Archive for design ecology
February 26, 2010 at 12:06 pm · Filed under bioinformatics, community interaction design, cybernetics, design ecology, energy, heterarchy, interaction, semantics
After writing yesterday’s post on psychology and climate change, I stumbled upon this article from the journal Ecological Economics entitled, “The art of the cognitive war to save the planet”.
The article details the proposition that our adaptive capacity–to respond to environmental feedback–to learn–is structured by the double bind, a concept coined by Gregory Bateson. A double bind is when an individual receives conflicting messages (intransitivity of preferences?) that disallows action on their part because responding to either message means being in conflict with the other. Wikipedia has a more detailed description here, but Bateson’s articulation of the concept can be found in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000, University of Chicago Press).
The author’s argument is that sustainability, or human-environment interactions that respond dynamically to each other, is constrained because beliefs about oneself and the community are increasingly biased towards individual level sustainability for two reasons. First, individual safety is increasingly linked to individual performance. Second, alienation from environmental feedback loops means that an amplification of uncertainty is taking place resulting many more belief ‘nodes’ about systems level relationships. This amplification results in greater propensity for conflict to develop between an individual’s assessment of the environment/system and their own well-being.
The task they outline is manifold–having many forms and elements. It means developing a shared cognitive base from which to develop mental models for collective action. The goal of a shared cognitive base is to help connect system level safety ideals to individual level belief nodes They argue that to do this requires “simple messages with the potential to shape individual belief systems”. Excessive information is to be avoided, while everyone should have access to the building blocks of conceptual blends that synthesize complex information.
The authors, Antal and Hukkinen, argue that more direct and influential injunctions should be exchanged to help reframe the context towards systems-individual linkages–not just individual. Thus an injunction, “Become a vegetarian” becomes the positive injunctive norm, “Become a vegetarian to maintain the status quo” and then makes more sense in terms of promoting sustainable behavior when coupled with a positive injunctive future norm, “Become a vegetarian so our civilization can survive.” This tactic seems similar to one described in the book Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, Penguin Books, 2009) where they describe some forms of social nudges based on experiments in judgment and decision making.
Thaler and Sunstein describe how some forms of social nudges unfold. These include:
- Increasing compliance when one is informed that others are complying–i.e. drawing public attention to what others are doing.
- Emphasize the positive injunctive norm encourages behavior that helps maintain the commons. (e.g. “Please don’t do this in order to keep it this way.”)
- Show what the norm actually is, as opposed the the perceived norm.
- Small encouragements or discouragements can maintain or induce new norms.
The example of the positive injunctive norm seems to be what Antal and Hukkinen are advocating, but with a touch more bite.
Their case lies in creating cognitively accessible links between systems status and individual experience. An example of this might be an electricity brownout linked to CO2 accumulation or perhaps a full blackout each time species diversity is degraded.
Their conclusion that ICT services are needed to help these links form is predictable. Systems like smart grids, early warning systems, and other membership and signaling tools are appropriate, but the burning question is how to implement them in society where the tools themselves do not reflect the normative values.
One scenario I had after reading this is a case where an electrical power generation company that is responsible for supplying the city creates more direct informational links with its consumers. Neighborhoods in the city already experience frequent and irregular cuts in supply. Engineers, particularly in energy, tend to focus on maintaining supply based on certain assumptions. Sometimes we don’t always know what those assumptions are. Smart grids have been identified as a solution bridging consumption and supply (albeit from a supply perspective), but what if there was a more jugaad solution?
I am hereby coining the term Ener-geets™ to describe a form of information transfer between energy consumers and energy suppliers. Let’s say consumption is pretty high. It’s hot. Everyone has fans running, AND the big cricket match is on. Power suppliers have decisions to make in order to maintain a consistent supply, but what if they could provide realtime feedback to their customers that threshold levels were being reached and if their behavior didn’t change, they might loose the ability to follow the cricket match to its conclusion.
Cut the normal means of feedback out for the time being (an energy bill or brownout) and allow the power operator to send a message, perhaps in the form a tweet (from Twitter), to everyone following those tweets. Potential overshoots to the grid capacity could be avoided. But then, this would go against established channels of information flow and place a great deal of responsibility in the power operator’s hands–er..mobile phone.
To connect the feedback loop, individual consumers could also be sending messages, informing of power cuts, potential spikes in use (a festival perhaps), or other changes or observations about consumption at the individual level.
You start to get the picture. Now, how do w do it?
Ref: Miklos Antal, Janne I. Hukkinen, The art of the cognitive war to save the planet, Ecological Economics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 February 2010, ISSN 0921-8009, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.01.002.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VDY-4Y9HP0Y-2/2/8effb7b70d90787bc2250323ffeef134)
Keywords: Human-environment interaction; Belief systems; Environmental strategy; Climate change communication; Cognitive studies
February 24, 2010 at 4:17 pm · Filed under cognitive justice, cybernetics, design ecology, ecoregionalism
I recently scanned this report that leveraged domain understanding in psychology to the problem of climate change. While the problem of climate changed could just as easily be reframed as a problem of recognizing variability and relevance, the research and patterns that the report draws upon can be used in the design process as levers to recognize opportunities and constraints for sustainability and adaptation.
It’s worth noting that the authors admit that the results are not drawn from a representative sample of the world’s population. Most of the work described comes only from studies done in North America, Europe, and Australia. Even the researchers who put the report together were from only the United States, Canada, Australia, and one member with dual citizenship in the United States and Germany. So while the report doesn’t represent a diversity of perspectives, it does emphasize the fact that there are significant gaps in our knowledge about environmental psychology and what intercultural similarities and differences exist in how we perceive and respond to problems like climate change.
Given that much of the work in the report describes what we could call cognitive or psychological biases, there are probably vary important differences in the processes people will use to adapt to climate variability. Indeed, one finding was that perceptions & reactions to climate risks are mediated by cultural values and beliefs.
Examples of design levers (observation followed by lever):
Small probability events tend to be underestimated when based on personal experience. Thus, designer should gather multiple personal experiences (embodiment? experiential learning?)
Recently occurred small probability events tend to be overestimated. Thus designer should show longer time frames (the historical context?)
Emotions influence perceptions of risk with respect to climate change. Thus, people tend to be conflicted and muted because it is seen as being beyond personal control.
The report also details how psychology looks at the relationship between consumption and behavior, where individual ability + motivation, context, and external motivators shape practice.
There was also a specific focus on the psychosocial impacts of climate change as driven by health an by relationships with common goods.
Adaptation in this context has multiple conduits:
- sense making
- causal and responsibility attributions for adverse instances
- appraisals of impacts
- resources
- possible coping responses
- affective responses
- motivational processes (stability, security, coherence, etc)
Which can be affected by media representations as both formal and informal social discourse that moderates the social construction, representation, amplification, and attenuation of risk and impacts.
In summary, the report identified psychological barriers to climate change action:
- unaware
- unsure
- lack of trust or believeability
- “not in my backyard”
- fixed behavior
- other people’s problem
- belief that actions are unimportant or make no difference
- engaged in token or objectively unhelpful actions
- not under human control
- other competing goals, time, resource, or effort draws
Much of the discussion and research seemed to point to a question of the cognitive architecture of risk. That is, how are categories learned, does information become relevant, risk construed, and behavior adopted? And what does that mean for vulnerability and adaptation?
Detection of climate change means distinguishing between climate and weather, making relevant the need for planning and decision making, and addressing expectations based on categories (e.g. latitude or place) since these beliefs bias the direction of our errors in perception. It also means understanding how information acquisition takes place which leads to differences in perception and action even when it comes from the same source.
associative + affective processes + repeated personal experience = fast and automatic
Good for low probability events
statistics = slow + cognitive effort
Good for recent, high impact events
Ok, that’s all for now. Here’s the reference:
Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges
A Report by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change
February 24, 2010 at 12:56 pm · Filed under cognitive justice, community interaction design, design ecology, preferences, symbolic systems, teaching and learning
I’ve been casually reading Scott Atran and Douglas Medin’s The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature since I came back from the U.S. in January. I picked the book up for a few reasons. One, I was familiar with Scott Atran’s work after running across it while I was studying at the University of Michigan. Atran is an anthropologist who has been working to integrate psychology and anthropology in pursuit of a better perspective on how the natural environment and the social landscape interacts to affect belief, behavior, and practice. Two, I am interested in how cognition facilitates learning and behavior, especially in a shared resources or public infrastructure context. Some of Atran’s more recent work deals with negotiations and intercultural understanding for problems ranging from terrorism, common resources, and Iran’s nuclear policy. Third, the discussions and research in the book can be helpful for artists, designers, teachers, and evolutionary biologists who want to gain better control or understanding of how, effectively, epistemology develops.
I found one particular passage to be quite helpful for a project I am working on at the moment. It deals with relevance drawing from Sperber and Wilson’s book on communication and cognition. Relevance is a pretty subjective measure of how much something matters to someone. The articulation of relevance in these pages shows ghosts of Bateson’s difference that makes a difference, but here there is an efforts to start to describe exactly what aspects of cognition make something relevant–that is, how does the environment and one’s interactions in it affect meaning? pay attention teachers…this is where it gets relevant to learning.
Here’s some notes:
Relevance: if processing an input at a certain time yields cognitive effects.
Cognitive Effects =
- revision of previous beliefs
- derivation of contextual conclusions following from input taken together with previously available information
So:
greater cognitive effect = greater relevance
While:
greater effort = lower relevance
Thus:
Salient information has greater relevance given the lower effort it requires. Atran and Medin make this point be describing their research with different groups’ interpretations (interpretations = mappings from objects, situations, problems, and events to words. In an interpretation, one word can mean many objects) of ecological relationships and taxonomy. They also studied school children who had a more nuanced view of ecology and compared them to urban children to try to help understand why they had different experiences in the classroom. The conclusions supported the idea that textbooks and instruction was not relevant enough to support the expansion of learning among those with more nuanced perspectives (perspectives = mappings from reality to an internal language such that each distinct object, situation, problem, or event gets mapped to a unique word).
Learning, then, is guided by what is already known. What is learned first often becomes a category ideal. It’s like when your idea of what tastes good, what a certain kind of flower is, or how to do a task is based on what you first learn. It’s also affects things like what we think of when we think of a bear. My image of a bear may be based on North American species like the black bear or grizzly. In India, an image of a bear may be based on their Himalayan relatives.
This seems to resonate somewhat with patterns of cognitive bias studied across different organisms in evolutionary biology in an attempt to get a better understanding of sexual selection. Cognitive or sensory bias, as studied in evolutionary biology, refers to an organism’s set of preferences. It’s similar to judgment biases studied by psychologists and micro economists (e.g. Tversky and Kahneman). However, in biological terms, sensory bias often has a genetic/sensory basis and can significantly affect mating and reproduction. Some well-studied examples include how Tungara frogs (Ryan lab at UTexas) or even crickets (Zuk lab at UC Riverside) influence mate choice with different call structures or signals (e.g. deep, red, loud, frequent, etc).
So in an experimental, teaching, or design setting, good examples of categories are ones that are familiar, have a high word frequency (use = familiarity + context), or that represent ideals. So as we design interfaces, software, interactions, and signs for access, it makes sense to consider categories that are culturally relevant and that have legacies of use in context. Additional learning uses these categories as supports (scaffolds?) to build on.
This is why representation of goals and categories is so important. The implicit organization of knowledge around goals creates category ideals, subsequently driving category based inference–that is, the creation of new knowledge from what already exists.
So in terms of deriving an experimental practice from these ideas, a student at CEMA, Aliya, has been trying to look at how naming objects as concepts (decategorization?) rather than the names they have been given. Thus a “chair” becomes a “people holder” or a “step ladder” depending on new contexts of use. It leads to the question, “How do we take objects from everyday life & create a stimulus that provides an opportunity for reflection & engagement on the use, interaction, and consumption that the object supports—all while waiting for whatever that object does?”
February 24, 2010 at 11:15 am · Filed under community interaction design, design ecology, ecoregionalism, symbolic systems, teaching and learning, visual culture
A colleague of mine recently received a request for a response on the topic of designing interculturally. It came from a graduate student in design who wrote about how his research “focuses on examining how culture influences visual language and what that means for contemporary designers who are increasingly asked to design across cultural boundaries”. The goal of his research is to create a guide to intercultural design.
The request from the grad student was forward to a listserve along with a statement of alarm from my colleague about the standards of graduate education. I’m not sure what he was alarmed by, but he seemed to be concerned about the empirical validity of the questionnaire the student had sent. I replied to forward by asking, “So what alarms you exactly about the questions as posed? That is, what is it about his culture and your culture that makes this way of designing a guide so alarming to you?”
My colleague’s reaction to the student’s request made me wonder why the empirical validity seemed to be so lacking. The student was making an earnest effort (something I may personally have to do in the near future) to gather varied perspectives on the topic of intercultural design. Perhaps my colleague knows of a right way to do intercultural design or if there are more ‘empirical’ ways of conducting design research and of designing.
In any case, I took on the student’s questionnaire and found it more difficult than it seemed at first. If anyone reading this has any perspectives and ways of going about intercultural design that are developed and seem to work, please share!
Here is the questionnaire with my responses:
Background information
Describe your current job. Please include your job title.
My current job title is artist-in-residence. Typically artists-in-residence work with or at an institution to create artworks. They interact with faculty, staff and students to share their processes and sometimes even collaborate. However, I refer to myself as a design ecologist since that might better describe what I do. Initially I came to the institution I work for under the assumption that I was helping to start up a graduate program and research lab in experimental and new media.
My work ranges from research into the traits and practices that characterize experimentalism and how they contribute to new knowledge and hybridity in form, practice and context. I’ve taught classes and developed curricula much as a faculty member at a college or university would. I’ve led workshops, labs, and helped to organize conferences. I research and write about design in cross-cultural contexts, and how to work across those contexts based on the kinds of knowledge that each creates. I am particularly interested in how experimentalism and objectivity are made. I also work to apply research in psychology, sociology, & anthropology to understandings of bias (cognitive and social) so that we can design more fluidly across different social orders. Today I attended a grad review session to give feedback to students. I also try to connect where possible people, projects and institutions where I see great value in their working together or in the synergy of their approaches to knowledge and its application. Other days I just do graphic design or sculpture…still others…I call people and do all the mundane stuff that goes with helping to contribute to the maintenance of a project or organization.
Describe your cultural background. Is your cultural background evident in your work?
Please give examples.
My cultural background is based in the East Side of Detroit. It borders two edges, the suburbs and the Grosse Pointes. The Grosse Pointes are a wealthy edge of the city on the lake, while the suburbs are mainly made of of people who left Detroit or who inhabit communities that sprung up outside of it. I lived in a pretty culturally-mixed lower-middle class neighborhood composed of houses built in the early 20th century. I lived sort of at an edge, a hybrid zone if you will. I went to Catholic school (like most of my family) in Grosse Pointe Park and I visited relatives in the suburbs. I went camping in the woods as a kid. We had a house, but we were never well-off. My parents were divorced when I was in second grade. My mom worked her way through grad school to support and get my sister and I through school. I lived in the midwest most of my time through college. I travelled to far away places a few times through the generosity of relatives. I learned to be critical of what was presented as fact or as law because I saw it being used arbitrarily and without it’s own self-reflection or criticality. Maybe I just didn’t like nuns telling me what I should and should not do. Late in college I started working with a group of evolutionary biologists. Later still I studied organizations and cybernetics. I prefer soccer to other sports. Especially in playing.
Is my cultural background evident?
It depends where you look. I think it is. I come from a strong maternal line that last generation had 10 brothers and sisters who lost their father and breadwinner during the Great Depression. Plus they were Catholic. So for me to be interested in organizations, feedback, management, systems, knowledge construction, sustainability, robustness, and critical inquiry + truth and justice…yeah I’d say so.
Cultural considerations in design
How important is it for you to understand the culture of your audience?
It depends on the context and what I am trying to do. One question I ask is if my understanding matters at all. Most people in the world are muddling by, understanding very little, and they seem to be doing just fine. Then again, there seems to be a lot we can learn about each other–culturally speaking. I think there is a lot to be gained in understanding each other’s culture if and when there are conflicts. Often times this is because we are holding assumptions about how the world works deep inside us, and we aren’t making these known. There was a recent study of negotiations between Palestine and Israel that showed how what one believed to be the sticking point in the negotiations was not the case at all. The researchers showed how a ‘reframing’ of values could allow negotiations to proceed by articulating what could be exchanged for material compensation and which values were beyond material compensation–even though it was assumed they were not—because of cultural assumptions.
Are there any specific steps you take to understand the culture of your audience?
Absolutely! I think first it makes sense to assess exactly what you mean when you say ‘culture’ I like Atran et al’s (2005; the cultural mind) discussion of culture:
“it is important to note that the question of how culture should be defined is separable from the question of how best to study it. Although we think a definition of a culture in terms of history, proximity, language, and identification is useful and (if not too rigidly applied) perhaps even necessary as a beginning point, it does not follow that the cultural content of interest must be shared ideas and beliefs.”
They go on further to describe some of the many ways culture is looked at by different fields and people with different interests, and they determine that cultural definitions are based on utility on one hand and the scope of interest (e.g. scale or subject) on the other. In the end they see culture as that which allows the uptake of processes, of procedures, information, beliefs values and so on. So culture then is not the nouns (belief, behavior, value, etc) that we commonly associate with culture–rather it is the means by which we acquire those nouns.
table
Cross-cultural comparison of the number and distribution of words used to describe container-like objects.
Another step beyond this definition would be to lay one’s own cultural assumptions bare. I’ve attached an image from Malt et al. (1999; knowing versus naming) that shows a comparison of the number of items or objects that words across three different languages. You can see quite clearly that are quite different distributions of words for these items when you compare. Now ask what this means for different locations, use patterns, numbers of items and how these items interact with language!!! The most important point here is to assume nothing!!!
Ask what the starting points of culture are and move on from there. Design is an appropriate place to do that since so many aspects of what we use to create culture are DESIGNED! Nature is another, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to disentangle nature and the social. I think objects and artifacts are great because they tell us some much when we fail to use them “correctly”. The workplace is yet another spot where different cultural artifacts and practices converge.
Please give examples.
Describe a specific project. How/why did the culture of your audience influence your choice of the following design elements:
The project I am thinking of is one I recently submitted a proposal for. The goal is to identify culturally appropriate ways of communicating climate change and risks associated with it for disaster preparedness. Here is how the audience(s) I think would influence the following elements:
- Shapes: How are names associated? What do they reference? Are there assumptions or associations that people have with them?
- Colors: What level communicates versus disturbs? Are there associations or not (e.g. red = hot)?
- Images/photographs: How does framing, angle, & focus matter? And how does the semeiotic relationships between the elements in the images narrate and structure our engagement with it and with other things (see van leeween and kress for more on that one)?
- Symbols: In what context does the symbol make sense? In everyday life? In an abstracted work setting?
- Layouts: What is the flow of information and meaning? Where do/should narrative elements appear?
- Other? Time, the temporal view, how do we access the future? the past? the present? On what terms and with what detail and agency?
Are there any specific steps you took to verify you were using the above elements in a culturally appropriate way? Please give examples.
No not yet with that one, but all of the above considerations were based on prior field research that identified some of these as core concerns in their engagement with the design of these information systems. So going back to question 4: do field research. Talk to people and ask them questions…about what makes them upset..about what they don’t understand…about what seems ‘alien’.
What advice would you give to other designers working on a similar project?
It it a similar cross-cultural project or a similar guide?
Either way: GO SOMEWHERE WHERE THE CULTURE IS NOT YOURS. PAY ATTENTION. DOCUMENT YOUR FRUSTRATION. THEN YOU WILL BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT MUCH OF THE WORLD IS EXPERIENCING RIGHT NOW.
February 18, 2010 at 11:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized, art, boundary objects, community interaction design, complex systems, cybernetics, design ecology, heterarchy, interaction, relational aesthetics, symbolic systems
This find (thanks Dharmang) describes a history and accounting of the Transactional Arts–which is art, where a transaction is explicitly part of the work.
Daniela Plewe’s discussion brings me back to some thoughts and notes I made about Marcel Duchamp’s Coefficient d’Art. Duchamp described it as:
“An arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”
It is intended to describe the difference between what artists intend and what the spectator perceives. For Duchamp, this difference is in the act of communication or transaction, where certain differences and attributions of value are made out of the interaction among individuals. It this coefficient that structures the viewers engagement with artifacts and allows them opportunities to appropriate objects to their own needs and ends.
For Duchamp, the coefficient of art could be good (+), bad (-) or indifferent (=), but the sign of the coefficient had no bearing on the effectiveness of the work itself–only the difference between the agency of the artists to produce a desired effect in the minds of the spectators. The effect itself is up for further negotiation between them.
Mutual information is a similar concept to the coefficient of art, but it comes from information theory and describes the amount of information one thing tells about another thing. In other words, it is the reduction in uncertainty of one thing due to knowledge of another. If we ask how information (and consequently, meaning) is shared between different sources of uncertainty (like an object and a spectator or an object and its artist), we may be able to get a sense of how they are connected and how they might respond to each other.
Mutual information is helpful as a concept because we want to understand how interactions vary with one another–i.e. how interaction values may/may not change as a result of signals, actions, and assumptions.
A component of mutual information is information entropy. Entropy is a measure of uncertainty associated with a variable and quantifies the information contained in a message. It is similar to the coefficient of art; it may describe the uncertainty associated with an artwork as judged by the spectator. Conversely, it could describe the absence of meaning when one does not know the value of the work. Likewise the spectator may themselves exhibit high entropy (high uncertainty) relative to the artist if the artist knows little about the spectator and how they will perceive the artwork….at least that’s how I think it would go.
The coefficient of art is a compelling concept. It suggests that that art has an effect, and if an effect–value in context. Describing that value is very close to the describing what difference the work of art makes, either to the spectator or some chain extending through them.
Borrowing from evolutionary and network theory, one could pull in a set of relationships between interacting agents that describe how networks evolve and persist. Relationships endure over time from the benefits of interaction. In network reciprocity, entities pay a cost, c, while their number of neighbors, k, receive a benefit, b. If b/c > k, where the ratio of benefits to costs is greater than the sum of neighbors, the network persists because its members are gaining as a result of their interactions.
Duchamp’s coefficient of art (hereafter described using the greek letter psi, ϕ; see also: epistasis), approximates the number of neighbors, but as indicated by it separation from the actual effect of the work itself, says nothing about costs and benefits. ϕ approximates k, or rather the reciprocal of k, because as the number of neighbors (or spectators of the work) increases, the likely ability of the artwork to communicate intent, decreases. This is because of variation among the spectators who may either not be well-understood by the artist or who are perceiving differently or because the artist. Interestingly, ϕ always assumes artistic intent. If ϕ is low, it may be the ‘fault’ of the spectator, the inability of the artist to realize that intent, or of some other intervening factor.
But what about art that is created beyond intent such as generative, algorithmic, or emergent artworks?
ϕ may also be a bound on the ability of artifacts to bridge social groups, as in the case of boundary objects that have multiple uses. The intent of the maker of that object is only partially achieved, but may clearly be appropriated to serve other purposes. Here we might similarly invoke a coefficient of use–or a measure of intent in use that transforms the intent of the artist.
Far from achieving certainty, at least the idea of ϕ, of a coefficient of art, starts to unlock more questions about translation and meaning between objects and people–and of the directionality of interactions between people.
January 30, 2010 at 12:58 pm · Filed under bioinformatics, community interaction design, complex systems, cybernetics, design ecology, ecology, ecoregionalism, maps, public health
Where People Live
Anthropogenic Biomes as a Region for Research in Evolutionary Design Ecology
Many systems of classification for regions ignore the integration of human influence and ecosystem form, process, and diversity. This situation was common when I was in school and we learned about different ecological regions that were described largely by vegetation type and the weather patterns. A definition of region that is based on many interactions between society and nature, including perspectives on global patterns of sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems, may be appropriate for weighing studies of human health, its interactions, and driving factors. Anthropogenic biome describes a recent and perhaps better system of regional classification than have previous definitions (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008) which have tended towards pure forms of nature or the separation of nature and society.
Anthropogenic Biomes: Definition
Anthropogenic biomes are similar to ecological biomes: they describe patterns of vegetation, climate, and ecosystem processes. However, they also take into account the anthropogenic influences of land use and population density on ecosystem processes. Ellis and Ramankutty characterize anthropogenic biomes as heterogeneous landscape mosaics, combining a variety of different land uses and land covers. Some of this heterogeneity is driven by natural landscape variation, as well as human enhancement of natural landscape (e.g. intensive agriculture) and human created landscape (e.g. construction of settlements and transportation systems).
The Regional Classification System they developed is as Follows (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008):
Dense Settlements: Urban, Dense Settlements
Villages: Rice Villages, Irrigated Villages, Cropped and Pastoral Villages, Rainfed Villages, Rainfed Mosaic Villages
Croplands: Irrigated Cropland, Residential Rainfed Mosaic, Populated Irrigated Cropland, Populated Rainfed Cropland, Remote Cropland
Rangelands: Rangelands, Populated Rangeland, Remote Rangeland
Forested: Populated Forests, Remote Forests
Wildlands: Wild Forest, Sparse Forest, Barren
Of Earth’s 6.4 billion human inhabitants:
40% live in dense settlements biomes (82% urban population),
40% live in village biomes (38% urban),
15% live in cropland biomes (7% urban), and
5% live in rangeland biomes (5% urban)
0.6% live in forested biomes.
Asia and Oceania have the most diversity in the distribution of these regions around the world.
Global Anthropogenic Biomes
Further refinement is possible (Alessa and Chapin, 2008) by resolving distributions of social values, dietary patterns, movement patterns, resource use and between local and regional scales, inter alia.
Why Anthropogenic Biomes Matter for Public Health and Other Forms of Research
Anthropogenic biomes are a more accurate description of broad ecological patterns than are systems that exclusively describe vegetation patterns based on variations in climate and geology. Likewise, anthropogenic biomes may be better at representing patterns of human interactions with the environment and describing the driving factors in health outcomes. There are multiple reasons for this that stem from the varied roles that ecosystem, climate, cultural, and social relationships enact in dialogue with each other.
Anthropogenic biomes differ substantially in terms of basic ecosystem processes (eg carbon emissions, reactive nitrogen) and ecosystem biodiversity. These factors in turn affect the relative availability of resources for that region, including and especially ecosystem services like clean air and water and nutrient availability for agriculture. Furthermore, they must necessarily feed back into human ways of knowing and interacting with the environment.
Anthropogenic biomes can be connected to global patterns of ecosystem processes, along with anticipated future increases in human influence on ecosystems and the associated health outcomes due to climate change-driven risk factors.
Genome by environment interactions may be particularly relevant at this scale of interaction. The region definition is appropriate to human movement patterns and thus exposure to sources of chronic and acute risk from disease and consumption patterns.
The land use type itself determines a wide variety of factors including interactions with other humans, livestock, dietary consumption, levels of hydration, energy intensity, and other factors.
Culture, ethnicity, and language are also important in response to land use and domestic patterns of consumption ranging from food use and taboos, communication of lifestyle and health options, provisioning of nutrition, water, and energy, availability, and the use of technology to process and maintain different lifestyle patterns.
In each of these regional definitions, the interactions between landscape and human activity affects affluence, access to health care, and political regulation which suggests that these are are other possible subdivisions since these regions correspond to human social, transport, technological, and social networks–especially in dense settlements versus villages and remote areas.
For these reasons, anthropogenic biomes may provide more of a mosaic-like image from which to base categorizations used by clinical and other studies of health compared to political and continental boundaries which conventionalize migration barriers and tribal relationships. Geographic and political definitions will slowly shift, leaving only historical genetic signatures. Furthermore, anthro biomes are not specific to any particular disease or health outcome. They may encompass suites of infection and disease patterning where behavior, exposure, risk, and land use are correlated. They may also be indicative of linked health outcomes at the physiological level where, for example, musculoskeletal disorders and endocrine system perturbations are bound by human-influenced ecosystem interactions. Or they may suggest psychological correlates, linking cognition and landscape to disease and health risks.
The main point to consider is that ecological relationships, including land use and human infrastructure development, script behavior and consumption in ways that drive health outcomes. Understanding human influenced ecosystem patterns helps us identify areas of positive feedback between health risks, land use, population density, and the construction of everyday life.
References
Alessa, L., & Chapin, F. S. (2008). Anthropogenic biomes: a key contribution to earth-system science. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23(10), 529–531.
Ellis, E. C., & Ramankutty, N. (2008). Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 6(8), 439–447.
April 19, 2009 at 6:35 pm · Filed under boundary objects, cognitive justice, community interaction design, complex systems, cybernetics, design ecology, interdisciplinary, metaphors
This is one of the best popular articles I have read on the psychological factors affecting individual and group decision making in complex, high-stakes uncertainty. The focus of this article is on climate change, but the implication can be translated to other problems just as easily. This is simply because of the scale and the way that problem itself is generated. The scale is large and usually prohibits people from seeing the impacts of decisions, while it is also caused by many individuals making choices that contribute to the problem.
It amazes me that in all of the discussion documented in the article, there is never a mention of designers, artists, or any other such expertise that actually spends the majority of its effort on communication, messaging, experience design, and the use of sensory mechanisms to motivate behavior. It makes me sad that there is the recognition that, when it comes to communication, it’s always about the researchers doing the communication. This can be improved, yes, and there are also many design-thinking guidelines one can pull out of the article. How many can you spot?
The Green Issue – Why Isn’t the Brain Green? – NYTimes.com.
September 29, 2008 at 8:28 pm · Filed under boundary objects, cognitive justice, community interaction design, design ecology, interaction, interdisciplinary, making it public, maps, network entrepreneurship, teaching and learning, watercasting
The first day was organized to enumerate problems and the criteria by which to evaluate responses to those problems. The second day focused on our responses as ‘designers’ and the methods that we could use to find tactical responses to the difficult problems posed by water (and the lack thereof).
We began by discussing what it is that designers do. I asked students what is is that artists and designers do? I asked the students to describe what they felt was their strongest characteristic as an artist/ designer. Surprisingly, almost all of them described characteristics that were domain-free and overwhelmingly social. I showed them Burt’s (2002) concept from sociology of a network entrepreneur, and we used his assessment tool to see how individual personalities and the class as a whole tended towards network entrepreneurship.
We continued by discussing Bowker and Star’s (1999) article about classifications an boundary objects. I expanded the initial discussion by showing them examples according to Star and Griesemer’s four types of boundary objects. We came to realize that boundary objects do and could play an important role in mediating different groups, particularly those that might have conflicting goals.
We concluded the morning session by sharing candidate solutions to the difficult problems posed by water. A couple of these dealt with making groundwater (and its hidden concerns) visible ‘above the ground’. This would be a metaphor to build on later that day.
In the afternoon, I showed them Paris: Invisible City and navigated through the multimedia map- a demonstration of all that helps to construct Paris as a city. With this in hand, we questioned how we come to describe the components of a city and how existing ways of seeing are, perhaps, constrained by existing representations. We discussed sex differences in navigation as one example relating to how maps are rendered and what it means for cognitive justice. We started to see that all of the components of a city- its water systems, street systems, entertainment systems- are constructed in numerous places and not just at the sites of consumption. 
As the afternoon waned, we adjourned to the water cooler in the corner of the room where we were able to have a refreshing drink and a new perspective on the networks that supported our taking that sip. We reflected and surmised deeply all of the actions and passing of signs, documents, and behaviors that are needed to make sure that the water cooler is there when we need it, that it tells a particular story, and what we miss when we take is existence for granted. WE connected it to the electricity plant, to the staff that keep it clean and full of water, to a history associating the color blue with water, to the friendliness of ‘eco friendly’ technology, to the construction people who built the building, to the architects and the central planning board whose permits probably had something to do with the fact that it was in the southwest corner and very near the bathrooms whose water systems run all alongside the building there.
We all shared what technical skills we had after that…from illustration, film shooting and editing, writing, 3-D rendering, and so on. We decided that we would make boundary objects as our designs and solutions for creating awareness and solving problems associated with water’s future. We decided we would make films to share our scenarios because they carry stories and build empathy. We decided that we would be like the tide, starting from shore and moving out to sea, returning to shore with our collections and documentation, moving back out again during the interim, and then back again…to sea what we can see.
September 29, 2008 at 6:49 pm · Filed under boundary objects, cognitive justice, community interaction design, design ecology, interaction, interdisciplinary, making it public, network entrepreneurship, teaching and learning, watercasting
We started by looking at the neologism ‘watercasting’, coined for the purposing of re-imagining what it is that we would be doing in the class. Casting for the purpose of making a mold, a cast that one would find in theatre or film, to broadcast, and even futurecasting were brought up by some of the participants.
We discussed difficult and wicked problems by comparing them to tame ones such as one would find in science and engineering. We formed groups based on complementary zodiac signs (in part to introduce forms of classification and grouping). Students were asked to develop symbols or logos for each of the characteristics of difficult problems as described in Horst and Rittel (1973). This required them not only to have read but to work toward synthesizing that information in the form of a visual response.
We ended the morning session by brainstorming and expanding a list of difficult problems associated with water. Pairs of students articulated the problems and then as a class we grouped them according to the themes they seemed to be suggesting.
After lunch I introduced the students to twitter and kluster, software platforms for 1) assembling a symphony of interactions around water in the case of twitter, and 2) choosing among proposed solutions in the case of kluster.
I asked students to come to the class with examples of good and bad design from around Srishti. They described many instances, and for a minute it seemed as if it would be a ‘crib’ session about the things the students didn’t like. Instead, we found out that things we might perceive as being ‘designed’ were often vestigial or happenstance. We also used examples of so-called bad design to recognize was it is that we value that seemed to be missing. In this way we turned these examples into opportunities as we transitioned into finding a list of criteria that we could use to evaluate or responses to difficult problems over the course of the semester.
We ended the afternoon session by compiling a list of these criteria as a first step towards understanding what kinds of traits our designs should have if they were going to be progressive responses.
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