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Designers, Meet Systems (Recommended Reading)
March 9, 2007 12:27 PM | Posted in: User Experience (UX)2007 looks to be the year that the user experience, information architecture, and design communities embrace systems thinking and concepts.
It's a meeting that's been in the making for a while -
At the 2006 IA Summit, Karl Fast and D. Grant Campbell presented From Pace Layering to Resilience Theory: the Complex Implications of Tagging for Information Architecture.
Gene Smith has been writing about systems for a while. At the 2007 summit Gene and Matthew Milan will discuss some practical techniques in their presentation Rich mapping and soft systems: new tools for creating conceptual models.
Peter Merhholz has been posting and talking about the implications of some of these ideas often.
- and seems to have reached critical mass recently:
- Adam Richardson Why Designing Systems Is Difficult
- Adam Greenfield on Two things product designers and manufacturers need to know
- Jeff Lash with Make your product part of a system
Here's a set of reading recommendations related to systems and system thinking. These books, feeds, and articles either talk about systems and the ideas and concepts behind this way of thinking, or contain work that is heavily informed by systems thinking. Either way, they're good resources for learning more.
Tags:
http://del.icio.us/tag/systems_theory
http://del.icio.us/tag/systemstheory
http://del.icio.us/tag/SSM
Feeds:
Resilience Science recently featured three excellent essays on the work of C.S. Holling
Books:
- Ervin Laszlo - The Systems View of the World
- Ludwig Van Bertalanffy - General System Theory
- Gerald Weinberg - An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine - The End of Certainty
- Manuel De Landa - 1000 Years of Non-Linear History
- and also War In The Age of Intelligent Machines
- Steven Johnson - Emergence
- Manuel Castells - The Rise of the Network Society (vol. 2 of The Information Age trilogy)
- C. S. Holling - PANARCHY: Understanding Transformations In Human And Natural Systems
And for a lighter read, try anything by author Bruce Sterling that features his recurring character Leggy Starlitz - a self-described systems analyst ( likely the first example of one in a work of fiction that's even moderately well known...). His stories Hollywood Kremlin, Are You for 86?, and The Littlest Jackal (two in short story collection Globalhead), are good places to start. The novel Zeitgest focuses on Starlitz.
Articles:
Sustainability, Stability, and Resilience
We've needed to bridge the gulf between views of design rooted in static notions of form and function, and the fluid reality of life for a long time. I hope this new friendship lasts a while.
local tags: design, systems, systems_theory, ux
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I'm grateful for the link, Joe, but feel compelled to point out that neither my interest in or discussion of systems thinking is at all "recent"; indeed, it's what started me writing online in the first place, way back in 1999.
Like you, though, I'm certainly encouraged by the recent burst of lightbulbs going off.
Adam,
Thanks for stopping by. I didn't mean to suggest your recent posting meant you were a recent *arrival* to the community of those interested in the convergence of systems and design.
Those who've followed your work know well and appreciate that this an area you've been thinking about / writing on / active in / contributing to / leading in for a long time!
: . )
I'm most encouraged to see the IA community in particular begin to engage these themes. The narrowbore focus of the last few years has, in my view, been a strategic disaster for that community if broader influence is what is desired. (It may not be.)
For my perspective, there is literally no more important topic in design today than trying to understand the complex interrelationship of people, our tools, and the social structures we're bound up in, and I'm delighted to see this viewpoint start to win adherents.
And FWIW, I don't think of Leggy Starlitz nearly so often as I do Donald Hogan.