February 2009
Which Led To all led to MEconomist.com
March 2008
Come back in May where you can see the final outcome of my thesis. It's been a 1.5 year official 'thesis' process for me, and it began with drive to use the power of Internet to facilitate collaboraiton on projects and pursuits that benefited humanity. Now I realize that my thesis truly began when I started asking questions, so consider it my whole life. What I will show you will be me. My thesis is about the process of me. It's also about you and us; it's about humanity. It goes back to nature and analyzes life for what it truly is. A big piece of my heart has gone into this, and I want to share it with everyone. My blog will give you the gist.
Aside from the radically fresh collaboration with Bruce Hinds this year, an environmental design professor, I've also been very priviledged to meet and engage with Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity), Rusty Smith (Rural Studio) and David Buckland (Cape Farewell) while they were here giving speeches about their careers in humanitarian practices. Very inspiring and encouraging year.
11-Mar-08
"Cultures that value perceptual diversity are more adaptable than cultures that do not. Perceptually diverse cultures are better able to understand whole systems (because they use a variety of perceptual processes to understand systems) than are cultures that rely only on scientific method, which dissects systems. They also are better stewards of their environments, because they grasp the value of the whole of biodiversity (biocomplexity) through transitional as well as scientific processes. Understanding through perceptual diversity leads to a higher degree of adaptability and evolutionary competence"
--Anthropology of Consciousness, American Anthropological Association (2001)
Tara Lumpkin from Perceptual Diversity: Is Polyphasic Consciousness Necessary for Global Survival?
"Urban design cannot be form alone. Purposeful social commitment must precede all action in the design process without concern for the techniques or shapes through which the commitment may finally be translated into physical reality. Although our present concern is for the existence in any urban system of places which may generate concourse and intercourse as a structuring device, before we start this analysis we have to clarify our humanistic commitment."
"The urban environment, if man can only learn to shape it properly, is not only becoming an essential component of the total environment, but has great promise as a springboard for rediscovery of the wonders of life everywhere, and simultaneously of man's own humanness. But time is running out and mankind may be running the risk of losing its humanity before it reaches its highest potential. From this point of view it seems reasonable to tackle the problem of readjustment at both ends -- not only the conservation of the natural, but also the restructuring of our collective selves, thereby satisfying simultaneously an ecological adjustment and sociological evolution."
-- Serge Chermayeff from Shape of Community (1971)
"In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action. The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual."
--Kevin Lynch from The Image of the City (1960)
04-Mar-08
Here are some passages from The Death of the Family (David Cooper 1971): a book I've accidentally attained recently which has connected with my thoughts quite deeply.
"Beyond the obvious legal and social-contractual senses of the word, marriage can mean any sort of more or less lasting, socially objectified conjunction between personal entities. If we recognize that each of us is filled with a world of others who are not quite them and at the same time not quite us, we can envisage the possibility of some marital arrangements within one person. If we go back in the tradition of phenomenological investigation of human experience we recall the definition of intentionality running through the work of Husserl and Sartre in particular. Any primary datum of experience arising as a thinking, feeling, striving movement is of something, towards some object that both constitutes and is constituted by the initial movement in consciousness as a unitary and self-uniting entity in the world."