Ecuador’s constitution grants rights to nature

“…the most interesting aspect of the new constitution is that it grants inalienable rights to nature.

The Pennsylvania based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) assisted in drafting the “Rights of Nature” chapter in the new constitution.  Language in the document assures nature the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution” and obligates the government to take “precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.”

Source: Sustainable Design Update
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-Daniel Montano

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Our Planet and Plants as Inspiration to Architecture?

If we will continue on in the path of seeking sustainable forms of living then the way we design our built environment needs to be informed by wisdom. Nature’s wisdom is all around us. Our planet has experimented for millions of years with plants. It has made lots of mistakes and has also succeeded greatly. Plants have evolved over millenia, changing and adapting to weather patterns, ecologies, and ecological-rhythms. Architecture may benefit from being inspired by nature.

Double Challenge – A Sustainable Structure to Maximize Farming Land
I’m wondering if some of the ingenious folks out there would like to join me on a hobby problem I am thinking about: how can we maximize the use of land/space for farming?

This would require the maximum exposure to sunlight while maximizing the amount of crops that could be planted within a specific amount of space.

Also, it would be great if we can also maximize the amount of water available. I keep imagining a multi-storied structure.

Would this farm structure look like a plant itself? Would it look like our planet? A sphere rotating to maximize exposure to sunlight?

Would it look like a sphere within a sphere? The smaller sphere holds the plants. The larger sphere traps the condensation of water – until it drips down again. This would mirror the cycle of water in our planet.
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Social innovation

“Realizing that innovation driven solely by technology often failed to meet customer needs, many organizations turned to a consumer (marketing) oriented approach where consumer research and observation is handled by “experts”. Green believes that this approach is starting to reaching end of life. [Josephine Green's (of Philips Design)] main point is that we need to go beyond designing around individual consumer needs and start innovating around social needs. Her reasoning: We have reached a saturation point for technology and consumer goods. Continuing to consume the way we currently do is not healthy.”

“There is too much ‘stuff’ and a growing realization that filling the future with more and more consumer-driven technology and marketable goods does not necessarily guarantee higher growth, a better quality of life or even life itself, given the state of the planet.” (from NexUp)

Consumer research and observation are still important, the difference now is that these methods have to be integrated with a wider social purpose.

Source

NextUp: “Democratizing the Future” >>

Related

World Changing blog >>

Call for papers on Social Innovation >>

Customer World (blog): “Adding Social Innovation to Design” >>

Standford Center for Social Innovation >>

New skyscraper to produce all its own energy

“A German architect is pursuing an ambitious project in the Middle East. He wants to build office towers in Riyadh, Dubai and Bahrain that produce all their own energy. The zero emissions office building has arrived.”

Spiegel Online International: “New Tower Creates All Its Own Energy” >>

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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Loremo car: 157 Miles per gallon and 137 Miles per hour

daniel montano, dan montano

Germany is not only leading the world in the use of solar power but now they have outdone automakers around the world with the Loremo, a car capable of more than doubling fossil fuel consumption.

Link

http://www.loremo.com/

You can find my feed here.

…or at Technorati…

The Virgin Earth Challenge

“The Virgin Earth Challenge is a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges’ satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate.”

Source
Go to the official Virgin Earth Challenge website >>

On Wikipedia
Wikipedia lists some of the contenders: “Virgin Earth Challenge” >>

Related
Global Research Technologies Announces Successful Carbon Dioxide Air-Capture System.

“Tucson company officially introduces itself on Earth Day. Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT) has announced its success in ongoing research and development of a proprietary air-capture system to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.”

Read the press release >>

Official GRT Site >>
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Systems thinking and dialectics

The Ackoff Center Weblog has an interesting posting titled:
“Analysis, synthesis, systems thinking and the scientific method: rediscovering the importance of open systems”

Along with this entry they have a paper that you can download.

Quoting a bit from the blog posting:

This paper reconsiders the role of systems thinking in science …The paper argues that the scientific method is most usefully interpreted as a dialectic between analysis and synthesis supported by the triadic logic of C.S. Peirce, and that the role of systems thinking is to frame this dialectic.

References
The Ackoff Center Weblog >>
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Distributed causality and time

Summary: Distributed causality factors in time and (space) distance. What you do today may affect someone in another country years from now. It’s hard to draw the line of causality in simple terms but to some relative degree, your action ‘A’ causes effect ‘Z’ over time and distance.

Beyond real-time cause and effect
In a completely interconnected system operating with multiple layers and cycles of causality event ‘A’ may be “caused” by any event A-Z to one relative degree or another.

Distributed Causality and Sustainability
This is complex causality. It broadens our way of understanding relationships between things and variables.

Distributed causality broadens responsibility. What you do today will affect more people than you think. How you behave may affect your mind, your body, those around you, those who know you, those who don’t know you and perhaps even those who are not even born yet.

Distributed causality may help us think more holistically. It may help our concept of sustainability.
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

One human = 50 Trillion (cellular) “brains” ?

“…The imagination is grounded in the energy of the organs of the body…” – Joseph Campbell

I have always been skeptical of the brain in the vat thought experiment that poses that a brain in a container being fed electrical pulses will mirror human consciousness.

One of the reasons is that I believe that this type of thought experiment forgets that we have 50 trillion cells all over our bodies. Each cell is like small “brain” that thinks and communicates with other cells. The brain may end up finding out what the cells are talking about but I don’t think they speak the same dialect/language. So, in a way I think the brain misses out on all the juicy gossip that goes on at the street level.

Human thought, may be (in part) an emergent phenomena of the “smaller thoughts” happening at the deeper cellular level. [It may also be emergent phenomena of other dynamics (many).

Think of human thought as (partially) an “echo” of what your cells, tissues and organs are thinking.

I was thinking the word “pre-cognition” may be fitting here to name that type of cellular thinking, but that word is loaded with meaning already.

In a previous blog I alluded to it simply as “intra-cellular communication”. (updated: turns out that intra-cellular communication is a term that is indeed used in science – so are “cell signaling” and Cellular communication (Biology

If we can agree that most entities that communicate are conscious (to one degree or extent or another) then we may agree that this cellular entity is “thinking” or processing information in an intelligent way. (to one degree or another).

While I tend to make up words, the term “intra-cellular communication” is a term being used today by scientists in different fields.

The history of medicine in a way, is the history of communication between humans and their sub-systems (cells, tissues, organs).

Cellular action, reaction, symptom, and change, are all fuzzy “meanings” in a growing vocabulary that we will eventually understand. Today we are alienated from its understanding but if we focus energies on this type of research we may gain an insight that may advance science and medicine by leaps and bounds. (p.s. DNA may be only part of that vocabulary akin to legal/cultural systems that partially assign/dictate and regulate behavior but can never fully control it).

Related
Quoting from Brown University:

“…A broad introduction to the basic mechanisms of cell signaling for communicating environmental information from the outside to the nucleus of a cell…” .

Beyond humans
Just in case I’m not challenging your belief enough… where does this understanding of cells as “small brains” leave plants and other lifeforms that we don’t usually think of as capable of thought or thought-like behavior?

It may be time to re-understand the earth is an cognitive organism. Each of our brains may be part of the 6.5 billion “small brains” that informs the planet earth about its human-cell condition. But just like in our bodies, we still don’t speak the same “language” as the bigger organism. So humans may be linguistically alienated from our bodies and we are alienated from earth in a similar way.

Related in Wikipedia:
Wikipedia: World population>>
Wikipedia: Brain in the vat>>
Wikipedia:Philosophy of mind >>
Wikipedia:Consciouness >>
Wikipedia:Sentience>>
Wikipedia:Cognition >>

Related elsewhere:
From The Web of Life (book) by Fritjof Capra “The Santiago Theory of Cognition”
Ask Yahoo! – How many cells in the human body?>>
Brown University:Intracellular communication in health and disease >>
intra-cellular abstract from Harvard >>

Beyond cells…think genes…>

Sustainability Institute

Quoting from the Sustainability Institute web site

The mission of the Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program is to accelerate the shift to global sustainability by increasing the effectiveness of well-positioned sustainability leaders. Fellows learn to address social, economic and environmental issues at their root causes while benefiting from a national and international network of talented and supportive colleagues.

Systems Thinking

Systems thinking practices and approaches that help in the work towards a sustainable world include:

• Focusing on fundamental versus symptomatic solutions
• Blaming the system, not the players in the system
• Understanding the dynamics of exponential growth and other phenomena through causal loop diagramming
• Recognizing archetypal behavior in systems
• Understanding the dynamics of accumulations in systems through stock-and-flow diagramming

Fellows receive instruction, practice opportunities and coaching in learning to see the world through a systems lens, being able to interpret systems diagrams, recognizing archetypal behaviors of systems, linking systems behavior to vision, drawing reinforcing and balancing causal diagrams, explaining the root cause of an issue and learning how to converse about a system and use a system diagram as an engagement tool.

Link:

Sustainability Institute website >>

(this page introduces the key people at SI and it introduces the root view points on sustainability, systems thinking and other related topics).

My only comments on this is that the points listed under the “S.ytems Thinking” header above are posed as dichotomies. In systems thinking we may want to consider focusing on:

• both the symptomatic solution systems and on fundamental solution systems
• distributed responsibility (both the players and the system are responsible)

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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect