Archive for ecology
January 25, 2011 at 5:32 AM · Filed under cognitive justice, community interaction design, complex systems, cybernetics, design ecology, ecology, futures, heterarchy, relational aesthetics, service design, symbolic systems
Design is a sticky practice. It is looped with contradictions, uncertainties, and material constraints. Bringing something new into the world, be it an artifact or service raises challenges that few individuals can surmount – if at all. Despite the dominant view that geniuses, visionaries, and otherwise crafty individuals are solely responsible for designed creations, organizations play a far greater and often unattributed role. Perhaps it is because of the aesthetic flair worked into the surface of the object or experience, or maybe it’s the personality of the driving individual that points us in the direction of these myths. And they are myths, because even the most brilliant designer owes their success at the end of the day to at least one group – their participants, their users. More likely is “rock-star” designers owe the production of a product or service to many more who inhabit a long chain in the process of design, implementation, and distribution.
Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry, South Wall"
Somewhere along the chain of causation between creative individuals and their users there exists a group of people, places, ideas, and things that operate synchronistically and synergistically to develop ideas into concepts, concepts into prototypes, prototypes into experiences, experiences into practices, and practices into lessons. These sets of translations encompass different skill sets and relationships, few of which are possible without deep and varied interactions across different environments.
Taking stock of an emerging design practice is something we do often these days. I think it springs from places that have recognized and internalized failures for what they are – opportunities – and from people who embrace reflection as positive forces for learning and adaptive change.
Our environments are changing. And they will continue to do so. Even if we find pathways to design static landscapes that include fixed social interactions, the resources and habitat available to us and other species will remain in flux. Consider that in 2008, we reached the threshold where 50% of the world’s human population resides in urban dwellings (and possibly also 50% of the world’s population of cockroaches, starlings, street dogs, and sewer rats).
It’s also true that the biosphere can no longer be considered ‘natural’ in the same terms that 18th century Romantics did, as something pure, something to be conserved, something separate. The landscapes of our contemporary experience are human enmeshed – neither dominated nor resistant to our desires to interact, to use, and to understand. They show our preferences for stable communities supported by agriculture that reinforce a growing feedback loop between population growth and energy consumption. The Anthropocene, as this epoch is now commonly referred to, places a point on some linear timeline where people demonstrated their best applications of the idea of progress. Perhaps it is only our external concept of the sublime that are disappearing from the human range of experience.
There is much greater landscape diversity than has ever existed, but certainly it is less inhabitable by the majority of the world biological diversity. Landscape diversity is created not only by people and their continued interpretations of “safe” and “prosperous”, but also by animals and plants that push and get pushed into their own new and divergent niches. Patches of materials are being collected and redistributed to form wild hybrids and pure spaces– bacteria-resistant surfaces, show rose gardens, crude oil-slicked sandy beaches, tourist-friendly rainforest, wildlife mobility solutions, skyscraper concrete pillars, semiconductors, and extra-terrestrial orbiting robots – to name just a few.
Each time new patches are created, they exemplify the desires and possibilities available for their inhabitants. They provide food, space for living, courses for exercise, obstacles for navigation, challenges and threats between groups that aim to occupy more patches, places to hide, and places to trade. Evolutionary history has demonstrated that cooperation confers a significant strategic advantage to those who choose to communicate, share, and build together. In human terms, one need only look at the migratory patterns of individuals from rural to urban settlements to understand that there is a direct and perceived economic advantage from sharing land, resources, infrastructure, and culture on people’s livelihoods – not to mention social mobility.
Detail from wall illustration at the Golden Temple, Namdroling Monastery, India
Design practices are widening. They are gaining breadth proportional to their influence on economic productivity, their ability to expand social engagement and political empowerment, and perhaps because of the impact that social studies of science and technology has provided to our appreciation of artifacts as catalysts for knowledge. Scientists and technologists are viewed as inventors, individual carries of the modern ideal of progress. We now recognize that images, laboratory spaces, institutions, public media, and mechanical parts play as significant a role in chance events, innovation, and the acquisition of scientific and technological dogma by civil society.
One of the implications of an expanded design practice is the gradual inclusion of organizations as ‘objects’ for design. Organizations were once the purview of managers, business executives, policy makers, and human resources consultants, but they can now be confidently lumped together with paint, plaster, and photo emulsion.
I’m sure this is raising red flags for some who read this, and it should. It’s a scary proposition for some to think that individual behaviors can and should be designed and organized. But it is a fact that individual and group behaviors are already structured by the designed and so-called natural environment along with normalized social interactions and perceptions of social agency. The only thing we gain by ignoring the structures that are already in place (albeit unconsciously) is the freedom from self-awareness, individual and collective agency to solve more challenging and complex problems. The more we ignore these unconscious behaviors (eating habits for example) that already exist, the more they leads us into deep patterns and habits that can be difficult to get out of for reasons of fear, inexperience, ability, or just a lack of awareness.
This is not to say it is all negative. If we had to pay attention to everything we did, we would fall apart from exhaustion while trying to make complicated decisions. Many of our biases may have developed because they habituate us into safe spaces for interaction. Unfortunately, as our societies and environments change, those safe spaces may be retreating, and it’s worth reflecting on our biases and how our individual and group dynamics promote infrastructures for flourishing.
Organizational management has become a major discipline of the 20th century with the adoption of increasingly complicated tasks and industrial processes. It stands to become more integrated into our systems and psyche, but will management theories dominate – or will design envelop management in favor more distributed processes of self-organization consistent with cybernetics and decision theory?
Groups change, and so do their goals. It is a part of life and society, and it always will be. The questions that we ought to be asking is how, where, through whom, and when do they change?
There is ample evidence that organizational behavior is at the root of innovation and robustness across enterprises. The shape and tenor of a group of people, each with different tasks, and working towards a common goal varies widely – not to mention the tasks, people and goals – and that’s assuming those goals are shared among the group members! Without going into the theory and practice of organizational behavior for which there is a massive literature, I simply want to raise the point that organizational design may be a more recent practice and one that plays a role in or strategies for adaptation, sustainability, and inclusive growth.
In part II, I’ll look at some examples where designers are tackling organizational design as project and process.
Diego Rivera's "Man at the Crossroads"
June 7, 2010 at 2:17 AM · Filed under architecture, biology, complex systems, cybernetics, design ecology, ecology, evolution, futures, genomics, interaction, interdisciplinary
Disaggregation among natural and social scientific communities can lead to misunderstandings about the different components of disaster management and socio-ecological systems. Terms like resilient, adaptive, robust are often used to describe systems and their processes and come up in the literature, policy, and the media very frequently. They have catch my attention because they have different use patterns in the field I know a little about: biology.
Adaptation, coping, resilience, and robustness have similar definitions, but they sometimes have different technical definitions across disciplines. Their different meanings contribute to their value, and they highlight the differences in perspectives that each scientific community contributes. However, the details matter for distinguishing important components of systems and what aspects might be suggestive for new insights or that might be responsive to intervention or assessment. It’s also important to establish common ground meanings when communities get together and work towards common goals.
There is a benchmark article Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–Ecological Systems that does a much better job at pulling together the literature than I do here, and I came across it after writing much of what is in this article. It is also the narrative used by the Resilience Alliance for their activities.
The following represents some of my notes and thinking as I try to sort out the definitions on my own. For me, it means asking how different perspectives contribute to the ways in which we interact in socio-ecological systems.
Adaptation
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report defines adaptation as:
Initiatives and measures to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects. Various types of adaptation exist, e.g. anticipatory and reactive, private and public, and autonomous and planned. Examples are raising river or coastal dikes, the substitution of more temperature-shock resistant plants for sensitive ones, etc.
This definition takes its function from the ability of humans to manipulate their environment, making it better suited to human-identified goals and interests, even if acting on behalf of other organisms. Some synonyms include alteration, modification, redesign, remodeling, revamping, reworking, reconstruction, conversion, adjustment, acclimatization, acclimation, accommodations, habituation, acculturation, assimilation, and integration.
Adaptation is also used to describe genetically-accumulated evolutionary change over time in organisms as a response to natural selection. This is different from the case where manipulating the environment substitutes in the short-term replaces the pressure of genetic adaptation over the long term.
So I suppose this is why it calls to mind a version of evolution based on characters acquired in its lifetime (commonly known as Lamarckian inheritance)–if only for the appropriation of the term adaptation to refer to intra (within) generational processes and not inter (between) generational processes.
Adaptation for evolutionary biologists typically means processes through which a population becomes better suited to its environment over the course of many generations, often through natural selection. A great deal of debate and research has been directed at how we recognize adaptation in hindsight. This is because it can be difficult to state the causes for the evolution of a trait when we do not have direct observation and only historical signatures to learn from. Most notably this was discussed in “The Spandrels of San Marco”, a paper by Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979) that uses an analogy from architecture for the evolution of organismal form and function.
I agree that changing the environment in the ways mentioned in the IPCC definition will likely limit vulnerabilities for humans and other populations. However, there is an implicit assumption here that the goal should be for humans NOT to have to adapt over a course of generations–despite the inevitability of genetic change over time. It presupposes an assumption of stasis – and a very western one when compared to eastern notions of change and mutability. Richard Nisbett catalogues how some of these assumptions about change and stasis in his book The Geography of Thought. For me, it depends on what time scale one is looking to understand if stasis or change is more relevant. Still, I think its difficult to argue anymore that stasis is more relevant than change.
The necessary question should not be IF we should adapt (genetically or by manipulating the environment). Instead we should ask, “What are we adapting to and how are we getting there?” Will humans and other populations be adapting to artificially-supported ‘vulnerability balloons’ as we are almost surely doing now through our uses of technology and fossil fuels?
This question of adaptive goal is important because the IPCC definitions include definitions of costs and benefits with its description of adaptation. To what goal are these costs and benefits applied? Within the frame of a generation or an organism’s lifetime, explicating goals may make sense, but ascribing goals to a ecosystem – much less whole populations – gets very very slippery. You start to need some way to implicate who or what is writing that mission statement.
Similarly the IPCC includes adaptive capacity in its glossary as the ability, institutions, and resources that can be used to implement adaptation measures.
I think this is all a bit confusing, and I feel it makes more sense to reserve the definition of adaptation for genetic, phenotypic, and behavioral attenuation of organisms or systems to their environment across generations. To describe the processes that organisms and systems use during their lifetimes I think we need a term that encompasses more variability, one that is less blatantly anthropocentric and functionalist in its approach to socio-ecological coevolution. We also need a long view on systems not ones that are limited to single generations only – something that the biological definition of adaptation retains but that the socio-technical one does not.
Borrowing from the literature of evolutionary biology, behavior, and developmental biology, plasticity seems far better suited to the processes of environmental manipulation being described by the IPCC. This is because it references a material (plastic) that maintains its basic molecular structure while having variable capacity to take on any number of manipulations or forms.
Coping and Plasticity
The terms coping and adaptation are sometimes used interchangeably leading to confusion. Here I think there is some opportunity to disentangle the two. A compilation of brainstorming sessions by groups of development practitioners in Ghana, Niger and Nepal described some differences which were then documented in the Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook. The results of the group’s sessions were pointing to what I think was a difference between 1) consistent and conscious actions to reduce vulnerability (adaptation) versus 2) ad hoc solutions (coping).
It’s worthwhile to differentiate coping and adaptation as within and between generation processes, respectively. Biologists use plasticity to describe the ability of an organism or group to adjust within its lifetime via behavioral or developmental responses to the environment. This may indeed include manipulation of the environment to decrease vulnerability. Phenotypic plasticity is a description that could easily encompass artifacts, behaviors, institutions, and aggregations of resources as extensions of an organism’s phenotype. It invokes important concepts from evolutionary biology including the role of cooperation in building and maintaining extended phenotypes (such as aggregations of useful materials like insurance, band-aids, and water) or how phenotypic reaction norms can change in response to different environments–shedding light on why a strategy in one environment may not be as successful in another. There is further correspondence here with plasticity and the concept of developmental canalization (that organismal systems can get locked in to specific trajectories) and with the concept of path dependence in the development of economic and institutional systems.
So a better definition of plasticity might re-appropriate the IPCC’s definition of adaptation and rework it as:
An adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities. Plasticity operates through cognitive (sensing), social (interactional), physiological, and other mechanisms that can adjust to a wide range of variability. Plasticity is the ability to respond to variability and a range of realized and possible futures continuously and in a sustained approach. Plasticity or coping strategies attenuate the use of resources to local needs and involve planning that hybridizes old and new knowledge and strategies in an exploratory process.
Here I think this definition makes it much easier to bridge what may be happening at a physiological level (cellular temperature variation, sweating) with responses at an artifact level (clothing, ventilation) and an institutional (e.g. policies towards what it means to be cool).
This is because the term plasticity explicitly invokes a connotation of variability, while adaptation feels more like a description of how well two things (in this case organism or population and environment) fit together. Clearly, if the environment is highly variable we need variability in our systems, not assumptions and values of how well we already fit and work within it.
Coping, on the other hand, seems pretty straightforward. Survive. It makes sense to leave a lot of variability open for this one, because when it comes time for coping strategies, any and all tactics may be appropriate. But then again, there can be ways to cope that are more responsive than others. But I think this starts to dig into a definition of resilience or robustness, where the system properties begin to matter more than than how they manifest themselves in practice. What I mean by this is that as people, organisms, and ecosystems attempt to cope with change, their ability to draw on networks or strategies for coping is itself embedded in the system. Some systems, as a function of their structure, cope better than others. Consequently the adapt better than other too.
Resilience
The Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook adapts its definition from UNISDR (2009) defining resilience as “the ability of a system to resist, absorb, and recover from the effects of hazards in a timely and efficient manner, preserving or restoring its essential basic structures, functions, and identity.”
The IPCC defines resilience as “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organisation, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.”
While Walker et al (2004) define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.”
In these cases resilience emphasizes a system’s ability to maintain or return to specific structural or functional features–i.e. to maintain its identity, its durability, its persistence. But as noted by Erica Jen in her article “Stable or Robust? What’s the Difference?” (2005), the choices of features or structural elements that we attend to are important for assessing both the capacity and quality of that responsiveness to change.
So what is the function, what is functional, and for whom? Definitions matter.
One way to think about resilience is to imagine a couple of different water balloons. One balloon is filled halfway full. Another is filled so that the latex rubber that composes its surface and membrane is stretched tightly to hold the water in. Now you can throw both balloons back and forth between each other, and neither may pop. But what do you think will happen when the balloons are stretched, twisted, or allowed to drop on the ground where a twig might be a hazard to the already tense surface of the overfilled balloon? It will probably pop and spill the water out.
A system’s resilience is a lot like a water balloon, and the degree of resilience is determined by how much water is forced into the balloon, the size of the balloon, and how much it is pushed to its limits. We might think of the balloons shape, its ‘throwability’ or the thickness of its membrane as examples of functional or structural elements. In most cases, we are looking at how well the balloon is able to maintain it shape and its continuity despite being stressed – i.e. it is functionally a ‘water balloon’, it has a round shape, and responds to the exterior and interior pressures of air and water.
Rarely do we think that a water balloon might reconfigure itself, rearranging the organization of its functions, structural elements, or features to be able to accomplish the same task differently. What would happen if the water and the balloon separated or if the water balloon system was able to draw on other systems (e.g. refrigeration) to change the relationships between its functional elements? What if we no longer simply considered only the water inside of the balloon as the system responding to the task of throwing? What if the throwing and catching movements were also included? Would we still think of a resilient system, or would we start to walk a path of robustness–of being able to adjust the definitions and constraints of the systems themselves in pursuit of coevolutionary relationships between them?
Robustness
Robustness is a different beast altogether – literally. While resilience is focused on maintaining a system, we can describe robustness as the ability of a system to change and in doing so to respond to environment and to develop entirely new functions as a result.
Some argue that robustness describes the ability of a system to withstand mutations and maintain its phenotype or “shape” as a result (Wagner, 2005). Instead I think there is a greater correspondence of robustness with transformation as used by Walker et al (2004). Transformability is “the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social (including political) conditions make the existing system untenable.” I’m less sure about the “untenable” part of Walker et al’s definition.
Robustness is the ability of a system to evolve system functions, not simply maintain those that already exist. In this way, an analogy can be drawn between adaptation/robustness and plasticity/resilience. Similarly, I think robustness has a quality of being parametric. Parametric architecture has the quality of being built from common construction principles, but by varying the parameter values of those rules of construction, endless forms become possible.
References
Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5
UNISDR, 2009. Terminology: Basic terms of disaster risk reduction and IISD et al, 2007. Community-based Risk Screening – Adaptation and Livelihoods (CRiSTAL) User’s Manual, Version 3.0.
Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook
http://www.careclimatechange.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=30
IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I., M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, Eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 976pp.
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” Proc. Roy. Soc. London B 205 (1979) pp. 581-598
Wagner, Andreas. 2005. Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems (Princeton Studies in Complexity). Princeton University Press.
Nisbett, R. E. (2004). The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why. Simon and Schuster.
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 29, 2008 at 4:59 PM · Filed under complex systems, design ecology, ecology, ecoregionalism, india, making it public
Cooperation and mutualism among humans and other species has spanned the landscape for thousands of years. This is particularly evident in the silk industry here in the southern Indian State of Karnataka where almost every woman wears a silk sari. The silk industry in Karnataka is massive. Visitors here will find silk shops on most main streets. The city of Mysore is one very well-known production center for silk (akin to Bordeaux for wine or Darjeeling for tea), and although Karnatakan silk production has fallen in recent years (perhaps due to development and water shortage), it still accounts for almost 50% of India’s total silk output.
This semester a group of my students undertook the task of documenting the silk production process as it occurs in Karnataka. They visited several sites ranging from a rural handloom enterprise to industrial mills and retail outlets. They prepared themselves by looking at precedents from similar art and design students looking at how things are made. They also focused their investigations by first reading the Design for Sustainability Guide. In this way, they managed their engagement for the purposes of producing actionable knowledge to foster sustainable design practices.
One of the outputs of their research is this account of silk production. I found it detailed, well-researched (though I would have preferred more footnotes and cited references), and informative. I think it also illuminates the degree to which these students understand their processes and are willing and able to identify parts of the systems for further exploration.
March 17, 2008 at 10:49 PM · Filed under biology, ecology, evolution, heterarchy, host-parasite, interaction
This is actually a really old post from when I was doing my master’s work in host-parasite biology. Nonetheless, it turns out that I’m revisiting it in preparation for an upcoming project.
Behavioral differences between the sexes may explain sexually dimorphic patterns of infection. The risk of infection may be one such factor that an analysis of movement paths can predict. For example, if males spent more time than females foraging for food and, as a result, passively ingest more parasites while doing so, then their risk for infection would generally be greater than females. The tortuosity (or crookedness) of movement paths between the sexes were compared to see if any differences in movement (e.g. foraging) could suggest an explanation for male-biased infection. These differences may suggest that males and females experience their environment at different scales.
Image Analysis
The first thing that needs to be done is to plot the movement of the snails. This can be done by hand, but time-lapse digital photography can help to automate the process. The easiest way to do this was to set up a tripod with the camera pointed down. A white container was used to hold the snails and create the highest contrast background for the photography. Pay attention to the reflection of your light source on the surface between the subject and camera (in this case, water and plastic container). A picture was taken approximately every minute, and to make things simple for the analysis program, I used only two snails per trial- one female and one male. Once I had a stack of pictures (over the course of an hour or two), I loaded them into the image analysis program.
ImageJ is the java implementation of an image analysis program developed by the National Institutes of Health. ImageJ allows you to track the movements of individuals on the screen and outputs a list of XY coordinates for each subject. The first thing that had to be done though was to import the images as a greyscale stack. Once that was done, I cropped out the uninteresting parts of the frame to show only the subject of interest. Further processing was needed to create a binary (black/white) image source for the analysis. Using Process>Subtract Background, I created more contrast with the subject and background. Finally, using the Process>Binary>Threshold, I was able to make the stack be completely composed of black and white images with no greytones inbetween. This is crucial if the analysis algorithm is going to separate the subject from the background. Some parameters may need adjusting for optimal results, but it usually works without too much toying. The final step in ImageJ is to apply the Plugin “Tracker”. This plugin tracks the subject(s) on the screen and outputs a datafile with the coordinates of the movement path. These can then be saved into a text file for later use. I used only two individuals per trial because Tracker is limited to only two subjects. A plugin called MultiTracker is available, but I found it difficult to keep it focused on both individuals. When individuals overlap in space MultiTracker assigns both sets of coordinates to a single individual.
Movie 1. Male and female movement played back after image processing and before tracking analysis.
Measuring the Fractal Dimension of the Paths
I found a great program for measuring the fractal dimension (D) of the snail movement paths. This measurement is thought to measure the scale at which an organism percieves its landscape. Differences in D for different populations would suggest that the populations utilize their landscape differently- perhaps as a result of their perception. The program for measuring D is called Fractal (Nams 2003), and it allows you to import the XY coordinates (after you pare them down to the basic data in excel or something like it). It also allows you to do this as a batch process, making large datasets more manageable. Fractal will give you D for your sample along with confidence intervals. I used a paired-sample t-test in my final analysis. It turned out to be important that I paired similar individuals in the trials; the results did indicate a positive relationship between D and body length. Luckily, I put males and females of the same size in each trial. You’ll have to look into the guidelines for using Fractal yourself if you are going to take a stab at it, but the descriptions are pretty easy to follow. With a bit of doing, it shouldn’t pose a problem to measure these types of behaviors yourself.
A comparison of movement paths for a male and female in maps generated by Fractal.
Selected Bibliography
Bascompte, J., C. Vila. 1997. Fractals and search paths in mammals. Landscape Ecology 12:213-221.
Dicke, M., P. A. Burrough. 1988. Using fractal dimensions for characterizing tortuosity of animal trails. Physiological Entomology 13:393-398.
Escos, J. M., C. L. Alados, J. M. Emlen. 1995. Fractal structures and fractal functions as disease indicators. Oikos 74:310-314.
Nams, V. O. 1996. The VFractal: a new estimator for fractal dimension of animal movement paths. Landscape Ecology 11:289-297.
Nams, V. O. 2001. Using animal movement paths to measure response to spatial scale. submitted.
Turchin, P. 1996. Fractal analyses of animal movement: A critique. Ecology 77:2086-2090.
With, K. A. 1994. Using fractal analysis to assess how species percieve landscape structure. Landscape Ecology 9:25-36.
December 5, 2007 at 11:47 PM · Filed under biology, complex systems, Design, ecology, ecoregionalism, evolution, host-parasite
One of the questions that’s been nagging at me is if the CEMA lab that we’ve been building is an applied testing ground for Science, Technology and Society (STS) Theory and Practice. Wikipedia describes Science and technology studies (STS) as:
the study of how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture.
My interpretation is surely unidimensional, and I’m sure there are many examples of experimental media arts and technology spaces where critical questions are being addressed. Are there programs that take a specifically empirical approach to the propositions that come from STS and its metaview of science as it is practiced? Many of CEMA’s projects look at how technology and scientific enterprise are embedded in society and politics. Because we specifically implement creative art & design practices in the process, we seek to generate multidimensional perspectives that can further stimulate the ways in which artifacts are designed, situated, and discussed in culture and society. One of these outcomes may be so-called innovation. My curiosity leads me to wonder if the structures that STS identifies can be tested.
A recent article in Design Issues looked at how products and practices are linked under actor-network theory. The authors, Jack Ingram, Elizabeth Shove, and Matthew Watson, suggest that their concepts have the potential to bridge design and social theory. Studying processes of acquisition, specialization, scripting, appropriation, assembly, normalization and practice can lead one to recognize how artifacts, processes, and principles are tightly linked. These linkages may or may not lead to what Malcolm McCullough calls ‘deskilling’ – where individuals and their environment become increasingly estranged as infrastructural bias accumulates.
I suppose this is why I am excited about one of our students’ projects. Prayas Abhinav has created Not Alone, which is more or less the Indian implementation of TXTmob. TXTmob was successfully used during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for protesters to actively coordinate their movements and demonstrations. One of the interesting questions to come out of this is how the implementation of this very socio-political technology will fare in India. What concerns and questions need to be addressed? I think Prayas is taking an interesting tactic by formulating the distribution of Not Alone as a form of social intervention designed to aid those in need.
What’s interesting to me is how technologies and scientific structures can be compared across landscapes to reveal how large-scale ecosociopolitical trends shape the differences in how technology and science are practiced and interpreted. Shelia Jasanoff took this approach in her book, Design on Nature, when she compared different conceptions for when life “begins” in the US, UK and Germany. By showing how the differing legal and political approaches led to the formation of different definitions of life, she showed how abortion issues reproductive rights are scripted and normalized (my interpretation).
So I’m thinking about all of this because I have long been interested in male-biased infection patterns which are especially prevalent in affluent countries. I started thinking about these patterns and how they might relate to Malcolm’s description of ‘deskilling.’ Are biological relationships like those between host and parasite affected and influenced by infrastructure and artifacts degrading or biasing over time? Is this a ratcheting effect and, if so, is it at all similar to the ratchet effect experienced by asexual populations as they diminish genotypic variation each generation through selection? Do landscape effects like the differences in infrastructure in the U.S. versus India contribute to this? hmmm…
November 23, 2007 at 5:56 AM · Filed under boundary objects, Design, ecology, ecoregionalism, interdisciplinary, network entrepreneurship, technology
How do you take into account the diverse factors that contribute to a product or service’s ecology? How do you determine which factors are more relevant than others? One of the ways to begin this process is by mapping these interactions at a conceptual level. Then, we an begin to map them in individuals, societies, and real-world environments.
July 22, 2007 at 8:48 PM · Filed under ecology, ecoregionalism
This self-scoring test is to determine a basic environmental perception of place. It was given to me while taking “Deep Ecology for the 22nd Century” with Bill Devall at Humboldt State University. It was adapted by Bill from a version that appeared in CoEvolution Magazine (now Whole Earth Review).
The boundaries of place, of bioregion, are not artificial lines drawn on a map for arbitary political purposes. The boundaries are natural boundaries such as watershed, mountain, sea coast.
This test is framed for the Humboldt Bay region in some questions and northwestern California in other questions. Scoring is done on the honor ystem, so if you fudge, cheat, or elude, you also get an idea of you’re at. The quiz is culture bound, favoring the country over the city landscape.
You can replace the proper name between the *asterisks* with your local region. Can you name your local region?
- How do you celebrate the autumn equinox? How do you celebrate, if at all, the winter solstice?
- Trace the water you drink from tap to precipitation.
- Name five native species of plants in the *Humboldt Bay* region.
- Name five intrusive, exotic species of plants in the *Humboldt Bay* region. What, if anything, is being done to control the spread of these intrusive species?
- Name five species of animals in the *Humboldt Bay* region.
- Name five intrusive, exotic species of animals in the *Humboldt Bay* region. What, if anything, is being done to control the spread of these intrusive species?
- From what direction do winter storms come in the *Humboldt Bay* region?
- What are the major rivers in northwestern *California*?
- When do the elk runt in the coastal region of *Humboldt county*? (you’ll really have to come up with a good analog here)
- What is the largest designated wilderness area in *northwestern California*?
- Give the names of five species of plants and animals listed as threatened or endangered under Federal or state regulations that are endemic in *northwest California*? What is being done to improve the chances of survival for these species?
June 21, 2007 at 8:58 AM · Filed under biology, biotechnology, Design, ecology
If Biology seeks to answer the question, “what characteristics of living things?”, then design biology tries to understand how the processes and artifacts of living systems help define design opportunities for humans and other systems.
I’ve adapted this definition based on how Elizabeth Tunstall defines what it means to be a design anthropologist. However, whereas the anthropological approach is more concerned with meaning, I think the design biologist is at least as concerned with function. The reason for this is that there has to be a certain level of integration for living systems to continue to cooperate, behave, or evolve dynamically. Therefore, if we are designing a product, understanding what the consequences of the product’s lifecycle are for humans and other living organisms is crucial if they are going to sustainable.
Another tactic is used by the Biomimicry Institute and seeks to incorporate processes and heuristics that exist in nature as for design research and strategy. By asking how a grebe or a spider accomplishes a certain task, we can understand a lot about the world. However, in order to do this, we need to have tools for recognizing patterns and process. Biologists bring these to the table during the design process. The other important skill is empathy. Being able to put oneself in another’s position is so important for recognizing how that solution may or may not work. Studying a leaf provides insight into the plant and may help you identify how your project can be cooperatively integrated into the ecosystem. Wouldn’t that be better than just designing despite the rest of the world? It’s a way cooler challenge.
Here’s an article on biomimicry at Worldchanging
and a video presentation at TED
April 22, 2007 at 11:40 AM · Filed under ecology, making it public
I've just calculated my Ecological Footprint on Earth Day's website (http://www.earthday.net). I thought you might be interested.
The Ecological Footprint estimates how much land and water people need to support what they use and absorb what they discard. The Footprint Quiz figures out your footprint, and then lets you compare it to what other people use and to what is available on this planet.
Check it out!
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