Systems
A new gestalt
Why aim small?
The number of ways in which things work
Inputs and outputs
Taylorism
Sets and systems
Every paper cut is felt
Technology is a system
Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters. Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.
Notes on the Legibility War
An Article by David R. MacIverThe basic idea of legibility is that the act of making something comprehensible enough to control is itself an act that shapes the thing to be controlled, often with far greater consequences than the control itself. This is because it removes complexity that is deemed as irrelevant that makes it harder to control, and that complexity may be in some way essential to the health of the system.
Primitive design
An Article by Matt Webb- I want it to feel intuitive
- I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs.
And the second of those is weird, right? It’s like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick.
That’s platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together.
Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization
An Article by Brad FrostI’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.
In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as they’re fed into the machine. It becomes “a developer resource is needed” rather than “Oh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.” And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When people’s primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them they’re blocked.
Reading “AS PER THE REQUIREMENTS” in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?
When Customer Journeys Don’t Work: Arcs, Loops, & Terrain
An Article by Stephen P. AndersonThinking [in terms of loops and arcs] allows us to let go of a specific journey or sequence, and imagine dozens of scenarios and possible sequences in which these skills can be learned. This doesn’t mean there aren’t more fundamental skills that other skills build upon, but we can let go the tyranny of how, precisely, a person will move through a system. We’re free to zoom in and obsess on these loops, which does two things for us:
- Approach the design of a system as the design of these as small but significant moments of learning.
- Consider the many ways these loops might be sequenced, with the exact order being less important.
Stress systems
An Article by Ethan MarcotteThe [Lake Erie] ecosystem underwent a series of changes, each of which were related. There was an increase in the human population; which led to higher phosophorus levels in the water; which led, at last, to an increased level of algae in the lake. In effect, Lake Erie’s ecosystem was rewritten. Changed by human activities into…something else.
But Franklin cites the study because it’s doing something slightly novel: applying Selye’s principle of stress to ecological systems, suggesting that they are, much like humans, just as susceptible to external stressors. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, especially this week. Because Franklin’s suggesting that the work begins not by “fixing the system.” Rather, she suggests it’s about shifting the priority a little: to removing whatever stress you can.
The Art of Systems Architecting
A Book by Mark W. Maier & Eberhardt RechtinThe design systems between us
A Talk by Ethan MarcotteIn the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While they’ve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, they’ve introduced new challenges too. Let’s talk through what’s working well—and what could be working better—as we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.
Design System as Style Manual With Web Characteristics
An Article by Dorian TaylorIn my opinion, what makes a designer competent is precisely their ability to credibly justify their conclusions. If you can’t do this as a designer—no matter how successful your results are—then neither I nor anybody else can tell if you aren’t just picking things at random.
What I am proposing, then, is no less than to make a designer’s entire line of reasoning a matter of permanent record. On the surface is the familiar set of prescriptions, components, examples and tutorials, like you would expect out of any such artifact. Attached to every element, though, is a little button that says You click it, and it tells you. The proximate explanation will probably not be very satisfying, so you click on the next until you get to the end, at which point you are either satisfied with the explanation, or you aren’t.
Now I get it
An Article by Ralph AmmerTo design a system means to orchestrate the interplay of its elements.
Such a system is considered “interactive” if it is open, which means that there are ways to engage with the processes that are happening inside of it. There is of course a range of interactivities which spans from very basic reactive behaviour to highly complex conversational interactions.
Rethinking Repair
This chapter is an exercise in broken world thinking. It asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media.
The modern infrastructural ideal
The form and possibility of the "modern infrastructural ideal" is increasingly under threat, as cracks (sometimes literal ones) show up in our bridges, our highways, our airports, and the nets of our social welfare systems. For these and other reasons, broken world thinking asserts that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practices and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today.
Attached to this, however, comes a second and more hopeful approach: namely, a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time.
The fulcrum of these two worlds
Here, then, are two radically different forces and realities. On one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, and always-almost-falling-apart world. On the other, a world in constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities...the fulcrum of these two worlds is repair.
A creature of bones, not words
In building connections, [articulation work] builds meaning and identity, sorting out ontologies on the fly rather than mixing and matching between fixed and stable entities. Articulation lives first and foremost in practice, not representation; as its proper etymology suggests, it's a creature of bones, not words. When articulation fails, systems seize up, and our sociotechnical worlds become stuff, arthritic, unworkable.
The world is always breaking
So the world is always breaking; it's in its nature to break.
A side that goes unrecognized
Edward Burtynsky, Shipbreaking #4.
Burtynsky's [shipbreaking] photos tell us important things about the themes of breakdown, maintenance, and repair raised here. The first is the extent to which such work is rendered invisible under our normal modes of picturing and theorizing technology. Burtynsky's photos share, in exquisite detail, a side or moment of technological life that goes for the most part unrecognized.
If we are to understand maintenance, repair, and technology more broadly, scenes such as Burtynsky's must be made empirically and conceptually familiar, even normal.
Turned into other things
Ask yourself this: for all the representations of great ships in history you've encountered, at what times and in what forms have you seen such vessels? In almost every instance it will be at moments of birth, or at the heights of strength and glory: the christening before the maiden voyage, rounding the cape, facing down the Spanish fleet, and so on. But what happens (or happened) to these ships? Save for the special cases of hostile sinking, shipwreck, or honorable retirement and preservation, it was this: they were disassembled, repurposed, stripped, and turned into other things.
An engine of technological difference
Whether at the level of national "technological styles" that shape and differentiate the nature of "same" technologies in different national contexts, or the simple but consequential variations by which industrial commodities are brought into, enlivened, and sustained within the circumstances of individual homes and lives, repair may constitute an important engine by which technological difference is produced and fit is accomplished.
The internet grew by breaking
The Internet grew by breaking, bumping up against the limits of existing protocols and practices and working around them, leaving behind almost by accident some of the properties that we now enumerate as key and distinctive virtues of the Internet as infrastructural form. Far from being a generalized cultural tendency or a property of individual minds, innovation in the technology space, as in culture more generally, is therefore organized around problems. This makes innovation simultaneously specific and in some measure collective in nature. And its engine is breakdown and repair.
What the fixer knows
Can repair sites and repair actors claim special insight or knowledge, by virtue of their positioning vis-à-vis the worlds of technology they engage? Can the fixer know and see different things—indeed, different worlds—than the better-known figures of "designer" or "user"?
Tool-being
Take Heidegger's notion of "tool-being", built around the central distinction between tools that are "ready-to-hand" versus "present-at-hand".
In the former state, technologies function as anticipated, do and stay where they're supposed to, and therefore sink below the level of conscious reflection. In the latter, the material world resists, obstructs, or frustrates action, and therefore calls attention to itself (precisely because we must now work to figure out and overcome barriers in our no-longer seamless world).
An ethics of mutual care
Foregrounding maintenance and repair as an aspect of technological work invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology. It references what is in fact a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility.
To love deeply a world of things
Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it.
...What if we care about our technologies, and do so in more than a trivial way? This feature or property has sometimes been extended to technologies in the past, but usually only ones that come out of deep folk or craft traditions, and rarely the products of a modern industrial culture.
...Is it possible to love, and love deeply, a world of things?
We live in the aftermath
So do we live in later modernity, postmodernity, alternative modernity, or liquid modernity? Knowledge societies, information societies, network societies, or risk societies? New media, old media, dead media, or hypermedia? The world of information, the world of search, the world of networks, or the or the world of big data?
The answer is simple: like every generation before, we live in the aftermath.