Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

PRAISE FOR VALUE CREATION PRINCIPLES "In Value Creation Principles, Madden introduces the Pragmatic Theory of the Firm that positions the firm as a system fueled by human capital, innovation, and, at a deeper level, imagination. He challenges us to understand how we know what we think we know in order to better discover faulty assumptions that often are camouflaged by language. His knowledge building loop offers guideposts to design experiments and organize feedback to facilitate early adaptation to a changed environment and to avoid being mired in ways of thinking rooted in 'knowledge' of what worked well in the past a context far different from the context of today. His book explains a way of being that enables those who work for, or invest in, business firms to see beyond accounting silos and short-term quarterly earnings and to focus on capabilities instrumental for creating long-term future and sustainable value for the firm's stakeholders. I can't recommend this astounding book enough especially given its deep and timely insights for our world today." John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist for Xerox Corp and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); co-author with Ann Pendleton-Jullian of Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World "In contrast to existing abstract theories of the firm, Madden's pragmatic theory of the firm connects management's decisions in a practical way to a firm's life cycle and market valuation. The book promotes a firm's knowledge building proficiency, relative to competitors, as the fundamental driver of a firm's long-term performance, which leads to insights about organizational capabilities, intangible assets, and excess shareholder returns. Value Creation Principles is ideally suited to facilitate progress in the New Economy by opening up the process by which firms build knowledge and create value, which is a needed step in revising how neoclassical economics treats the firm." Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University; co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution "Bartley Madden rightfully points out that both textbook and more advanced economic theories of the firm fail to address the concerns of top management and boards of directors. He offers a tantalizing pragmatic alternative that directly connects to quantitative changes in the firm's market value. His framework gives recognition to the importance of intangible assets, and his pragmatic approach is quite complementary to the Dynamic Capabilities framework that strategic managers implicitly and sometimes explicitly employ." David J. Teece, Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business, Faculty Director, Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

Pendleton-Jullian discusses influences behind the Open City - the work and working methods of Surrealist French poets, the words and creative attitude of Le Corbusier, the heritage of the South American landscape and culture.

Examines twenty years of French military interventions in Chad and Hissène Habré's rise to power between 1960 and 1982.

Reimagining Adult Education as World Building offers a new way of thinking about adult education by re-envisaging how adult education works. It explores how the process of world building, or the invention of a new world or a set of concepts, can be translated into actual and feasible action when turning towards complex, real-life problems. Cultivating contexts where adult educators can become change agents, who recognize that the individual and community are intricately entangled, demands that educators grow new capacities, make new tools, develop thicker networks, and cultivate intentional links amongst each other to foster ecologies of transformation. This book shows how educators can create an ecology or environment for transformative thinking where students can learn to collaborate and use world building tools to create new responses to current issues. It begins by explaining the philosophical underpinnings of world building and the tools that translate pragmatic imagination into scaffolds for individual and collective capacity building. It also illustrates how the worldbuilding protocol makes a difference in adult learning and how this pedagogical tool introduces the ecological approach to adult education. Each chapter explores a practical case study, showing how learners have applied worldbuilding tools to complex challenges. Showing how to apply the world building protocol in a classroom setting, this edited collection will be valuable to Adult Education scholars, researchers, practitioners, and learning facilitators.

Something good about the smart city: a human-centered account of why the future of electricity is local. Resilience now matters most, and most resilience is local—even for that most universal, foundational modern resource: the electric power grid. Today that technological marvel is changing more rapidly than it has for a lifetime, and in our new grid awareness, community microgrids have become a fascinating catalyst for cultural value change. In Downtime on the Microgrid, Malcolm McCullough offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the cascade of white papers on smart clean infrastructure. Writing from an experiential perspective, McCullough avoids the usual smart city futurism, technological solutionism, policy acronyms, green idealism, critical theory jargon, and doomsday prepping to provide new cultural context for a subject long a favorite theme in science and technology studies. McCullough describes the three eras of North American electrification: innovation, consolidation, and decentralization. He considers the microgrid boom and its relevance to the built environment as “architecture's grid edge.” Finally, he argues that resilience arises from clusters; although a microgrid is often described as an island, future resilience will require archipelagos—clusters of microgrids, with a two-way, intermittent connectiveness that is very different from the always-on, top-down technofuture we may be expecting. With Downtime on the Microgrid, McCullough rises above techno-hype to find something good about the smart city and reassuring about local resilience.