Designers, Meet Systems (Recommended Reading)

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:

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:

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.

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Category: User Experience (UX)
 Tags: , , , , 3 comments »

3 Responses to “Designers, Meet Systems (Recommended Reading)”

  1. AG
    March 9th, 2007 at 4:35 pm

    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.
  2. joe
    March 11th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    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!
  3. AG
    March 12th, 2007 at 1:53 pm

    : . )
    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.

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