Epistemic environments — where knowledge gets built

A model in collaborative field research Last week Connie Svabo and I hosted a gathering of members of her STEM Education Research Center (FNUG at University of Southern Denmark) [Link] to explore epistemic environments in the Bay Area — spaces and places where knowledge gets built. Our core team was Dorte Moeskær Larsen, Associate Professor…

Times Places Things — Fogo Island, Newfoundland

A previous post on this site mentioned a recent visit I made to Fogo Island [Link] — and where I found myself revisiting matters I had raised in a book of mine — Heritage Performance Design (2019) [Link]. Here are more comments and thoughts that have arisen after this extraordinary gathering. See also my thoughts…

Fogo Island — field notes on design, place, community

I have just returned from a fascinating gathering on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, Canada — Shore Time [Link], organized by Fogo Island Arts, a part of Shorefast [Link], the social enterprise founded by Zita Cobb in 2006 to build economic and cultural resilience on the island. Speakers and hosts were Kitty Scott, Leonor Antunes, Tom McDonough,…

Larry Leifer

Larry Leifer, extraordinary pioneer in design practice and design research, passed away yesterday August 29. Larry was a key figure in what I had hoped Stanford might stand for when I arrived in 1999. He welcomed me into The Learning Lab, Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning, Center for Design Research (CDR), and the Hasso…

Getting on with AI: a factory in Hesse, Germany

With Sabine (Remdisch) I recently spent time at Rittal’s plant in Haiger, Germany — by some measures the most advanced factory in the world manufacturing equipment enclosures for data centers — and I have been thinking about it ever since. What impressed me was not the automation as such. It was the coordination of temporal…

Infrastructural imaginaries

Chris Ford and I are in a conference in Cambridge UK. The archaeological imagination applied to urban architecture, planning, design. Hosted by the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, this global conference on Situated Imagination and Imaginaries of Urban Futures brings together over 70 scholars, practitioners, and artists from around the world for a day to…