![\"Diagram](\"https://d3vjn2zm46gms2.cloudfront.net/blogs/2019/09/18133749/gri_850513_b001_f003_recto_376388ds_1600-1300x873.jpg\")
Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.
\nWisdom has been defined in many different ways, including several distinct approaches to assess the characteristics attributed to wisdom.
\nPublic schools in the US have an approach to character education. Eighteenth century thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, referred to this as training wisdom and virtue. Traditionally, schools share the responsibility to build character and wisdom along with parents and the community.
\nNicholas Maxwell, a contemporary philosopher in the United Kingdom, advocates that academia ought to alter its focus from the acquisition of knowledge to seeking and promoting wisdom. This he defines as the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others. He teaches that new knowledge and technological know-how increase our power to act. Without wisdom though, Maxwell claims this new knowledge may cause human harm as well as human good.
\n","pages":[{"url":"/","relativePath":"index.md","relativeDir":"","base":"index.md","name":"index","frontmatter":{"title":"Home","header":"three: progress and the evolution of ideas","menus":{"main":{"title":"Home","weight":1}},"template":"home"},"html":"A publication about progress and the evolution of ideas, exploring the world from multiple perspectives, from the tangible to the intangible, and from the physical to the metaphysical: the social, the economic, and the political.
"},{"url":"/posts/art/","relativePath":"posts/art.md","relativeDir":"posts","base":"art.md","name":"art","frontmatter":{"title":"Art","date":"2020-02-06","excerpt":"Expressing the inexpressible in what we think, how we move, and why we make","home_img":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/60e4707f3928e24e4f879de7e405f57c39a79e83-480x480.jpg","home_style":"style3","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/123fe6ff2503f109ef6770d2868b50e107b857c9-1920x1080.jpg","template":"page"},"html":"Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts (artworks), expressing the author's imaginative, conceptual ideas, or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power. Other activities related to the production of works of art include the criticism of art, the study of the history of art, and the aesthetic dissemination of art.
\nThe three classical branches of art are painting, sculpture and architecture. Music, theatre, film, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature and other media such as interactive media, are included in a broader definition of the arts. Until the 17th century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences. In modern usage after the 17th century, where aesthetic considerations are paramount, the fine arts are separated and distinguished from acquired skills in general, such as the decorative or applied arts.
\nThough the definition of what constitutes art is disputed and has changed over time, general descriptions mention an idea of imaginative or technical skill stemming from human agency and creation. The nature of art and related concepts, such as creativity and interpretation, are explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.
\nWe live in a world that has been transformed by the tools that we have designed to solve our problems and realize our aspirations.
\nWe have so transformed our world in the process that humans have arrived at a state of crisis in our story as a species. We are immensely imaginative and creative, yet powerfully violent and destructive.
\nWe are eminently aware of our potential to create and destroy, but we have lost our ability to guide and control ourselves. The democratic experiment appears to be falling apart as the appetites for power, wealth, and glory overpower our efforts to bring freedom, equality, and fraternity to humanity.
\nCollectively, we are seeking the sort of leadership that can guide us toward a brighter future. However, the calculations of capitalist corporate economics is centralizing wealth and power in the hands of a very few, threatening a darker vision of the future as we descend toward digital despotism. The values and incentives of capitalism have turned against the flourishing of humanity in favour of machines and algorithms that serve to perpetuate corporations. Flesh and blood bodies are being replaced by incorporeal fictions that we have named as legal representatives of human organization. However, these legal entities have turned on their creators. The value of corporations have far exceeded that of their human creators.
\nNation states have legitimized the use of lethal force to perpetrate genocide, steal land, draw borders, and inflame nationalist, religious, and racist animosities toward fellow human beings.
\nAt the heart of our survival as a species is a debate over the faith in capital to order our lives. We have chosen Mammon over our anachronistic notions of God. Yet, we still invoke the names of ancient deities to rationalize our capitalist devotions.
\nThe Bauhaus began in 1919 in Weimar, Germany as a socialist movement to gather architects, artists, and artisans to rebuild society out of the ashes of the war over the domains of nation states and aristocratic empires.
\nWhen, in 1933, the Nazis declared the modernism of the Bauhaus as degenerate art and closed the school, much of the creative diaspora was assimilated into what would become the American capitalist empire. Ever since, designers have tended to be the faithful servants of the capitalist order.
\nDigital communication technologies have disrupted efforts to edit, mediate, control, distort, and suppress the flow of ideas. We find greater freedom to share ideas and to express questions and doubts about how the hierarchical institutions that have tended to dominate our social systems are responsible for oppressive, abusive, violent, and lethal force against large populations of humans and animals, and destructive actions against all forms of vegetative and organic life.
\nDividing over gender, race, religion, ideology, and geography has only served to strengthen the control of authoritarian hierarchies.
\nWith the democratization of communication technologies, the voices of the marginalized, disenfranchised, and disillusioned are finding an audience. The wider access to information has created the conditions for an apocalypse: that is, an unveiling and a revelation of silenced opinions, undisclosed truths, hidden secrets, and suppressed facts. We now face the challenge of a reckoning with the truth of who we are and how we must change.
\nWe have lost faith in our institutions because they have proven themselves to be untrustworthy.
\nThe challenge of our century goes far beyond the design of new technologies to solve our problems. We have already spent the past century experimenting with technological inventions to create more efficient and more powerful versions of the old hierarchies. We have only become far more effective at destroying ourselves.
\nIf Facebook has taught us anything, it is our ability to scale inhumanity at an exponential rate when the metrics for success focus on capital and market dominance rather than human decency.
\nThe inescapable conclusion about what we need to design for this century is a better way to be human.
\nWe must shift our focus from designing physical artifacts to designing living systems.
\nHow do we teach people to be prepared for such a challenge? The old industrial model of education does not serve humanity. It serves the machine.
\nWe need a new model of education.
\n“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
\n― Buckminster Fuller
\nDesign is a process that involves the human ability to use experience and memory as inspiration for the imagination to envision, create and build things, relationships, and organizations to solve our problems and manifest abstract ideas as physical artifacts and living systems.
\nResilience is the awareness of our limitations and the challenges that we face and the ability to recognize our responsibility to engage our perceptions, cognitions, emotions, and actions in the world as creative problem-solvers and agents of change.
\nA new model of education must recognize our dependence and connection to a complex ecosystem. We are part of a living system called Earth.
\nA new education model might replace the old model of diplomas, certificates, and degrees.
\nThe new credentials would be character, emotional intelligence, experience, wisdom, and resilience.
\nThe new curriculum would recognize the complex nature of being human.
\nMetaphysics
\nPhysics
\nBiology
\nCognition + Emotion
\nPerception + Action
\nTo build a new model of society will require all of us to work together. It will require a new liturgy, a new work of the people, to explore how we imagine, design, and build the future together.
\nThat is the vision for the builders collective.
"},{"url":"/posts/clothing/","relativePath":"posts/clothing.md","relativeDir":"posts","base":"clothing.md","name":"clothing","frontmatter":{"title":"Clothing","date":"2020-02-08","excerpt":"Covering the body for protection, insulation, decoration, and social status","home_img":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/22cae4eb1c5d52cbb77b2fc8db7e9563ded41fff-480x480.jpg","home_style":"style6","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/d5ccccac8784dcad41561fb7354239cd0168eece-1920x1080.jpg","template":"page"},"html":"Clothing (also known as clothes, apparel and attire) is items worn on the body. Clothing is typically made of fabrics or textiles but over time has included garments made from animal skin or other thin sheets of materials put together. The wearing of clothing is mostly restricted to human beings and is a feature of all human societies. The amount and type of clothing worn depends on gender, body type, social, and geographic considerations.
\nClothing serves many purposes: it can serve as protection from the elements, rough surfaces, rash-causing plants, insect bites, splinters, thorns and prickles by providing a barrier between the skin and the environment. Clothes can insulate against cold or hot conditions, and they can provide a hygienic barrier, keeping infectious and toxic materials away from the body. Clothing also provides protection from ultraviolet radiation.
\nWearing clothes is also a social norm, and being deprived of clothing in front of others may be embarrassing. Not wearing clothes in public so that genitals, breasts or buttocks are visible could be considered indecent exposure.
\n"},{"url":"/posts/culture/","relativePath":"posts/culture.md","relativeDir":"posts","base":"culture.md","name":"culture","frontmatter":{"title":"Culture","date":"2020-02-04","excerpt":"Learning through mimesis the values, habits, and practices of a social group","home_img":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/cc831adc4220e82e4874e29f3e5174c5e6199aa5-480x480.jpg","home_style":"style2","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/b73bfdf6ffa9c0e41cebc61a361c31224725c31c-1920x1080.jpg","template":"page"},"html":"Culture (/ˈkʌltʃər/) is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities and habits of the individuals in these groups.
\nHumans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.
\nA cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change. Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual, as are duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.
\nCulture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies; these include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
\n"},{"url":"/posts/design/","relativePath":"posts/design.md","relativeDir":"posts","base":"design.md","name":"design","frontmatter":{"title":"Design","date":"2020-01-30","excerpt":"The evolution of making from tools and physical artifacts to living systems","home_img":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/b0892ecd135de396d5196ea7f4e05f4eeba3cbd3-480x480.jpg","home_style":"style5","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/804bd8d000d65e7ec2c8c9e0ab1f732b16f3e8dd-1920x1080.jpg","template":"page"},"html":"My years of experience as a designer have been formative. I was able to collaborate with a team of developers to build web applications, introducing me to agile methodology and behaviour-driven development. It was an exciting time to be part of a team of people that was involved in leading the responsive web design and product design revolutions, and I was glad to have the privilege of helping to lead those changes within the organization and with our clients.
\nAt the time, the vision was to “humanize the web.” I think this is still a focus of the work that designers are doing, except that the work centres around the business processes and systems that define an organization. Where the focus of the business was once about creating design artifacts and producing websites, there has been a shift towards design thinking and service design.
\nSix years ago, I was becoming restless because I had a perception that designers did not have a voice in decision-making. Design appeared to be a commodity within the organization, a service which became a line item in the scope of work. The work was primarily driven by a production-oriented mindset that organized people into silos of job descriptions. The various responsibilities could be proportioned into units of time and value, divided appropriately by managers to fulfill the requirements of the work. The unintended consequence of this approach was to limit the opportunities for designers to collaborate, since that did not factor into the value equation. As a result, I felt that I had fewer opportunities to learn and grow as a designer, since my time was driven by my value as part of the production process, which did not, at least for my part, involve strategy, mentorship or collaboration. At the time, design was considered a decorative function that was able to provide value by raising the aesthetic quality of a product. Design did not have a strategic role in the organization. I felt undervalued and that my career was floundering in an environment in which I no longer had agency. So, I had hoped to take a leave of absence to explore other opportunities, and to return with experiences that I could bring to the team. Unfortunately, I miscalculated and my hopes of rejoining the team were never realized.
\nWhile I cannot speak to the intentions of that particular organization, I have wondered about the direction of the design industry as a whole. The dynamics of a competitive corporate culture have tended to overwhelm the innovative culture of design and turned design into a competitive business and marketing advantage, often at the expense of the designers who made it possible, as the work has become commodified and the field of design has become globally more competitive. Securing one’s place in the hierarchy becomes that much more challenging. In the face of the insecurity that constantly evolving expectations and responsibilities place on designers, imposter syndrome can become yet another challenge to overcome.
\nIt appears that the current focus of organizations on user experience design, design thinking, product design and service design signals a major shift that has happened over the past five years to recognize design as the primary engine for delivering value to the customer. I regret that I was not able to witness that change from the inside of an organization and to be a part of that cultural evolution.
\nIn the meantime, I have been learning, writing, freelancing, collaborating, exploring entrepreneurial opportunities, teaching and mentoring. I have also been addressing my own deficiencies in self-awareness, emotional intelligence and other mental health challenges that have been limiting factors in my personal and professional growth.
\nEven though my perspective is of one who exists on the margins, I have a growing awareness of a shift in the culture of design away from the physical artifact and toward the human experience. Our current focus on design systems is a signal of the next step in awakening the collective consciousness of the design world to understand the opportunity and the responsibility to design systems of human connection to address the alarming rate of disconnection that our world is experiencing, separating us from each other and from the natural world. The industrial world was built on divisions of geography, nationality, race, religion, class, income, and sex. Branding and marketing divide people into tribes of consumption. The unintended consequence is that this corporate culture of competition is bleeding into the social, political, economic, and spiritual compartments of our lives, building barriers between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” merely on the basis of habits of consumption.
\nAs a designer who exists on the margins of a global corporate culture, what power do I have to change anything? I still believe that ideas have the power to change the world. We have 100 years of evidence bearing witness to this fact.
\nI started something that I am calling a builders collective. The vision is to build leaders to design a resilient society (BLDRS). We are human beings who are working on the design challenge of our times: the human experience.
\nThe project is to engage humanity in rebuilding our world.
"},{"url":"/posts/ecology/","relativePath":"posts/ecology.md","relativeDir":"posts","base":"ecology.md","name":"ecology","frontmatter":{"title":"Ecology","date":"2020-02-02","excerpt":"An interconnected system of relationships supporting the biological diversity of life","home_img":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/6c9ea60b204e66099438fd9a716d31bd45905cf3-480x480.jpg","home_style":"style1","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/c5d4a351c8b7cd6fcb052049fff7ec07423617ce-1920x1080.jpg","template":"page"},"html":"Ecology (from Greek: οἶκος, \"house\", or \"environment\"; -λογία, \"study of\") is a branch of biology that studies the interactions among organisms and their biophysical environment, which includes both biotic and abiotic components. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution, biomass, and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species. Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production, pedogenesis, nutrient cycling, and niche construction, regulate the flux of energy and matter through an environment. These processes are sustained by organisms with specific life history traits.
\nEcology is not synonymous with environmentalism, natural history, or environmental science. It overlaps with the closely related sciences of evolutionary biology, genetics, and ethology. An important focus for ecologists is to improve the understanding of how biodiversity affects ecological function. Ecologists seek to explain:
\nEcology has practical applications in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agroecology, agriculture, forestry, agroforestry, fisheries), city planning (urban ecology), community health, economics, basic and applied science, and human social interaction (human ecology). For example, the Circles of Sustainability approach treats ecology as more than the environment 'out there'. It is not treated as separate from humans. Organisms (including humans) and resources compose ecosystems which, in turn, maintain biophysical feedback mechanisms that moderate processes acting on living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) components of the planet. Ecosystems sustain life-supporting functions and produce natural capital like biomass production (food, fuel, fiber, and medicine), the regulation of climate, global biogeochemical cycles, water filtration, soil formation, erosion control, flood protection, and many other natural features of scientific, historical, economic, or intrinsic value.
\nThe word \"ecology\" (\"Ökologie\") was coined in 1866 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel. Ecological thought is derivative of established currents in philosophy, particularly from ethics and politics. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Hippocrates and Aristotle laid the foundations of ecology in their studies on natural history. Modern ecology became a much more rigorous science in the late 19th century. Evolutionary concepts relating to adaptation and natural selection became the cornerstones of modern ecological theory.
"},{"url":"/posts/food/","relativePath":"posts/food.md","relativeDir":"posts","base":"food.md","name":"food","frontmatter":{"title":"Food","date":"2020-02-09","excerpt":"Nutrients and energy to support the health and well-being of an active body","home_img":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/1cc63ef1695282540636861c38b8f1ccfdf8cd4f-480x480.jpg","home_style":"style5","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/9ccf8d3d0a2a1ca3fc8805149ff9fc55d78b96f4-1920x1080.jpg","template":"page"},"html":"Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for an organism. Food is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells to provide energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth.
\nHistorically, humans secured food through two methods: hunting and gathering and agriculture, which gave modern humans a mainly omnivorous diet. Worldwide, humanity has created numerous cuisines and culinary arts, including a wide array of ingredients, herbs, spices, techniques, and dishes.
\nToday, the majority of the food energy required by the ever-increasing population of the world is supplied by the food industry. Food safety and food security are monitored by agencies like the International Association for Food Protection, World Resources Institute, World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization, and International Food Information Council. They address issues such as sustainability, biological diversity, climate change, nutritional economics, population growth, water supply, and access to food.
\nThe right to food is a human right derived from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), recognizing the \"right to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food\", as well as the \"fundamental right to be free from hunger\".
\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrjusPeOZRk
\n\n\nThe iconic images for me as a child were Walt Disney on television and the other was Albert Einstein, who had embodied this thing about understanding the world. I grew up liking both of those, but the deepest thing that I wanted to do was become an animator. I did a lot of drawing all the way through high school. I even had a class where I got an A plus, plus, plus. Now, I know that was based more on quantity than quality.
\nAs I went from high school to go to college, I realized that I didn't know how to get the skills and it was not up to the level that I saw in the Disney animators, so I switched over to Physics.
\nHere's the interesting thing I found. I've told this story before, as you would guess, over the years, and there's always a titter and laughter in the audience, because the general concept that we have is to go from art to science is incongruous.
\nWhy is it incongruous to go from one to the other and why do we think of them as two very different personalities? I will say that over the years, I have known world-class mathematicians and scientists and artists and programmers, and if I were to take another characteristic, let's say it's their organizational skills, the ability to get stuff done. I haven't found a correlation between them.
\n...
\nI had to think, “What is the source of the incongruity?”, and I would have to say that one of them is a terrible misconception in school that when we take art that we are teaching people to draw. What we are really doing is teaching people to see. That's the important function. That's why I think it is tragic when school funding gets cut, they cut out the art.
\n...
\nI liked the idea of being at the frontier. Now there was this new field of computer science, and it was like an Easter egg hunt where you were at the front of the line and they had just cut the ribbon.
\n...
\nThere is this concept of the elevator pitch. We want this clear concept, so that when we get in the elevator, we can present it to somebody so cleanly that by the time we get there they realize they should fund this idea. There is an attraction to the clarity of an idea that most of us have. We talk about speaking clearly or making things clear. And the fact is, most of our stuff that we've ever made would fail the elevator test. And I take, actually, pride in that, because the way you pass the elevator test is to make it so that they already know. “We get that. That's a sellable idea.” Well, as soon as we go down that path, we're not really being creative. We're figuring out how to draw from the past, to repeat it. So, if we pick something that is really hard, that we might fail at, and have failed at, we're more likely to come up with something that is fresh and different. (13:25)
\n
Ed Catmull, Pixar
\nCreativity, Inc.
(6:03)
"},{"url":"/posts/music/","relativePath":"posts/music.md","relativeDir":"posts","base":"music.md","name":"music","frontmatter":{"title":"Music","date":"2020-02-05","excerpt":"Creating and manipulating sound vibrations as an experience in time","home_img":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/ffced029d3509bf8d83b9a75949b490e16146e02-480x480.jpg","home_style":"style2","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/a698ff4dd3061478666284a23031bc51a8543008-1920x1080.jpg","template":"page"},"html":"Music is an art form and cultural activity whose medium is sound organized in time. General definitions of music include common elements such as pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics (loudness and softness), and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture (which are sometimes termed the \"color\" of a musical sound). Different styles or types of music may emphasize, de-emphasize or omit some of these elements. Music is performed with a vast range of instruments and vocal techniques ranging from singing to rapping; there are solely instrumental pieces, solely vocal pieces (such as songs without instrumental accompaniment) and pieces that combine singing and instruments. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike; \"art of the Muses\").
\nIn its most general form, the activities describing music as an art form or cultural activity include the creation of works of music (songs, tunes, symphonies, and so on), the criticism of music, the study of the history of music, and the aesthetic examination of music. Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as \"the harmony of the spheres\" and \"it is music to my ears\" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, \"There is no noise, only sound.\"
\nThe creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Indeed, throughout history, some new forms or styles of music have been criticized as \"not being music\", including Beethoven's Grosse Fuge string quartet in 1825, early jazz in the beginning of the 1900s and hardcore punk in the 1980s. There are many types of music, including popular music, traditional music, art music, music written for religious ceremonies and work songs such as chanteys. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions–such as Classical music symphonies from the 1700s and 1800s, through to spontaneously played improvisational music such as jazz, and avant-garde styles of chance-based contemporary music from the 20th and 21st centuries.
\nMusic can be divided into genres (e.g., country music) and genres can be further divided into subgenres (e.g., country blues and pop country are two of the many country subgenres), although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to personal interpretation, and occasionally controversial. For example, it can be hard to draw the line between some early 1980s hard rock and heavy metal. Within the arts, music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art or as an auditory art. Music may be played or sung and heard live at a rock concert or orchestra performance, heard live as part of a dramatic work (a music theater show or opera), or it may be recorded and listened to on a radio, MP3 player, CD player, smartphone or as film score or TV show.
\nIn many cultures, music is an important part of people's way of life, as it plays a key role in religious rituals, rite of passage ceremonies (e.g., graduation and marriage), social activities (e.g., dancing) and cultural activities ranging from amateur karaoke singing to playing in an amateur funk band or singing in a community choir. People may make music as a hobby, like a teen playing cello in a youth orchestra, or work as a professional musician or singer. The music industry includes the individuals who create new songs and musical pieces (such as songwriters and composers), individuals who perform music (which include orchestra, jazz band and rock band musicians, singers and conductors), individuals who record music (music producers and sound engineers), individuals who organize concert tours, and individuals who sell recordings, sheet music, and scores to customers.
\nWisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.
\nWisdom has been defined in many different ways, including several distinct approaches to assess the characteristics attributed to wisdom.
\nPublic schools in the US have an approach to character education. Eighteenth century thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, referred to this as training wisdom and virtue. Traditionally, schools share the responsibility to build character and wisdom along with parents and the community.
\nNicholas Maxwell, a contemporary philosopher in the United Kingdom, advocates that academia ought to alter its focus from the acquisition of knowledge to seeking and promoting wisdom. This he defines as the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others. He teaches that new knowledge and technological know-how increase our power to act. Without wisdom though, Maxwell claims this new knowledge may cause human harm as well as human good.
\n"},{"url":"/about/","relativePath":"about.md","relativeDir":"","base":"about.md","name":"about","frontmatter":{"title":"About","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/7f3cdecece07aa4f2f3c5e6be5e7d4eb4de24484-1640x680.png","menus":{"main":{"title":"About","weight":4}},"template":"page"},"html":"The conversation about design is evolving as the scope of design expands from physical artifacts to living systems. Increasingly, we are exploring ideas about organizational transformation and social change. In other words, we are expanding the scope of design from the physical to the metaphysical: to the social, the economic, and the political. These are issues of connection, capacity, and power.
\n“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”\n—R. Buckminster Fuller
\nThe challenge, then, becomes more about how to understand the values, perceptions, and behaviours of the individuals who make up an organization or a society. Through brain research and cognitive science, we are coming to understand that we are not actually rational creatures. Rather we react and behave emotionally and invent rationalizations to justify our instinctive and impulsive actions.
\nValues, perceptions, narratives, and social identities are far more compelling than data, facts, information, and rational thought in the way that we understand our environment and make decisions as social creatures.
\n
Diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum (adapted, right), 1922, Walter Gropius. Lithograph. 20.2 x 29.3 cm. From Walter Gropius, Satzungen Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar (Statutes of the State Bauhaus in Weimar), July 1922. Bauhaus Typography Collection, 1919–1937. The Getty Research Institute, 850513. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS) / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
\nUnderstanding materials was the first step in the education of a modern artist, designer, and architect. The pedagogical approach of the Bauhaus become the progenitor of the curricula of the design and architecture academies of the modern world.
\n\nBauhaus design is everywhere, but its roots are political
\nI begin my exploration of human experience with a curious feature of reality. There is an interesting, rather mysterious connection that I have observed between experience and reality. That is, we can conceive of ideas beyond what we sense in the physical environment that are ideals or concepts that can never exist in reality. The ideas are beyond the physical, or metaphysical.
\nThe other curious characteristic of these ideas is that they occur in groups of three, both in the physical and the metaphysical. Humans have a curious affinity for the rule of thirds, not just in the aesthetics of art, but in all of life.
\nOn the other hand, there seems to be a relationship between the ideals that we can conceive of and the imperfect realities within which we exist. In that sense, it is possible to conjecture that the physical is a metaphor for the metaphysical, or vice versa.
\n![\"Three:](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49243812022_3ff2b852ba_b.jpg\")
A mental model is what a person believes about experience and reality.\nIn user experience design, a mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand.
\nMental models are in flux exactly because they’re embedded in a brain rather than fixed in an external medium. Additional experience with the system can obviously change the model, but users might also update their mental models based on stimuli from elsewhere, such as talking to other users or even applying lessons from other systems.
\nHow, then, can we begin to map the human experience? How we can design mental habits, social systems, and physical environments for resilience and symbiosis with the living processes and ecology that are the foundation of our biological support systems?
\nTo better understand our materials as experience designers, we need more holistic mental models of the human experience, as a way to understand what we are designing for.
\n![\"A](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49234429626_7a6763a44b_b.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49236449251_1caaf6d94c_b.jpg\")
The design profession is currently facing a reckoning, similar to the revolutions in our understanding of class, race, gender, and religion. The 1700-year-old project of cultural imperialism that originated with the Roman Emperor Constantine and the integration of church and state finds its realization in the social, political, and economic institutions that have created monolithic monopolies of global power.
\nThe unintended consequences of the tools that we have designed to shape our environment are the weaponizing of those tools as the means for controlling and manipulating populations, protecting access to scarce resources, and eliminating threats to religious, national, and corporate prosperity and security.
\nThe primitive limbic systems in our brains are designed to trigger the fight or flight response as a matter of survival in a world of physical threats. Senses are attuned to dangers in the environment and events perceived as threats will automatically trigger a physical and biological response of increased heart rate, a release of adrenalin, and a heightened state of awareness, along with emotions of anxiety, fear, and panic.
\nWhen this intellectual, emotional, and physical state of anxiety is prolonged, we call this stress. People who live in this constant state of fear and scarcity will tend to engage in behaviours that are focused on survival and self-preservation. This interpretation of constant threat leads to isolation and aggression, as members of a group engage in a competition for scarce resources and demonstrations of strength and dominance to control the group, protect resources, and destroy enemies. However, such isolation and aggression has a tendency to undermine the survival of the group.
\n![\"A](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49236656232_0e5406ab4c_b.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49235974428_1caaf6d94c_b.jpg\")
Lacking a science that helps us to conceive of a person holistically, it may be possible to draw from the observations of the generations of people who have come before us. They formulated conceptions and philosophies of the world that attempt to communicate the complex, interconnected relationships of human beings to their physical and metaphysical environments. There are things that humans experience that are distinctly tangible, but others that we cannot measure, test, or account for through physical means. Should we simply ignore this data, that which is beyond physical or empirical measurement, or is there something to be gleaned from the musings, conjectures, observations, histories, and literature preserved in ancient sacred texts?
\nAnother mental model acknowledges a common conception of the trinitarian God popularized by the Western Christian colonization of the globe. It represents a mental model of the Creator. The book of Genesis asserts that humans have been made in God’s image. This mental model represents the human mind, heart, and body as a reflection of the trinitarian nature of the Christian conception of the divine as Father, Spirit, and Son. This model captures some common conceptions of the perfection to which humans aspire, but from which we fall short. In many ways, our societies, corporations, and nations are attempts at social, economic, and political utopian visions that fall short of the ideologies and narratives that we have formulated to rationalize our attempts to create a better world.
\n![\"A](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49236656267_bcdfdd1b0d_b.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49236449221_6c34e90c05_b.jpg\")
By inviting people to participate in design workshops using these worksheets, we can explore the theme of design for resilience.
\nFirst, we need to understand what is wrong with our existing systems. They are very poorly conceived, designed, and built. However, the blanks in the model actually tell us how much agency we have in this reality. There are a lot of things that are givens, but we have a lot of freedom. Where we lose freedom is in the choices we make collectively. We have designed our own hell in the form of social, economic, and political systems that manifest as physical products, infrastructure, and architecture.
\nHow might we design a world where we can all live together without killing each other and undermining the life support systems of the planet?
\nSaul Griffith shares some interesting ideas in his discussion with Ezra Klein: How to solve climate change and make life more awesome. Or read his article, How do we decarbonize? We don’t need a miracle. Everything we need to solve climate change is already here.
\n![\"A](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49236084483_e1f6a9d080_b.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49235974488_bb51e8e33f_b.jpg\")
Given the challenge our generation faces, we endeavour to invest time, energy and resources in the effort of building leaders to design a resilient society. By considering basic human needs of food, clothing, and shelter, we are reimagining the metaphysical environment: the social, economic, and political. How might we build a new economy on a foundation of resilience and symbiosis?
\nBy creating greater self-awareness, we may recognize how things can go very wrong and create virtual models with predictive power to anticipate problems before they become reality. This is a collaborative project to better understand ourselves and our place in this world, to find generative ways to live with each other and the natural world.
\nTranscending human-centered design, this is design that seeks to learn from nature, to put into practice the knowledge and principles of biomimicry to reimagine and redesign our environment, to reconnect ourselves to our own humanity and to reconnect us to the earth and all living things.
\n![\"Resilience](\"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49243814197_d1404fd700_b.jpg\")
As a builders collective, our work is to restore the garden, pruning to allow for good fruit to grow. The role of the editor is to focus the narrative and tell a better story. We have allowed technology and media to overwhelm our senses. We look in a mirror and immediately forget what we look like. We instead begin to reflect everything that we see around us. As editors, we advocate for an identity, a point of view, and a movement in the direction of learning the attitudes and habits necessary for personal and social transformation, to develop people of integrity, compassion, and generosity. The builders collective is a vision to build leaders to design a resilient society (BLDRS).
\n![\"BLDRS](\"https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/1400_opt_1/5746c289596281.5df9c9008a389.gif\")
A shelter is a basic architectural structure or building that provides protection from the local environment.
\nHaving a place of shelter, of safety and of retreat, i.e. a home, is commonly considered a fundamental physiological human need, the foundation from which to develop higher human motivations.
"},{"url":"/posts/work/","relativePath":"posts/work.md","relativeDir":"posts","base":"work.md","name":"work","frontmatter":{"title":"Work","date":"2020-02-01","excerpt":"The search, pursuit, and struggle for daily meaning as well as daily bread","home_img":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/ffb79a4750389a919567c54ec11e5d10cfffe853-480x480.jpg","home_style":"style4","img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/0de4832cb5ce2d7ed825308a30db5aac3e83a933-1920x1080.jpg","template":"page"},"html":"Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a 1974 nonfiction book by the oral historian and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel.
\nWorking investigates the meaning of work for different people under different circumstances, showing it can vary in importance. The book also reflects Terkel’s general idea that work can be difficult but still provides meaning for workers. It is an exploration of what makes work meaningful for people in all walks of life, from Lovin’ Al the parking valet, Dolores the waitress, the fireman, to the business executive. The narrative moves through mundane details, emotional truths, and existential questioning.
\nAs the foreword to the book points out, “Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, ‘for daily meaning as well as daily bread’.... The oral histories in Working are wistful dispatches from a distant era...when management practices and computers were just beginning to transform the American workplace. In the last thirty years, productivity has soared but job satisfaction has plummeted. It is hard to read Working without wondering what has gone wrong.”
\n"}],"site":{"siteMetadata":{"none":"","title":"Three"},"pathPrefix":"","data":{"contact":{"enabled":false,"title":"Get in touch"},"footer":{"copyright":"A project of the builders collective. ","links":[{"new_window":true,"text":"Made with Stackbit","url":"https://www.stackbit.com"}]},"header":{"logo_img_src":"https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ft0qna28/production/8f702e0c86385e29a5c4b753a4719b1a62292420-1024x1024.png"},"menus":{"main":[]},"social":{"enabled":true,"follow_section":[{"icon":"fa-medium","link_url":"http://medium.com/threeprogress/","title":"Medium"},{"icon":"fa-twitter","link_url":"https://twitter.com/threeprogress","title":"Twitter"},{"icon":"fa-facebook","link_url":"https://www.facebook.com/threeprogress/","title":"Facebook"}],"title":"Follow"}}},"menus":{"main":[{"page___NODE":"329f6eb8-ca30-5c02-8921-19623541f94e","id":"menu-main-index","identifier":"main-index","title":"Home","weight":1,"url":"/","items":[]},{"page___NODE":"fa117f50-bfef-5bac-b5fe-1188e35b8e3f","id":"menu-main-about","identifier":"main-about","title":"About","weight":4,"url":"/about/","items":[]}]}}}