This data visualization from Kiva's 2011 Annual Report is worth taking a look at for the way that it takes a significant amount of data and designs the presentation so you can quickly see the patterns.

Even if the music isn't your thing, the idea that a platform was developed to facilitate the exchange of resources between people - money from lenders, updates, stories and a sense of purpose from borrowers (small business partners, really) - is valuable and worth contemplating further for all aspects of organizational strategy. I don't see these structures as nice extras, they are the heart of a new way of cooperating though they have yet to find their way into the psyche of most organizations.

The wonder of the world is so much deeper than we are. I dreamed last night of steel foam. Today I searched to see what I could find and easily located this engineering website where I learned that such a thing exists, is being tested, and is perhaps being used. Here's a link to the site and a PDF of the presentation.

I have also wondered about how we could grow steel so that the complex structures of living plants might somehow be fostered in physical space the way it is in computer generated graphics, simple rules iterating, randomizing, erring and correcting. The rusty stalagmites that you see on old ship wrecks and submerged iron structures means that it must be somewhat possible.

Probably, I should quit reading Christopher Alexander before going to bed. 

Swarm Robots - I Love the Idea

For a long while now I've wanted to create my own little flock of swarm robots. In Prey, Michael Crichton shows us what swarms of nanobots can do and that's a great book to read for inspiration. However, since nanotech is not within reach of most of us, I wonder about microtech level robots. Driving home from UWaterloo the other day I was pondering how one might create a Really Simple Swarm Robot - a mechanical flocking device that is super cheap and super simple. In my mind I saw a steam punk version of a swarm robot that could move, get inputs from nearby other bots or the environment, and communicate that to the others.

I confess that I have recently watched Hugo and the movie provided fresh inspiration for the development of some sort of swarm bot based on mechanical rather than electrical means. This swarm robot website was pointed out to my by my Network Science 675 professor and is really interesting as well. One approach they use is to enable the robots to read light as a kind of pheromone for emergent property formation. I like it.

Could you use hollow styrofoam balls that somehow interact with each other in a directional way? Would magnetism be a useful information or energy transfer medium? It can be complicated to work with but perhaps the movement could be constrained in two dimensions somehow or along a track with the emergent behaviour falling along a single distance-between vector.

If anyone has seen something like this, I'd love to learn more about steam punk robotics.

Thinking Cities - 21 minute video

Although this is a commercial video produced by Ericsson, Thinking Cities outlines at least some of the key aspects of urban development and city planning that we are facing today. One of the biases is developed cities (not much is said about informal development even though it is the most rapid area of city growth globally). Geoffrey West, Carlo Ratti, Mathieu Lefevre along with a handful of others feature as the narrators of the changing global urban patterns.

I was most interested in the social city angles as well as the trash tracking project as both relate to my own research interests in mapping social capital in urban settings. Though West is very much criticized in some circles, I applaud his efforts to try and understand if they are variables and constants in city growth, development and change. The angle is interesting even if it will end up being refined or changed over time. Ratti's work is also well worth paying attention to, particularly where it can be integrated with other research and planning processes.

What kind of thing is a think tank?

They are, of course, organizations of one kind or another whether formal, informal, small, large and so on. This post from "On Think Tanks" is highlights a very obvious but critical element, namely the people who originate, lead and live in the think tank. The organization is the people, particularly at the scale which most think tanks function - small, compact, mission-driven and expertise loaded. Being small, they need to be timely, selective, and capable of acting quickly and intelligently on opportunities. That nimbleness is underpinned by having invested in capacity, intellectual and otherwise, to carry out those timely forays. Being flexible and nimble isn't about being haphazard or careless - quite the opposite.

It would be worth exploring what role conscious organizational design plays in think tank establishment and growth. If think tanks were compared against a typology of organizations, where would they end up? It would seem that the small, entrepreneurial sector of the spectrum would be well represented with a power law distribution as size increases - the bigger a think tank is, the more rare it would be.

Has anyone come across a study of this type? What would such a study tell us about the role, purpose, and future of think tanks? Are they changing more or less than other institutions in their comparative space? Do the visible aspects of a think tank reveal what is going on under that visible layer? What would we see if the top layers were peeled back?

Co.Design put together a compilation of 22 of the best infographics of 2011 that is worth taking a look at for a number of reasons. First, what each of them represents is interesting. Second, as a whole, they represent the many ways that we can visualize and communicate information. Third, they are not merely graphic representations but reflect a wide range of cultural and historic dynamics that remain important as we move into 2012. Finally, making good use of the data streams around us is an important space where technology and human experience intersect.

What does dying look like for businesses?

This brief video from The End of Business is a sketch of what happens when organizations don't change quickly enough to survive. Businesses have always failed in some proportion but the stat from Forbes about 70% of Fortune 1000 companies failing by 2031 is pretty sobering. None of them think it can happen or are living like it will happen. But it will.

Amazon is a Super Nova Business

This infographic, sent to me compliments of Brian Dijkema, is just plain shocking. The monster size of their disruption has/is/will change the retail climate and a lot of other things as well.
Source: Frugaldad.com

Understanding how people might move through a given space is very important for designers, architects, planners, advertisers, retailers, and really any setting that involves people. Daniel Hambleton has a really interesting piece of software that allows 'people' to navigate through spaces by ray casting - a method that involves the 'people' seeing the room and then moving based on what they see.

Whether you're designing office space or putting together a new streetscape, this could be a very valuable modelling tool. As we know, modelling doesn't tell you what will actually happen but it does sharpen our capacity to think through how various combinations of elements will influence human interactions and the flow of crowds.


Dragonfly: AI Perception and Motion from ArchitectureInCombination on Vimeo.


Take a look at see what you think. It's interesting to watch just one of the figures and see what 'it' does. The group flows are also very intriguing. I'd like to try changing configurations, crowd size, etc. to see what happens.

Does anyone know how this compares with crowd-flow modelling software applications like this - eg. SMART Move (see below)?

SMART Move simulation software:

I recently attended Shreyas Sundaram's talk at the University of Waterloo. Shreyas is an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering. Some aspects of the talk are more technical than a general audience will likely tolerate but it is worth sticking with Shreyas through those parts for the conclusions and insights that his work represents. 


A couple of points to note - the ability to discover malicious nodes mathematically in a network. This is useful in finding bad sensors but is equally useful in understanding where key gatekeepers are in a human network. The brokers who are critical to information flows have always been important but in vary large data sets they may be difficult to detect.


Another interesting point very much related to the malicious nodes work is the ability to determine which nodes bridge between network structures. What nodes, if you removed them, would split the network into two or more distinct parts? There are many possible applications of this as well.


The power of developing powerful mathematical tools for understanding networks is that the processes developed can be applied to very large data sets. Mathematics also makes it possible to see novel structures and qualities that would not be possible with human processing alone. From epidemics to information technology structures and power grids, gaining greater insight into the science of networks is critical. In addition, disseminating that information and teaching people across disciplines how the technical aspects of networks function will determine the level of sophistication we can sustain in our various domains of analysis. 


The Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation was the host of the talk and they seek to deepen our understanding and application of complexity science as a means of approaching the most challenging issues and questions of our time.



Diffusing Information and Reaching Agreement in Networks: Convergence and Resilience from Waterloo Institute for Complexit on Vimeo.



(that's me ducking in at the front right at the beginning)