Accidental Vagrant

Transcript of West’s interview at Umea University in 1987 Courtesy of Sjon van’t Hof West was my mentor at UC Berkeley and was a great life-long friend. He was a seminal member of the 'Berkeley Bubble'. This level of discourse is sorely missing in todays world of sound bites and tweets.

A recent article in Fast Company, titled “ Stanford’s Most Popular Class ...”, dealt with a class titled ‘Designing Your Life’.   The first time I was introduced to the idea that one could 'design' their life was when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. Over the years, My friend and mentor C. West Churchman —a polymath Professor at UC Berkeley—had written and lectured on the concept of the ‘Design of a Life’ with a focus on questions of ethics in whole systems. He was very concerned with the ethical behavior of individuals within business, governmental and institutional organizations as they ‘designed’ or planned interventions in complex social systems. Ethics was at the center of designing behavior from West’s perspective. West Churchman and Harold Nelson, Mill Valley, CA (1990's) Reading further in the Fast Company article on Stanford’s class, Bill Burnett—the Executive Director of Stanford’s design program—is quoted as saying: … "Design doesn’t s...