scholarly journals Nature-Inspired Design for Self-Organized Social Systems: A Tool for Collaborative Communities

Author(s):  
Sumin Lee ◽  
Joon Sang Baek

AbstractThis research was motivated by the need to design for self-organized and sustained collaborative communities. A collaborative community is defined as a group of people who are bound by a sense of community and fulfil their unmet needs through collaboration (Baek, Meroni, & Manzini, 2015). A community with limited resources and premature organisational structure and therefore experience an unbalanced workload is fragile. If the community fails to distribute workloads fairly within and the commitment of the sacrificing members is exhausted, it is likely to fall apart. Inspired by the self- organization phenomena in nature, we designed a tool that these communities can use to conceive strategies that contribute to autonomy and collaboration. For validation, we applied the tool to an industrial design student club. The results demonstrate that despite the differences between social and ecological systems, there is a potential to learn from nature to design for self-organized collaborative communities with the condition that one has sufficient knowledge about both the references and the design target. We also discuss the problem-solving and learning effects of the tool.

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathalie Mezza-Garcia ◽  
Tom Froese ◽  
Nelson Fernández

All political systems have limitations in their information processing and action capacities to face large-scale crises and challenges, but especially if they happen to be too hierarchically and centrally controlled systems. In contrast, some other cultures whose political structure is heterarchically organized, such as the Zenú, the Muiscas, and the Tayronas in pre-Hispanic Colombia, presented adaptiveness even without advanced scientific knowledge and without powerful centralized top-down control. We therefore propose that creating and analyzing computer models of their decentralized processes of management could provide a broader perspective on the possibilities of self-organized political systems. Our hope is that this approach will eventually go beyond the scope of basic science. It seeks to promote more computer-model-based research of social systems that exhibit an adaptive balance of flexibility and robustness, i.e., systems that do not rely on the current ideal of rule-based control of all systemic aspects, with the practical aim of improving current social and political processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2261
Author(s):  
David Langlet ◽  
Aron Westholm

In the last 20 years, the EU has adopted some rather ambitious pieces of legislation with the aim to achieve a good environmental status in freshwater and marine ecosystems. Both the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) have a strong focus on the natural environment and biological criteria for assessing the status of the relevant ecosystems. In the same time period, much research on environmental governance has focused on the interconnectedness of social systems and ecosystems, so-called social-ecological systems (SES). While having high aspirations, the legal frameworks underpinning current EU water and marine management do not necessarily reflect the advances of contemporary science relating to SES. Using the geographical intersection of the two directives, i.e., coastal waters as a focal point, the paper explores the inchoate integration of social and ecological perspectives in the EU marine governance. What are the main challenges for the current EU legal regimes for managing coastal waters in a way that builds on the understanding of social and ecological systems as interconnected? Having explored the two directives, the paper introduces the possibility of using marine spatial planning (MSP), and the EU directive establishing a framework for maritime spatial planning (MSPD) as a bridge between the social and ecological dimensions and discusses what implications this would have for the current system for governing coastal waters in Europe.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Valente

AbstractImitating the transition from inanimate to living matter is a longstanding challenge. Artificial life has achieved computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve, but lacks self-organized hardwares akin to the self-assembly of the first living cells. Nonequilibrium thermodynamics has achieved lifelike self-organization in diverse physical systems, but has not yet met the open-ended evolution of living organisms. Here, I look for the emergence of an artificial-life code in a nonequilibrium physical system undergoing self-organization. I devise a toy model where the onset of self-replication of a quantum artificial organism (a chain of lambda systems) is owing to single-photon pulses added to a zero-temperature environment. I find that spontaneous mutations during self-replication are unavoidable in this model, due to rare but finite absorption of off-resonant photons. I also show that the replication probability is proportional to the absorbed work from the photon, thereby fulfilling a dissipative adaptation (a thermodynamic mechanism underlying lifelike self-organization). These results hint at self-replication as the scenario where dissipative adaptation (pointing towards convergence) coexists with open-ended evolution (pointing towards divergence).


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro E. S. Silva ◽  
Ricardo Chagas ◽  
Susete N. Fernandes ◽  
Pawel Pieranski ◽  
Robin L. B. Selinger ◽  
...  

AbstractCellulose-based systems are useful for many applications. However, the issue of self-organization under non-equilibrium conditions, which is ubiquitous in living matter, has scarcely been addressed in cellulose-based materials. Here, we show that quasi-2D preparations of a lyotropic cellulose-based cholesteric mesophase display travelling colourful patterns, which are generated by a chemical reaction-diffusion mechanism being simultaneous with the evaporation of solvents at the boundaries. These patterns involve spatial and temporal variation in the amplitude and sign of the helix´s pitch. We propose a simple model, based on a reaction-diffusion mechanism, which simulates the observed spatiotemporal colour behaviour.


Complexity ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey Dmitriev ◽  
Victor Dmitriev ◽  
Stepan Balybin

Recently, there has been an increasing number of empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that spread of avalanches of microposts on social networks, such as Twitter, is associated with some sociopolitical events. Typical examples of such events are political elections and protest movements. Inspired by this phenomenon, we built a phenomenological model that describes Twitter’s self-organization in a critical state. An external manifestation of this condition is the spread of avalanches of microposts on the network. The model is based on a fractional three-parameter self-organization scheme with stochastic sources. It is shown that the adiabatic mode of self-organization in a critical state is determined by the intensive coordinated action of a relatively small number of network users. To identify the critical states of the network and to verify the model, we have proposed a spectrum of three scaling indicators of the observed time series of microposts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-351
Author(s):  
Georgy G. Malinetsky

In the 1950s, Charles Snow wrote about the growing gap between the humanities and natural science cultures. He saw this as a great danger both for science itself and for all humankind. In Russia, it was complemented by a crisis of humanitarian knowledge. The article considers the ways to overcome this crisis and build a bridge between cultures.The solution of these problems is associated with the development of interdisciplinary approaches in general, and the theory of self-organization in particular. Synergetics today represents an approach that lies at the intersection of subject knowledge, philosophical reflection and mathematical modeling. It allows you to solve problems that go beyond individual scientific disciplines. Many of them require an analysis of processes and factors in rational, emotional and intuitive spaces.The article shows that the ongoing humanitarian and technological revolution, the tasks of designing the future, increase the role of humanitarian knowledge. The author substantiates the importance of a civilizational approach to humanitarian culture and considers the cultural issues of the unique civilization of Russia. There is outlined a number of specific steps to overcome the crisis of Russian humanitarian knowledge.The concept of cultural challenge is of particular importance among the problems for which solutions are proposed. The transition from the industrial to the post-industrial phase of the civilization development and the widespread use of artificial intelligence systems will free from work about half of people. The social stability and prospects for the civilization development are determined by the ability of culture to make their life complete, meaningful and creative. The use of interdisciplinary approaches in the education system of Russia is of fundamental importance in the course of the humanitarian and technological revolution. The organizational and financial reforms of the last thirty years have led education to a deep crisis. The interdisciplinary approaches are needed in order to balance the wishes of the programs authors, the opportunities of students and to correlate the training received with the prospects for the country’s development. The revision of the content and forms of education today is becoming a problem not only for teachers and scientists, but also for the entire national culture.The imperative of our country’s cultural development is the image of the future. In the industrial era, there was an idea of universality of the ways of social systems development. In the postindustrial reality, the world becomes more complex, diversity increases. At the current point of bifurcation, several development paths open up. A civilization’s cultural choice, based on tradition, scientific forecasting and the image of the future, becomes fundamental. Interdisciplinary approaches can play a fundamental role in shaping such a cultural choice.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 1203-1209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hind Kadiri ◽  
Serguei Kostcheev ◽  
Daniel Turover ◽  
Rafael Salas-Montiel ◽  
Komla Nomenyo ◽  
...  

Our aim was to elaborate a novel method for fully controllable large-scale nanopatterning. We investigated the influence of the surface topology, i.e., a pre-pattern of hydrogen silsesquioxane (HSQ) posts, on the self-organization of polystyrene beads (PS) dispersed over a large surface. Depending on the post size and spacing, long-range ordering of self-organized polystyrene beads is observed wherein guide posts were used leading to single crystal structure. Topology assisted self-organization has proved to be one of the solutions to obtain large-scale ordering. Besides post size and spacing, the colloidal concentration and the nature of solvent were found to have a significant effect on the self-organization of the PS beads. Scanning electron microscope and associated Fourier transform analysis were used to characterize the morphology of the ordered surfaces. Finally, the production of silicon molds is demonstrated by using the beads as a template for dry etching.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kazusa Beppu ◽  
Ziane Izri ◽  
Yusuke Maeda ◽  
Ryota Sakamoto

As expressed “God made the bulk; the surface was invented by the devil” by W. Pauli, the surface has remarkable properties because broken symmetry in surface alters the material properties. In biological systems, the smallest functional and structural unit, which has a functional bulk space enclosed by a thin interface, is a cell. Cells contain inner cytosolic soup in which genetic information stored in DNA can be expressed through transcription (TX) and translation (TL). The exploration of cell-sized confinement has been recently investigated by using micron-scale droplets and microfluidic devices. In the first part of this review article, we describe recent developments of cell-free bioreactors where bacterial TX-TL machinery and DNA are encapsulated in these cell-sized compartments. Since synthetic biology and microfluidics meet toward the bottom-up assembly of cell-free bioreactors, the interplay between cellular geometry and TX-TL advances better control of biological structure and dynamics in vitro system. Furthermore, biological systems that show self-organization in confined space are not limited to a single cell, but are also involved in the collective behavior of motile cells, named active matter. In the second part, we describe recent studies where collectively ordered patterns of active matter, from bacterial suspensions to active cytoskeleton, are self-organized. Since geometry and topology are vital concepts to understand the ordered phase of active matter, a microfluidic device with designed compartments allows one to explore geometric principles behind self-organization across the molecular scale to cellular scale. Finally, we discuss the future perspectives of a microfluidic approach to explore the further understanding of biological systems from geometric and topological aspects.


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