Often love affairs are instable, fleeting and unpredictable. It seems emotions change in a chaotic way. On this assumptions some mathematicians recently modeled a love relationship in terms of dynamic system. One of the case study of this kind of works is Jules et Jim, the autobiographical novel of Henri Pierre Roché and his cinematographic [...]

A close-up of the Earth Globe by Coronelli in which narration has a strong relevance. Extracts from Italo Calvino’s “Collection of sand”, 1980 The simplest form of a map isn’t the one we consider the most natural today, that is the map which represents the surface of the Earth as seen by an extra-terrestrial eye. [...]

I read Kevin Kelly article on New York Times magazine and I found the concept of Visual Literacy very interesting. Even if our society it is getting aware of the importance of visual language for our contemporary communication, visual language need more research to get to the point of being totally accepted in artefacts where traditionally we use text.

27 August 2008
Michael Bond
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926711.500-how-to-keep-your-head-in-scary-situations.html

This has led Slovic to suggest we need to imbue statistics with more emotional significance so that we take them to heart. “We learn how to deal with numbers from a young age as cold or abstract entities – to read them, add them, multiply them – but we don’t learn to think about how they represent reality in a way that conveys feeling and meaning. We need to think how to teach people to step away from their intuitive response, which is insensitive to magnitude, and think more carefully about what numbers represent.” [...]

Density Design Lab, Knowledgecartography.org and ovrflw, under the nom de plume Writing Acamenic English, are proud to annouce that Murmur is one of the selected project for VISUALIZAR’08: DATABASE CITY.

HANDLING CHANGES THROUGH DIAGRAMS
To change towards a more sustainable development could means to make decisions not only with a systemic approach, but also to be able to decide in the right time: the density. It seems that, when the discipline of Design integrate a systemic approach with the competences of designers in visualization, it can cope with dense situations, providing effective artefacts – diagrams – to improve the decision process and making profit from the richness of complexity.

The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space; it is seen and understood simultaneously. Even in traditional architectures such as labyrinths and mazes, there is a space-time continuum between experience and knowing; one has a goal to work one’s way in or out.

Knowing Complex Systems. The limits of understanding
Due to their non-linear nature, complex systems are incompressible. They are also open systems and cannot be understood without also understanding their environments and their history. To fully know something complex will therefore involve incorporating all the complexity of the system and its environment. This not humanly possible, perhaps not even possible in principle. Thus, our models of complex systems always have to reduce the complexity. Since what is left out also has non-linear effects, we cannot predict the error made in the reduction. The modelling and understanding of complex system thus always involve an element of choice which cannot be justified by pure calculation. There is always a normative element involved.

I have been discussing a lot about quality of life in the last month in very different situations, and it made me thinking this is a key and imperative issue now.
I presented a paper in Changing the change conference in Turin. The conference was about design research for sustainability and was a very outstanding place for exchanging ideas and meet interesting people. I spoke with Chris Ryan

Matthew Frederick in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (The MIT Press, 2007) after saying how to draw a line, also says that there are three levels of knowing:
-simplicity, is the world view of the child or uninformed adult, fully engaged in his own experience and happily unaware of what lies beneath the surface of immediate reality.
-complexity, characterizes the ordinary adult world view. It is characterized by an awareness of complex system in nature and society but an inability to discern clarifyng patterns and connection.
-informed simplicity, is an enlightened view of reality. It is founded upon an ability to dicern or create clarifying patterns within complex mixtures.