Context: Sustainability is among major societal goals in our days. Education is acknowledged as an essential strategy for attaining sustainability by activating the creative potential within young people to understand sustainability, bring forth changes in their everyday life, and collectively envision a more sustainable future. Problem: However, teaching and learning about sustainability and sustainability-related issues is not an easy task due to the inherent complexity, ambiguity, and context-specificity of the concept. We are in need of innovative pedagogical approaches and tools that will allow us to design learning activities in which learners will be empowered to develop new, alternative interpretations of sustainability in personally and collectively meaningful ways. Method: We argue that a constructionist perspective involving the use of expressive media for digital storytelling offers an appropriate frame for designing learning activities fostering collaborative creativity in thinking and learning about urban sustainability. Our study is based on the design of a learning activity following this rationale. We adopted a qualitative approach in the collection and analysis of different sources of data with the aim to explore collaborative creativity as a learning process based on the students’ collective processes and resulting in the co-construction of new ideas and insights about sustainability, and new tangible artefacts (the digital stories) encompassing them. Results: Our analysis of the collaborative creativity exemplified in the three digital stories produced identified important creative elements with regards to the three components of a digital story (script, technical characteristics, and ideas of urban sustainability) and how they were embodied in each digital story produced as a result of the students’ joint constructionist activity. Implications: Our study provides some preliminary evidence that collaborative creativity from a constructionist perspective can stand as an appropriate framework for designing learning activities addressing the difficult concept of sustainability. There are several implications for both theory and educational practice in environmental education and education for sustainable development, constructionism, and digital storytelling in education. Moreover, our study opens up new fields for research and theory in creativity.

Key words: Sustainability, urban sustainability, collaborative creativity, constructionism, digital storytelling, learning design.

Excerpt: Recent years have seen two large-scale efforts at improving the curricular goals and pedagogical methods of school mathematics by placing greater emphasis on student experience, on good analytical thinking, and on creativity. The first of these was proclaimed (incorrectly) to have been a failure. Will our present-day sophistication, as represented by today’s constructivist perspective, mean that the second attempt will prove any more successful?

Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as a minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view by showing how direct learning, seen as an instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity.

In this article, I sketch an enactive account of autism. For the enactive approach to cognition, embodiment, experience, and social interaction are fundamental to understanding mind and subjectivity. Enaction defines cognition as sense-making: the way cognitive agents meaningfully connect with their world, based on their needs and goals as self-organizing, self-maintaining, embodied agents. In the social realm, the interactive coordination of embodied sense-making activities with others lets us participate in each other’s sense-making (social understanding = participatory sense-making). The enactive approach provides new concepts to overcome the problems of traditional functionalist accounts of autism, which can only give a piecemeal and disintegrated view because they consider cognition, communication, and perception separately, do not take embodied into account, and are methodologically individualistic. Applying the concepts of enaction to autism, I show: (1) How embodiment and sense-making connect, i.e., how autistic particularities of moving, perceiving, and emoting relate to how people with autism make sense of their world. For instance, restricted interests or preference for detail will have certain sensorimotor correlates, as well as specific meaning for autistic people. (2) That reduced flexibility in interactional coordination correlates with difficulties in participatory sense-making. At the same time, seemingly irrelevant “autistic behaviors” can be quite attuned to the interactive context. I illustrate this complexity in the case of echolalia. An enactive account of autism starts from the embodiment, experience, and social interactions of autistic people. Enaction brings together the sensorimotor, cognitive, social, experiential, and affective aspects of autism in a coherent framework based on a complex non-linear multi-causality. This foundation allows to build new bridges between autistic people and their often non-autistic context, and to improve quality of life prospects.

Key words: autism, enaction, sense-making, participatory sense-making, embodiment, social interaction, coordination dynamics

Autopoietic enactivism (AE) is a relatively young but increasingly influential approach within embodied cognitive science, which aims to offer a viable alternative framework to mainstream cognitivism. Similarly, in biology, the nascent field of biosemiotics has steadily been developing an increasingly influential alternative framework to mainstream biology. Despite sharing common objectives and clear theoretical overlap, there has to date been little to no exchange between the two fields. This paper takes this under-appreciated overlap as not only a much needed call to begin building bridges between the two areas but also as an opportunity to explore how AE could benefit from biosemiotics. As a first tentative step towards this end, the paper will draw from both fields to develop a novel synthesis – biosemiotic enactivism – which aims to clarify, develop and ultimately strengthen some key AE concepts. The paper has two main goals: (i) to propose a novel conception of cognition that could contribute to the ongoing theoretical developments of AE and (ii) to introduce some concepts and ideas from biosemiotics to the enactive community in order to stimulate further debate across the two fields.

Key words: Anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism, autopoietic enactivism, biosemiotic enactivism, enactive cognitive science, semiosis, strong life-mind continuity thesis, Umwelt.

Problem: The underlying assumption of all feminist theories is that in order to achieve our emancipatory goals we have to resolve the so-called female subjectivity problem first. That is, we have to answer the question of what is (is not) the nature/essence/main feature of being a woman. The debate about where and how we should look for that essence seems to be endless and it still continues in contemporary feminist theories. This stalemate blocks the initial political and social power of the whole feminist movement. It also seems to contradict the idea that philosophy can serve practical purposes, which was a driving force behind feminist theories as such. Solution: While analyzing contemporary feminist theories we can discover that they are dualistic with respect to the cognitive situation. Using tools taken from Josef Mitterer’s philosophy and the idea of emancipation developed by Bruno Latour, I want to consider the idea of avoiding stalemate situations in discussions on female subjectivity. I claim that this strategy can be more effective in achieving certain practical goals that are important from a feminist point of view. Benefits: We are able to show that the aim of our theoretical activity is not to agree about what a woman is and what kind of woman we are going to emancipate, but rather to define which problems should be solved in order to improve the situation of women. We just have to learn how to formulate the description from now on of initial matters of concern that is acceptable to all those involved in a given dispute.

Key words: anti-essentialism, identity, feminism

Excerpt: As alternatives to the dominant computationalist approach to cognition develop toward scientific maturity, the taken-for-granted departure and end points of mind science begin to be questioned more systematically. The simple and apparently given starting points are often revealed as presupposing the more complex stages that are relegated to longer term explanatory goals. Similarly, the apparently complex feat is sometimes shown to be simpler to explain and more basic once certain methodological and conceptual blinders are removed. We witness this pattern in various regions of cognitive science, for instance, over the last two decades, in the embodied turn in artificial intelligence and robotics, the emerging field of cognitive linguistics and in embodied and dynamical accounts of action and perception.

Autonomous systems are the result of self-sustaining processes of constitution of an identity under precarious circumstances. They may transit through different modes of dynamical engagement with their environment, from committed ongoing coping to open susceptibility to external demands. This paper discusses these two statements and presents examples of models of autonomous behaviour using methods in evolutionary robotics. A model of an agent capable of issuing self-instructions demonstrates the fragility of modelling autonomy as a function rather than as a property of a system’s organization. An alternative model of behavioural preference based on homeostatic adaptation avoids this problem by establishing a mutual constraining between lower-level processes (neural dynamics and sensorimotor interaction) and higher-level metadynamics (experience-dependent, homeostatic triggering of local plasticity and re-organization). The results of these models are lessons about how strong autonomy should be approached: neither as a function, nor as a matter of external vs. internal determination.

Key words: biological autonomy, modelling autonomous behaviour, evolutionary robotics, self-setting of goals, behavioural preference.

This article describes the replacement of traditional strategies for designing corporate culture with an innovative concept of cultural evolution in enterprises. The traditional method regards cultures as designable instruments which can be used to achieve management goals. In a complex and dynamic world, this view has become obsolete and must be replaced with a symbolic view of corporate culture. Corporate cultures should be regarded as autopoietic systems. Because of their endogenous orientation, autopoietic systems cannot be designed in a straightforward manner. Thus, strategies for designing cultures must be replaced with a careful cultural management whose activities are restrained to cautious modifications of general conditions such as organizational structures or the behavior of employees. One important means to achieve those modifications is to promote organizational learning.

This article presents a constructivist model of human cognitive development during infancy. According to constructivism, the elements of mental representation-even such basic elements as the concept of physical object-are constructed afresh by each individual, rather than being innately supplied. A (partially-specified, yet-unimplemented) mechanism, the Schema Mechanism, is proposed here; this mechanism is intended to achieve a series of cognitive constructions characteristic of infants' sensorimotor-stage development, primarily as described by Piaget. In reference to Piaget's “genetic epistemology”, I call this approach genetic AI-“genetic” not in the sense of genes, but in the sense of genesis: development from the point of origin. The Schema Mechanism focuses on Piaget's concept of the activity and evolution of cognitive schemas. The schema is construed here as a context-sensitive prediction of what will follow a certain action. Schemas are used both as assertions about the world, and as elements of plans to achieve goals. A mechanism of attribution causes a schema's assertion to be extended or revised according to the observed effects of the schema's action; due to the possible relevance of conjunctions of context conditions, the attribution facility needs to be able to sort through a combinatorial explosion of hypotheses. Crucially, the mechanism constructs representations of new actions and state elements, in terms of which schemas are expressed. Included here is a sketch of the proposed Schema Mechanism, and highlights of a hypothetical scenario of the mechanism's operation. The Schema Mechanism starts with a set of sensory and motor primitives as its sole units of representation. As with the Piagetian neonate, this leads to a “solipsist” conception: the world consists of sensory impressions transformed by motor actions. My scenario suggests how the mechanism might progress from there to conceiving of objects in space-representing an object independently of how it is currently perceived, or even whether it is currently perceived. The details of this progression paralledl the Piagetian development of object conception from the first through fifth sensorimotor stage.