When I found topics dear to me, treated in a documentary I felt a warm pleasure. The theoretical and abstract notion of stocks and flows that I caress multiple times per day, in my mind, in my work, in my life, seen represented with actual tanks and water flowing was a nice surprise. That’s a machine, an analog computer, showing how money flows from the state to all of its stakeholders and it shows it with water. What a wonderful way of using a labyrinth of tanks and pipes with water flowing thanks to gravity. The author is searching for the origin of knowledge and she asked the water-based system dynamics machine if education and knowledge were connected to economics: of course!, he replied, they are directly connected. And he shows what happens when the state does not finance public education anymore and the student debts become a bank loan so the national debt gets hidden! And that was explained in a few seconds, some lever adjusted and water flowing. That documentary will be a source of many more connections.
To create clarity out of messes we need to make an inventory of all the components of the mess. That’s not enough. Once we have an exhaustive and tidy organization we need to classify each piece and question its nature. Is it old or new? What’s its purpose? And most of all: with other pieces does it connect to?
If we don’t have a detailed, well-organized, comprehensive inventory of all the components of a messy thing we can only use luck to make sense out of it.
Before considering rebuilding a solution because old, it’s wise to evaluate the differences between the existing system and the new version to be designed. Even if there are many components with several interdependencies it might be convenient to evaluate a piece-by-piece update rather than scratching everything and starting back from zero.
How shall we decide if we should redo it from scratch or adapt the existing one?
Plan to invest a limited amount of time to map the most connected and relevant part of the system to the one to be and see if it is relatively straightforward to translate between the old and the new or if there are too many differences or new pieces or a lot of old pieces to be completely removed.
If you discover that there is a high ratio of unchanged parts or slightly adapted components versus the novelties you might consider updating and upgrading the old rather than starting from scratch.
In very complicated systems, if you discover that the update is more convenient than the rebuild you might save a lot of time and resources.
Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.
Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.
But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.
And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?
This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.
I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.
How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?
When looking to create a new solution starting from premade pieces you need to have a precise and exhaustive inventory of all the pieces and how they can connect with each other.
Design is about finding new and useful connections. New, compared to the solutions found until now, otherwise you would have already solved the problem. Useful because they are satisfying the needs, wants and desires of the final users.
It’s not wise to try to arrange the pieces without having a clear and shared understanding of their functions and their potential for connection, it could be inefficient or, worst, harmful.
The phases of inventory and mapping are crucial to make a system visible. Any serious management and leadership effort as well as a design intervention should always rely on a careful and accurate system mapping.
We can find the weak links and the strength points of a product, an organization, a service or a group only if we know how it is composed. We need to know not only all of its components but especially their relationships. What buttons shall we push and in which sequence to create the effects we desire? Make the system visible to redesign, develop and lead it.
Storytelling can be your only solution to tell complexity. Sometimes you have to deal with a problem so complex in such a little time that it is impossible to know everything about it. You should map it out, identify all components, and delineate all relationships between them. Knowing boundaries, constraints, forces, and influences is fundamental to make sense out of something complex. But sometimes you have no time to do it. So, putting together a story, in its simplest form, a context: somebody needs to do something because they want it or because somebody else wants it, they learn something about the possible roads to take, they take into consideration possible scenarios and, finally they make a decision with all of the implications and consequences that it entails.
You won’t create a perfect and durable solution. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, you will be wrong or very wrong. But telling a story using the elements you have at your disposal and adding a bit of imagination allows you to get unstuck and get out of the paralysis from analysis. Most of all, a story is the most immediate means you have to communicate your lacks, your missing pieces, your speculations. It’s a way to work, productively and provocatively, without knowing exactly what the work is that you have to do.
To make decisions, we need to know where we are acting and what the consequences could be. Then, we decide to pursue our goals, choose to do some actions, or ask somebody else to perform some activities for us with the final goal of achieving what we desire or what we are required to complete.
We might have personal skills independent from the context. Intuition, expertise, or previous knowledge of similar situations may inform our decision-making capability. We definitely look to mitigate risks and avoid damage and losses even when explicitly acting for a direct benefit or a profit.
What’s the most important thing to know to make the best decision? Understanding how the system works. Such knowledge comes from having the most accurate inventory of all interactions between the system’s components. The more we know about the context, the actors, the forces, the constraints, and the boundaries of the system we are making our decisions, the more we will acquire the knowledge needed to make the best decision.
That’s why making the system visible is a design and discovery principle at the foundation of understanding how a system works and how making specific choices generates different scenarios and possible consequences.
There is a strong parallel between the characteristics and the influences of physical places on our lives and what worlds of information living in immaterial digital existences are having on them.
Living in Information by Jorge Arango is about designing digital places: information spaces where we act, move, search and request to satisfy our needs in similar and sometimes more complex and powerful ways than the physical ones.
As designers of interactions, learning, services, products, we need to be constantly aware of the importance of the architecture of a space and its characteristics to create meaningful experiences for the people living in it.
Jorge Arango, Information Architect, Strategic Designer, writes about the factors involved in designing digital places in this well-structured and flowing text, which should be a reference point for any modern designer.
The neat organization in chapters provides a systematic structure to sustain a holistic and multi-perspective view of information environments, their influence on humans, and the fundamental properties to consider when designing them.
A logical sequence of concepts, treated in a fluid and convincing style, tells a story where the two distant actors converge into a unifying theory: the physical and the digital space. The concepts: Environments, Context, Incentives, Engagement, Technology, Architecture, Structure, Systems, Sustainability to conclude with Gardening.
A systemic and systematic view of digital design empowers a multi-angle and structured vision of designing Information Environments.
The narration unfolds to focus on the critical question of this book: “How can we design these information environments, so they serve our social needs in the long term?”
Each chapter contributes to stimulating an answer. Chapter 6, in particular, gives a strong point about it:” Architecture: We can intentionally design our environments to better serve our needs. Architecture is the design discipline that is focused on structuring our physical environments, and information architecture is the design discipline that does the same for information environments.”
I particularly appreciate the expanded and expanding view of Arango when he extends the scope to systems, systems of systems, and ecosystems, increasing the conceptual power and the strength of the framework as he does in Chapter 8. Systems: “Environments are not just structural constructs; many other systems must work in concert to make it possible for them to serve our needs. Architects must consider how these systems work together. “
This takes the discussion beyond the border of the single, closed, independent scope of the artifact, the product, or the service, extending the consideration to a Systems View which entails a long sequence of dynamics and phenomena as well explained in the various Systems Thinking schools: systems change, often unpredictably, usually cannot be controlled and need ongoing stewardship as well described in Chapter 10, Gardening.
I loved “Living In Information” because it helped me have a more comprehensive, broader, and more encompassing view on design, design thinking, information architecture, systems design, systems thinking, sustainability development, usability, human-centered design, strategic design.
“Living in Information” is a precious book to be lovingly kept on any designer’s bookshelf.
Living in Information by Jorge Arango, book review
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OkNo
