Notices by Ruth Malan — Systems (ruthmalan@mastodon.social)

This ✨free✨ (and free to share) 145 page ebook might sound like a lot, but it can be encountered at different levels: glancing through the slides and quotes, and reading a page here or there; reading a section; reading the book:

https://www.ruthmalan.com/Bredemeyer/20241021SystemDesignIntro.pdf

It emphasizes system design as:
• contextual
• co-evolutionary
• co-active
• considerate

What images do you use for irreversible decisions?

Turnstile
Toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube

Others?

‘The British sociologist Marilyn Strathern [..] taught me that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with)” [..] It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots; what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’

— Donna Haraway, Staying With The Trouble

“A seat at the table is no good unless design is part of the strategy. To find the right place to apply leverage, designers need to embrace systems thinking.”

“Designers do not, I think, have a coherent sense of what systems thinking is (I have heard it used to refer to design systems more than once and I am sorry to say, that is not it). A good start on systems thinking is Indi Young’s piece on thinking critically”

— @PavelASamsonov

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/design-is-a-leadership-skill-why-design-goes-wrong-and-how-to-set-it-right-part-3

Aside on the System Seeing Journal Starter Kit: it is smuggling all manner of systems donkeys, in terms of the explicit areas of practice as well as the quotes as offers of “matter to think with.”

Still, it emphasizes models and diagramming, so this struck me earlier today:

“For systems practitioners then, modelling is core to the discipline — if you’re not modelling you’re not doing systems”

— Patrick Hoverstadt

The donkeys reference: https://idriesshahfoundation.org/pdfviewer/the-smuggler-from-the-exploits-of-the-incomparable-mulla-nasrudin/

🎉

“One of the best and most designerly ways of untangling that web is through diagramming. Ruth Malan has composed an excellent diagramming toolkit for systems seeing and Karen Holtzblatt’s contextual design remains a priceless resource.”

A link/mention of the System Seeing Journal Starter Kit
https://www.ruthmalan.com/systems/2025SystemSeeingJournal.pdf

And in such good company!!

This, via

https://mastodon.social/@harold/114212999467555499

Denial of the uncertainty induced by climate shifts is simply … beyond reason… Which regions will be hit by harsh droughts? Wild fire? Floods? Add to that: Bird flu? Pollution? Which countries will need to rely more on others this year for food? But sure, instead of nourishing mutual relationships, we’re doing what now? Farmers having fun??

“Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just forgotten”
— an engineer

https://landley.net/history/mirror/institutional_memory.html

If you are, or know anyone, interested in these ideas and practices:

(System design and architecture chapbook pdf) https://www.ruthmalan.com/Bredemeyer/20241021SystemDesignIntro.pdf

the workshop provides an opportunity to explore them. The setting is collaborative, and we’ll have fun but also get work done. So that we experience, and reflect, and co-evolve our design sense and sensibilities.

This is an incredible line-up (DDDEU workshops) and you’ll get why I was posting about imposter syndrome and doing it anyway, the other day :)

https://ti.to/on3/aardling25

lol. The things my fingers blurt out here, that I could never, on LI

:)

Can I use that image on the program???

:D

Joking in nervous already, obviously. The more important point is that it is so much about who participates … and the goodwilling pitching in to the experience. Still… there’s anxieties… Will people sign up? Does humility and collaborative engagement have a venue “in this economy”…

Lucy Bellwood, hero to all who have internalized society’s demonz and need to deal.

https://lucybellwood.com/books/100-demon-dialogues/

“The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost.”

“To create R1, DeepSeek had to rework its training process to reduce the strain on its GPUs, a variety released by Nvidia for the Chinese market that have their performance capped at half the speed of its top products, according to Zihan Wang”

— Caiwei Chen

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/24/1110526/china-deepseek-top-ai-despite-sanctions/

Mitigating and preparing for climate impacts *is* economic development, and organizations, cities, states and countries that get on that, are being smart — under pressure… This is *short term* thinking now.

“For many software professionals, the biggest mindshift when thinking in systems is also the most important one: software systems are sociotechnical. When I say our systems are sociotechnical, I mean that our thinking, behaviors, and communication patterns are inextricable from the software systems we produce.”

— @diana

Scanning for “appetizer” quotes —

‘Technical debt is how we describe the lack of cohesion in the system.’

— I hear @diana ’s voice in my mind, especially at parts like the last phrase in:

‘Donella Meadows defines systems thinking as how “parts together produce an effect
that is different from the effect of each part on its own.”

Relationships produce effects. Software becomes a system of software when “parts together” achieve something that could not exist without the “together” part.’

Next up in #PapersInSystems: we’ll be discussing Crafting Conceptual Integrity: ch 2 of Learning Systems Thinking

Discussion will be led by (the author!) @diana

Monday, February 10, 1-2pm Eastern Time

Free, but enroll for access:
https://ti.to/bredemeyer/montalion_conceptualintegrity/with/conway-on-systems

And a lovely colorful version of the (tippy) Iceberg Model (smiles)

Illustration: Sam Bradd, https://www.sfu.ca/complex-systems-frameworks/frameworks/unpacking-complexity/iceberg-model.html