Transdisciplinary Design

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…

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?

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…

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…

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

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.

“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

If success in urban planning was measured by impact, advances in technology, such as electricity, plumbing, and transportation, are arguably the most successful urban planning…

A couple of weeks ago, we were given the task to map out a complex system of our own choice. A small side effect of Donella Meadow’s ”Thinking in Systems” is that you start to think of everything around you as a system. Excited by this thought I set out to map the system of love between two people. When I was finished, I looked at the result thinking that it looked too simple and too clean. And a similar feeling came over me when I saw the systems that my classmates had made. Certainly, these system diagrams where only models but I still could not help but feeling that they were deceiving everyone that looked at them.

In an attempt to explain Beirut city trends from a system thinking perspective, I bow to the nighthawks of the city and to Gregory Buchakjian (my inspiration for the title).