Narrow Results

Considering the impact on human beings and human activities of architectural decisions in the design of space for human habitation, this chapter discusses the increasingly evident and necessary confluence in contemporary times of many disciplines and human-oriented sciences, with architecture being the meeting ground to know emergent phenomena of human habitation. As both a general rubric and a specific phenomenon, architectural emergence is the chosen focus of discussion and other phenomena are related to it. Attention is given to the phenomena of architectural induction, emergence, and convergence as having strategic and explanatory value in understanding tensions between two competing mentalities, the global domineering nature-for-humans attitude, in opposition to the lesser practiced humans-for-nature attitude.

Interoperability in architecture illustrates contemporary instances of innovation. It aims, through the standardization of instruments and procedures (and especially through shared languages of/in IT tools and applications), at the optimization of interactions amongst agents and the work done.

It requires, within a consistently non-reductionist systemic approach: (1) interactions and activities of conscious government in/amongst its fundamental component parts (politics, technical aspects, semantics); (2) development of shared languages and protocols, to verify technical, poietic, etc., innovations which do not destroy accumulative effects and peculiarities (axiological, fruitional, etc.).

Systemics approaches towards architecture, traditionally within a structuralist framework (especially within a technological environment), may evolve in a non-reductionist way through:

- non-reductive considerations of the role of human requirements in the definition of inhabited spaces;

- acceptance of the use-perception dialogical relationship, and more generally of the art-science nexus, as being characteristic of architecture.

Likewise, there are theoretical issues in the development of systemic, particularly within the discipline of architecture, including:

- the role of the observer, in the constructivist sense and within the exceptions of scientific realism;

- the unpredictability of emergence, with its related limits (of purely ontological significance).

Infradisciplinary, besides interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, applications, forms part of the definition of new company organizational models and, in particular, for networked-companies. Their related systemic connotations characterize them as collective beings, especially regarding the optimization of interactions between agents as well as context-specific interference.

Networked-companies in the building industry (chosen to illustrate the infradisciplinary values of the systemic approach towards company organizational models) require, due to their nature and particularities of context, certain specifications: behavioral microrules of an informal nature, suitable governance of their sector, etc. Their nature and particular context thus determine, especially in the systemic view, the need not only for an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach, but also an infradisciplinary one.

The unstoppable acceleration of the scientific and technological development that is revolutionizing our socioeconomic systems in recent years has made the critical aspects and the inadequacy of medical epistemology more and more evident. Several elements have underlined the insufficiency of traditional ethical points of reference in Medicine, like the change of individual needs, the technical possibility of long-term management of heavy diseases, the change of the social and health systems caused by the interaction of different ethnic groups and cultures, several problems linked to the fair distribution of resources in regime of fiscal scarcity involving all the industrialized countries of our world. This brought to the necessity for Medicine to modify its coordinates, adjusting them on the person, and not on the disease.

In order to reach this objective, the author strategically suggests Systemics as the epistemological guidance of the knowledge process, which can make the scientific method operate in an ethical and cultural horizon centered on the human being valorization, on the respect of his/her needs and the respect of his/her environment.

A systemic approach of the medical thought can allow the re-orientation of the clinical look from a biological to a biographic one, the re-definition of the aim of the medical intervention as the restoration and support of self-organizing and self-regulating processes of the biological system, the achieving of a social and health expenditure's saving through a major appropriateness of prescription and an inherent preventive valence of medical interventions, the offer of new and larger horizons for the development of scientific research.