Transdisciplinary Design

Monthly Archives: October 2011

Just Take a Look Around

I’ve noticed that over the weeks that I’ve been submersed in the fast-paced – at times jaw dropping – life of New York City that…

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21st Century Mussels

So when the Spanish vessels arrived in America, they brought conquer, civilization, new ideas, cruelty, power, progress… and, new species. Mussels (and other little and microscopic ways of life) that were not originally from America, arrived sticked on the hulls of the ships. The fact that this living beings were attached to this crafts and travelled thousands of miles was an unperceived fact until some biologists and experts started studying the origins and development of some species. But isn´t it amazing how this little creatures got so strongly attached to the structure that not even years of travel and miles of distance made them let go?, Isn´t it amazing how strong their capacity of attachment and will is?

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Designs for the Aging

Shortly after his retirement, Sam Farber and his wife rented a home in Provence, France for two weeks. His wife had developed arthritis and the…

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don’t forget the monkey.

Out one night with friends I was explaining the Transdisiplinary Design program. I stumbled on this a bit because of the mercurial nature of the…

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i-Share

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” –Steve Jobs

After I finished my late dinner, I checked on the Internet to see what’s going on in the world as usual as I do. Click! My front page came – Yahoo! My eyes were suddenly captured by the headline- “Steve Jobs Pass Away in his 56 Years of Age”. All of the sudden, the article claimed an end of a generation of Apple. I was depressed about losing him and using his products at the same time. A lot of questions came to my mind about how he transformed our generations. Why was he so successful in delivering his products into our hands? What we can learn from his products and his approach to design?

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Of Dance and Design

I walked into the Guggenheim, and the walls were empty. An 8 year-old child asked, “What is progress?” and we started to walk. Destabilized but…

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Object, Body, Behavior

As John Thackara says, “This shift in emphasis from what things look like to how they behave – from designing on the world to designing…

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A big fat Gulab Jamun

As you can see, India’s like a big fat gulab jamun. It’s fried, it’s sugary, its loaded with calories, and the after effects of eating one are more complex than you might imagine. Infographics and systems diagramming allow us to take a fresh look at these statistics and cultural values so that we may draw new connections we didn’t think existed before.

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You, Me, and Everything We Know

“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all other things we know.” – AI researcher Marvin Minsky

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Student Housing isn’t perfect, but..

It sure encompasses a sharing based community. We hear this everywhere yet we barely understand it. “Share”. “Use, not own”. Simple words that could really…

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