In Shape, George Stiny argues that seeing shapes--with all their changeability and ambiguity--is an inexhaustible source of creative ideas. Understanding shapes, he says, is a useful way to understand what is possible in design.

Shapes are devices for visual expression just as symbols are devices for verbal expression. Stiny develops a unified scheme that includes both visual expression with shapes and verbal expression with signs. The relationships--and equivalencies--between the two kinds of expressive devices make design comparable to other professional practices that rely more on verbal than visual expression. Design uses shapes while business, engineering, law, mathematics, and philosophy turn mainly to symbols, but the difference, says Stiny, isn't categorical. Designing is a way of thinking. Designing, Stiny argues, is calculating with shapes, calculating without equations and numbers but still according to rules. Stiny shows that the mechanical process of calculation is actually a creative process when you calculate with shapes--when you can reason with your eyes, when you learn to see instead of count.

The book takes the idea of design as calculation from mere heuristic or metaphor to a rigorous relationship in which design and calculation each inform and enhance the other. Stiny first demonstrates how seeing and counting differ when you use rules--that is, what it means to calculate with your eyes--then shows how to calculate with shapes, providing formal details. He gives practical applications in design with specific visual examples. The book is extraordinarily visual, with many drawings throughout--drawings punctuated with words. You have to see this book in order to read it.

Shape: Talking about Seeing and Doing

As our dependence on technology has increased precipitously over the past centuries, so too has the notion that we can solve all environmental problems with scientific explanations. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge proposes an alternative to this dangerous worldview. The contributing authors argue that our reliance on scientific knowledge has created many of the problems that now plague the globe and that our wholesale dependence on scientific progress is both untenable and myopic. They conclude that we must simply accept that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and always will.

Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson and a diverse group of thinkers, including Wendell Berry, Anna Peterson, and Robert Root-Bernstein, offer insights on the advantages of an ignorance-based worldview. Their essays explore the entire realm of this philosophy, from its origins and its essence to how its implementation can preserve vital natural resources for future generations. The Virtues of Ignorance argues that knowledge-based worldviews are more dangerous than useful and looks ahead to determine how humans can live sustainably on Earth.

The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge

Felice Frankel, and George M. Whitesides:

Wired, Reena Jana
...one of the year's more intriguing concepts for an art book (or is it a science book?) It's a rare yin and yang concoction that satisfies both sides of the brain.

On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science

In the fast-paced twenty-first century educational environment—with new technologies, mounting global competition for students and scholars, blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplines, and growing pressures for accountability—doctoral programs face fundamental questions of purpose, vision, and quality.

Sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The Formation of Scholars distills the results of a five-year project to develop creative solutions and approaches for transforming doctoral programs. The authors outline the processes, tools, and opportunities through which faculty and graduate students can turn their habits and skills as scholars—their commitment to hard questions and robust evidence—on their purposes and practices as educators and learners.

This groundbreaking book explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and offers a plan for increasing the effectiveness of doctoral education. Programs must grapple with questions of purpose. The authors examine practices and elements of doctoral programs and show how they can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration, and collaboration. They challenge the traditional apprenticeship model and offer an alternative in which students learn while apprenticing with several faculty members. The authors persuasively argue that creating intellectual community is essential for high-quality graduate education in every department. Knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk-taking.

The Formation of Scholars issues a call to action for administrators, faculty, and students to ensure that the United States' doctoral education continues to be the envy of the world.

The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

The Darwinian "theory of everything" has always stood above its presumptive competitors because it came packaged with several "big problems," which could just as easily have been the theory's undoing as its vindication: altruism, sociality, organs of extreme perfection, and animal-built structures. With respect to the last one, the basic problem is that when we build, we act as purposeful, intentional and designing agents. Yet it is Darwinism's core assumption that such agency has no place in guiding evolution.

When animals build things, sometimes appearing to anticipate, match or exceed our own capabilities as architects, what are we to think? Do we conclude that other creatures can also act as intentional agents? In that case, the Darwinian vision of a world without such agency is undermined. Or do we conclude that our own intentionality is a quality apart, with no precedent in the living world from which we sprang? Drawing such a conclusion would be tantamount to succoring Darwin's bête noir, Platonic essentialism. This problem is not trivial: Indeed, it drove a wedge between Darwin and his "co-Darwinist," Alfred Russel Wallace. Yet Darwin himself, confronted with the magnificent structures built by bowerbirds, resorted to attributing them to the birds' pursuit of "pleasure"—a purposeful agency if ever there was one.

Nature's Awful Beauty

Neuroscientist Christopher deCharms is helping to develop a new kind of MRI that allows doctor and patient to look inside the brain in real time -- to see visual representations of brain processes as they happen. With his company Omneuron, deCharms has developed technology they call rtfMRI, for "real-time functional MRI" -- which is exactly what it sounds like. You move your arm, your brain lights up. You feel pain, your brain lights up.

How could we use the ability to see our brains in action? For a start, to help treat chronic pain with a kind of biofeedback; being able to visualize pain can help patients control it. And longer-term uses boggle the mind. Ours is the first generation, he believes, to be able to train and build our minds as systematically as a weightlifter builds a muscle. What will we do with this?

TED | Speakers | Christopher deCharms

BEGINNING IN 1997, an important change swept over cotton farms in northern China. By adopting new farming techniques, growers found they could spray far less insecticide over their fields. Within four years they had reduced their annual use of the poisonous chemicals by 156 million pounds - almost as much as is used in the entire state of California each year. Cotton yields in the region climbed, and production costs fell. Strikingly, the number of insecticide-related illnesses among farmers in the region dropped to a quarter of their previous level.

This story, which has been repeated around the world, is precisely the kind of triumph over chemicals that organic-farming advocates wish for.

But the hero in this story isn't organic farming. It is genetic engineering.

The new organic

Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter

Where angels no longer fear to tread

If Craig Venter is the iconic scientist of the early 21st century, what conception of science does he embody?

Belligerent, innovative, ambitious and entrepreneurial, he is an emblem of the radical changes in American scientific life, and especially in the lives of biomedical scientists, over the past thirty years or so. The intense relationship between biomedical science and capital is substantially new, and so is the texture of much scientific practice in the area, including the pace of work, the funds required to do the work, the instrumental production and processing of inconceivably large amounts of scientific information, and the institutional configurations in which biomedical science now happens. At the same time, Venter expresses sentiments about science that could scarcely be more traditional, even romantic.

A ruggedly freebooting individualist, contemptuous of authority and of bureaucracy, he revives an old conception of scientific independence and integrity in an age when the bureaucracies that allegedly block the advance of science are as much academic and non-profit as they are commercial.

When academic bureaucracies are said to protect intellectual orthodoxies, when cumbersome and politicised government bureaucracies harbour cults of personality, and when corporate bureaucracies build on business models that stultify both science and commercial growth, the only person you can trust is an edgy hybrid of self-confessed ‘bad boy’ and self-advertised humanitarian who thinks he has a spoon long enough to sup with all the institutional devils and sacrifice his integrity to none. The imaginative development of new institutional forms appropriate to the new science, the new economy, and a newly emerging moral order is made to depend on a unique individual.

Later this year, when ‘boot up’ inevitably happens, he will – according to some conceptions of the thing – have created life. If you trust Craig Venter, he will, like his predecessor in the life-creating business, see that it is good.

I’m a Surfer