Week 12: Emergence

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Dictyostelium discoideum (slime mould)


bottom-up


bottom-up ďƒ collective intelligence


bottom-up  collective intelligence, emergence, and the “smart mob”


Sometime in the past decade…we stopped analyzing

emergence

and started creating it. We began building selforganizing systems into our software applications, our video games, our art, our music. We built emergent systems to recommend new books, recognize our voices, or find mates. Steven Johnson, Emergence, 2001


For as long as complex organisms have been alive, they have lived under the laws of

self-organization

but in recent years our day-to-day life has become overrun with artificial emergence: systems built with a conscious understanding of what emergence is, systems designed to exploit the laws of atomic physics. Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But now they are starting to change it. Steven Johnson, Emergence, 2001


Smart Mobs

Howard Rheingold, 2002


Existenzmaximum = XMX



connection



My space does not end where yours begins, but rather the two can coexists and overlap.

Paola Antonelli, “All Together Now!� Design and the Elastic Mind







Existenzmaximum = XMX


Frankfurt Kitchen, 1926, Margaret Sch端tte Lizhotzky


Cabrini-Green, Chicago Housing Authority, 1942-1960s


Joe Colombo, “Living Systems” Flexible Seating Systems, 1967


Verner Panton, Visiona II, 1970



“The move from minimum to maximum echoes the twentieth century’s evolution from the dream of a better society based on objective, almost mathematical rules of distribution of space and resources to the idea of a self-organizing,

bottom-up society in which individual initiative can shape a more just and efficient world.”

-Paola Antonelli, “All Together Now!”

Design and the Elastic Mind


Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to re-impose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy-protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be

users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation?

consumers

Or will they be , constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests? -Howard Rheingold


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