon being said that Da Vinci himself used the golden ratio as the secret math behind his exquisitely beautiful paintings.
One guy who believed this was Adolf Zeising. “He’s the guy you really want to burn at the stake for the reputation of the golden ratio,” Devlin laughs. Zeising was a German psychologist who argued that the golden ratio was a universal law that described “beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art… which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical.”
He was a long-winded guy. The only problem with Zeising was he saw patterns where none exist. For example, Zeising argued that the golden ratio could be applied to the human body by taking the height from a person’s navel to his toes, then dividing it by the person’s total height. These are just arbitrary body parts, crammed into a formula, Devlin says: “When measuring anything as complex as the human body, it’s easy to come up with examples of ratios that are very near to 1.6.”
But it didn’t matter if it was made up or not. Zeising’s theories became extremely popular, “the 19th-century equivalent of the Mozart Effect,” according to Devlin, referring to the belief that listening to classical music improves your intelligence. And it never really went away. In the 20th century, the famous Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier based his Modulor system of anthropometric proportions on the golden ratio. Dalí painted his masterpiece The Sacrament of the Last Supper on a canvas shaped like a golden rectangle. Meanwhile, art historians started combing back through the great designs of history, trying to retroactively apply the golden ratio to Stonehenge, Rembrandt, the Chatres Cathedral, and Seurat. The link between the golden ratio and beauty has been a canard of the world of art, architecture, and design ever since.

YOU DON’T REALLY PREFER THE GOLDEN RATIO

In the real world, people don’t necessarily prefer the golden ratio.
Devlin tells me that, as part of an ongoing, unpublished exercise at Stanford, he has worked with the university’s psychology department to ask hundreds of students over the years what their favorite rectangle is. He shows the students collections of rectangles, then asks them pick out their favorite one. If there were any truth behind the idea that the golden ratio is key to beautiful aesthetics, the students would pick out the rectangle closest to a golden rectangle. But they don’t. They pick seemingly at random. And if you ask them to repeat the exercise, they pick different rectangles. “It’s a very useful way to show new psychology students the complexity of human perception,” Devlin says. And it doesn’t show that the golden ratio is more aesthetically pleasing to people at all.
Devlin’s experiments aren’t the only ones to show people don’t prefer the golden ratio. A study from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley found that, on average, consumers prefer rectangles that are in the range of 1.414 and 1.732. The range contains the golden rectangle, but its exact dimensions are not the clear favorite.

MANY OF TODAY’S DESIGNERS DON’T THINK IT’S USEFUL

The designers we spoke to about the golden ratio don’t actually find it to be very useful, anyway.
Richard Meier, the legendary architect behind the Getty Center and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, admits that when he first started his career, he had an architect’s triangle made that matched the golden ratio, but he had never once designed his buildings keeping the golden ratio in mind. “There are so many other numbers and formulas that are more important when designing a building,” he tells me by phone, referring to formulas that can calculate the maximum size certain spaces can be, or ones that can determine structural load.
Alisa Andrasek, the designer behind Biothing, an online repository of computational designs, agrees. “In my own work, I can’t ever recall using the golden ratio,” Andrasek writes in an email. “I can imagine embedding the golden ratio into different systems as additional ‘spice,’ but I can hardly imagine it driving the whole design as it did historically… it is way too simplistic.”
Giorgia Lupi of Accurat, the Italian design and innovation firm, says that, at best, the golden ratio is as important to designers as any other compositional rule, such as the rule of thirds: maybe a fine rule-of-thumb, but one that good designers will feel free to reject. “I don’t really know, in practice, how many designers deliberately employ the golden ratio,” she writes. “I personally have never worked with it our used it in my projects.”
Of the designers we spoke to, industrial designer Yves Béhar of Fuseproject is perhaps kindest to the golden ratio. “I sometimes look at the golden ratio as I observe proportions of the products and graphics we create, but it’s more informational than dogmatic,” he tells me. Even then, he never sets out to design something with the golden ratio in mind. “It’s important as a tool, but not a rule.”
Even designers who are also mathematicians are skeptical of the golden ratio’s use in design. Edmund Harriss is a clinical assistant professor in the University of Arkansas’ mathematics department who uses many formulas to help generate new works of art. But Harriss says that the golden ratio is, at best, just one of many tools at a mathematically inclined designer’s fingertips. “It is a simple number in many ways, and as a result it does turn up in a wide variety of places…” Harriss tells me by email. “[But] it is certainly not the universal formula behind aesthetic beauty.”

WHY DOES THE MYTH PERSIST?

If the golden ratio’s aesthetic merit is so flimsy, then why does the myth persist?
Devlin says it’s simple. “We’re creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning,” he says. It’s not in our DNA to be comfortable with arbitrary things like aesthetics, so we try to back them up with our often limited grasp of math. But most people don’t really understand math, or how even a simple formula like the golden ratio applies to complex system, so we can’t error-check ourselves. “People think they see the golden ratio around them, in the natural world and the objects they love, but they can’t actually substantiate it,” Devlin tells me. “They are victims to their natural desire to find meaning in the pattern of the universe, without the math skills to tell them that the patterns they think they see are illusory.” If you see the golden ratio in your favorite designs, you’re probably seeing things.

Is the Golden Ratio Design's Greatest Hoax?


For more than 150 years, the Golden Ratio has been one of the main tenets of design, informing generations of architects, designers, and artists. From Le Corbusier to AppleVitruvius to Da Vinci, the ratio purportedly dictates which forms will be found aesthetically pleasing.  Yet mathematicians and designers have grown skeptical of the practical applications of the Golden Ratio, with Edmund Harriss of the University of Arkansas' mathematics department putting it at its most simple: "It is certainly not the universal formula behind aesthetic beauty." Writing for Fast Co. Design, John Brownlee collates sources as diverse as the mathematics department at Stanford University to Richard Meier, laying out the case against what may just be design's greatest hoax. Read the full article here.


embracing it...












BBC Universe Documentary The Great Math Mystery BBC Documentary






Fibonacci Melody: Greg Sheehan at TEDxSydney

Greg Sheehan is one of Australia's premier and most innovative percussionists widely regarded internationally as a leader in his field. As a performer, he is significantly represented in the last three decades of Australian contemporary music as both a live band member and studio musician on hundreds of recordings. Greg has created a melody from the first 8 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence and performs it in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House for TEDxSydney 2013. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)



The Secret Mathematicians - Professor Marcus du Sautoy


Professor du Sautoy examines the way that Mathematics has overtly and covertly inspired some of the greatest artists. He examines how they might be considered as secret mathematicians: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and... From composers to painters, writers to choreographers, the mathematician's palette of shapes, patterns and numbers has proved a powerful inspiration. Artists can be subconsciously drawn to the same structures that fascinate mathematicians as they hunt for interesting new structures to frame their creative process.

Professor du Sautoy will explore the hidden mathematical ideas that underpin the creative output of well-known artists and reveal that the work of the mathematician is also driven by strong aesthetic values. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and... Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Tuesday, September 12

#Unite4Heritage

#Unite4Heritage is a phot-competition launched by UNESCO in aims of documenting built Heritage around the world, it is organised by WikiMedia with ten international Prizes & awards.
"All winners of the international contest will receive a Wiki Loves Monuments t-shirt, pin, sticker, and a certificate. On top of these, the following prizes will be awarded to the international winners:
  1. Canon DSLR EOS 5D Mark IV plus Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L USM lens * and a printed copy of their winning photo signed by Maestro Plácido Domingo, the president of Europa Nostra. ***
  2. Up to €1500 in in-kind prize**
  3. Up to €1200 in in-kind prize**
  4. Up to €1000 in in-kind prize**
  5. Up to €800 in in-kind prize**
  6. Up to €500 in in-kind prize**
  7. Up to €400 in in-kind prize**
  8. Up to €300 in in-kind prize**
  9. Up to €200 in in-kind prize**
  10. Up to €100 in in-kind prize**
*Thanks to the anonymous donor who has made this prize possible
** This amount can be used for buying equipment or other materials related to photography or built cultural heritage (camera equipment, subscription to relevant journals, books, etc.), chosen by the winner and the prize coordinator jointly, before 2017-12-23. The winner will be able to propose the exact prize and vendor, pending approval by the prize coordinator (considering convenience and scope reasons). The value of the prize includes any customs or taxes that may need to be paid at the time of purchase to send the prize to the recipient. Any additional (customs) charges that are due later will be the responsibility of the recipient.
*** Kindly provided by our partner Europa Nostra."