archive.Joe Lamantia.com

The Lessons From Failure Series (curated by Christian Crumlish) kicked off today at Boxes and Arrows, leading with my meditation on being an entrepreneur and what it means to face failure as a member of a rigidly defined society, titled It Seemed Like The Thing To Do At The Time. Stay tuned for three further installments from talented fellow panelists.

Also, look for part two of my series on designing healthy user experiences for portals using the IA Building Blocks in early July. Part one – The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals – describing the structural and usability weaknesses of flat architectures, was published in December.

Many thanks to the hard working volunteers at B+A for creating a forum for these ideas and the community around them!

For regular readers wondering about the recent quiet here, a notice that Boxes and Arrows will shortly publish an article I’ve been working on for a while in the background, titled, “It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: The Power of State of Mind”. This is the written version of my panel presentation Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs from the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.

I’ve written about organizations and failure – Signs of Crisis and Decline In Organizations – in this blog before (a while ago, but still a popular posting), and wanted to consider the subject on a larger level. With the rapid spread of social software / social media and the rise of complex social dynamics in on-line environments, exploring failure at the level of an entire society is timely.

In The Fishbowl

Failed or failing societies are an excellent fishbowl for observers seeking patterns related to social media, for two reasons. First, the high intensity of failure situations reveals much of what is ordinarily hidden in social structures and patterns: Impending collapse leads people to dispense with carefully maintained social constructions.

One source of this heightened intensity is the greatly increased stakes of societal failure (vs. most other kinds), which often means sudden and dramatic disruptions to basic living and economic patterns, the decline of cities and urban concentrations, and dramatic population decrease. Another source is the very broad scope of the aftereffects; because a failing society involves an entire culture, the affects are comprehensive, touching everyone and everything.

Secondly, societies often command substantial qualitative and quantitative resources that can help them manage crisis or challenges, thereby averting failure. Smaller, less sophisticated entities lack the resource base of a complex social organism, and consequently cannot put up as much of a fight.

Examples of resources available at the level of a society include:

• Leaders and planners dedicated to focusing on the future
• Large amounts of accumulated knowledge and experience
• Sophisticated structures for decision making and control
• Mechanisms for maintaining order during crises
• Collective resilience from surviving previous challenges
• Substantial stores of resources such as food and materials, money, land
• Tools, methods, and organizations providing economies of scale, such as banking and commerce networks
• Systems for mobilizing labor for special purposes
• Connections to other societies that could provide assistance (or potential rescue)

Despite these mitigating resources, the historical and archeological records overflow with examples of failed societies. Once we read those records, the question of how these societies defined themselves seems to bear directly on quite a few of the outcomes.

I discuss three societies in the article: Easter Island, Tikopia, and my own small startup company. We have insight into the fate of Easter Island society thanks to a rich archeological record that has been extensively studied, and descriptions of the Rapa Nui society in written records kept by European explorers visiting since 1722. Tikopia of course is still a functioning culture. My startup was a tiny affair that serves as a useful foil because it shows all the mistakes societies make in a compressed span of time, and on a scale that’s easy to examine. The Norse colonies in North America and Greenland are another good example, though space constraints didn’t allow discussion of their failed society in the article.

Read the article to see what happens to all three!

Semi Random Assortment of Quotations

In the meantime, enjoy this sampling of quotations about failure, knowledge, and self, from some well-known – and mostly successful! – people.

“Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – CHARLES DARWIN

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – EPICTETUS

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – THOMAS EDISON

“It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.” – HAVELOCK ELLIS

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.” – ANAIS NIN

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” – RABINDRANATH TAGORE

“Whoever longs to rescue quickly both himself and others should practice the supreme mystery: exchange of self and other.” – SHANTIDEVA

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” – JOHN DEWEY

For those in the enterprise IA / UX space, The next frontier in IT strategy: A McKinsey Survey centered on the idea that “…IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance”is worth a look.

This nicely parallels a point made about the reactive mindset common to IT in many large organizations, in discussion on the IAI mailing list last month. Lou Rosenfeld’s post Information architects on communicating to IT managers, summarizes the original discussion in the IAI thread, and is worth reading as a companion piece.

Lou’s summary of information architecture and user experience voices in the enterprise arena is noteworthy for including many examples of strong correspondence between McKinsey’s understanding of how IT strategy will mature (a traditional management consulting view), and the collected IA / UX viewpoints on addressing IT leadership – typical buyers for enterprise anything – and innovation.

Dialogs that show convergence of understanding like this serve as positive signs for the future. At present, a large set of deeply rooted cultural assumptions (at their best inaccurate, usually reductive, sometimes even damaging) about the roles of IT, business, and design combine with the historical legacies of corporate structures to needlessly limit what’s possible for User Experience and IA in the enterprise landscape. In practical terms, I’m thinking of those limitations as barriers to the strategy table; constraining who can talk to who, and about which important topics, such as how to spend money, and where the business should go.
Considering the gulf that separated UX and IT viewpoints ten – or even five – years ago, this kind of emerging common understanding is a good sign that the cultural obstacles to a holistic view of the modern enterprise are waning. We know that a holistic view will rely on deep understanding of the user experience aspects of business at all levels to support innovation in products and services. I’m hoping the rest of the players come to understand this soon.

Another good sign is that CIO’s have won a seat at the strategy table, after consistent effort:

Further evidence of IT’s collaborative role in shaping business strategy is the fact that so many CIOs now have a seat at the table with senior management. They report to the CEO in 44 percent of all cases; an additional 42 percent report to either the chief operating officer or the chief financial officer.

Looking ahead, information architecture and user experience viewpoints and practitioners should work toward a similar growth path. We fill a critical and missing strategic role that other traditional viewpoints are not as well positioned to supply.

Quoting McKinsey again:

IT strategy in most companies has not yet reached its full potential, which in our experience involves exploiting innovation to drive constant improvement in the operations of a business and to give it a real advantage over competitors with new products and capabilities. Fewer than two-thirds of the survey respondents say that technological innovation shapes their strategy. Only 43 percent say they are either very or extremely effective at identifying areas where IT can add the most value.

User Experience can and should have a leading voice in setting the agenda for innovation, and shaping understandings of where IT and other groups can add the most value in the enterprise. To this end, I’ll quote Peter Merholz (with apologies for not asking in advance):

“…we’ve reached a point where we’ve maximized efficiency until we can’t maximize no more, and that in order to realize new top-line value, we need to innovate… And right now, innovations are coming from engaging with the experiences people want to have and satisfying *that*.”

McKinsey isn’t making the connection between strategic user experience perspectives and innovation – at least not yet. That’s most likely a consequence of the fact that management consulting firms base their own ways of thinking, organizational models, and product offerings (services, intellectual property, etc.) on addressing buyers who are themselves deeply entrenched in traditional corporate structures and worldviews. And in those worlds, everything is far from miscellaneous, as a glance at the category options available demonstrates; your menu here includes Corporate Finance, Information Technology, Marketing, Operations, Strategy…

BTW: if you weren’t convinced already, this should demonstrate the value of the $40 IAI annual membership fee, or of simply reading Bloug, which is free, over paying for subscriptions to management journals

Direct connections between the war in Iraq and the realm of user experience are rare, so I was surprised when one popped up today in an article by the New York Times, titled 2 Car Bombings in Iraq Kill 25.

The article quotes an Iraqi, reacting to the destruction of a house containing a cache of munitions by American soldiers.  “The Americans are lying,” said Ali Jabbar, 28, one of several men digging through the rubble, where bicycle handlebars could be seen poking out. “If there were weapons there, they should have taken pictures to prove it.” But in a sign of the challenge Americans face here, Mr. Jabbar said that even if he saw such pictures, he would not be convinced that the destruction was justified. “The Americans can make it up with Photoshop,” he said.

It’s simultaneously terrible and fascinating that a tool I use regularly would appear in this sort of context. And yet it’s not unreasonable, given the ways that many futurists envision and describe warfare centered on information.

Here’s Alvin Toffler, from How will future wars be fought?

Above all, the full implications of what we termed Third Wave “knowledge warfare” have not yet been digested – even in the United States. The wars of the future will increasingly be prevented, won or lost based on information superiority and dominance. And that isn’t just a matter of taking out the other guy’s radar. It means waging the kind of full-scale cyber-war we described in War and Anti-War. Cyber-war involves everything from strategic deception and perception management down to tactical disruption of an adversary’s information systems. It also means understanding the role played by the global media in any conflict today. It means enhancing all your knowledge assets from intelligence, to research and development, training, and communication.

A meme is emerging for the use text clouds as visualization for – and a source of insight into – political speeches and speakers.
Text clouds of the Republican Presidential candidates’ debate appear front and center on the DNC blog democrats.org, in Tag Clouds Can Tell Us a Lot…. (sourced from media analysis firm Upstream Analysis via Pollster.com).


As you can see in the quote from the writeup below, we’re quickly developing sophisticated readings of the (comparatively) simple visualization methods used to generate text clouds.

But sometimes a cloud also reflects concerns that voters share about a candidate. This is because the candidate gets asked about the issue–a lot–and then has to talk about it.

Check out the large “Pro-Life” tag in flip-flopping Romney’s cloud, or the large “Think” tag in Giuliani’s cloud–the candidate notorious for leaping first and thinking later.

Political interpretations aside, this is a nuanced reading of the resulting clouds: it recognizes the dynamic feedback link between intentions and responses that becomes visible in the rendered clouds. For a visualization geek, these clouds show the differing agendas of candidates and audience as they played out, a nice example of social mechanisms in action.

Note to the tool builders of the world

How about putting together a visualization toolset that shows evolving text clouds as the debate progresses? I’m imagining a timeline plus transcript plus cloud view of the accumulating text cloud for each candidate, with options for moving forward or back in the stream of words.

What could be better than watching words and ideas bloom over time, the same way we see flowers in a garden blossom, open, and close in time lapse photography. I’d like to think we can grow something poetic and beautiful, as well as useful, from the (sadly debased) soil of politicized sound bites surrounding us.

Or, with a nod to the brutal competition built into most natural systems, you may choose to watch the struggle of waterlillies for sunlight, in this clip from The Amazing Life of Plants.

Mark Blumenthal, of Pollster.com, recently posted a set of text clouds showing the words used by each candidate in the Democratic presidential debate Thursday night. The clouds were generated from transcripts of the debate, using Daniel Steinbock’s Tag Crowd tool.

Candidates’ Text Clouds

In the screenshot of Mark’s posting, it’s easy to see this is a great example of a collection of text clouds used for comparative visualization and interpretation. The goal is to enhance understanding of the meaning and content of the candidate’s overall conversations during the debate, an idea I explored briefly last year.

Just a month ago, in a post that identified text clouds as a new and distinct tag cloud variant, I suggested:

text clouds may become a generally applied tool for managing growing information overload by using automated synthesis and summarization. In the information saturated future (or the information saturated present), text clouds are the common executive summary on steroids

Supporting the comparison and interpretation of political speeches is an inventive, timely, and resourceful application that could make text clouds a regular part of the new personal and professional toolkit for effectively handling the torrents of information overwhelming people in important situations like vetting political candidates.

I especially like the way this use of text clouds helps neatly sidestep the disheartening ubiquity of the soundbite, by aggregating, distilling, and summarizing all the things the candidates said. I suspect few – if any – of the campaigns realize the potential for text clouds, but they definitely know the detrimental power of soundbites:

“It’s a mess,” said an exasperated-sounding Mr. Prince, Mr. Edwards’s deputy campaign manager. “Debates are important, but in these big multicandidate races they end up not being an exchange of ideas, but just an exchange of sound bites. They have become a distraction.”

From Debates Losing a Bit of Luster in a Big Field

The value of a collection of soundbites over an insightful dialog is – apologies for the pun – debatable. But even if a simple exchange of soundbites is what the new shortened formats of many debates yields us, text clouds may help derive some value and insight from the results. The combined deconstructive and reconstructive approach that text clouds employ should make it possible to balance the weight of single remarks of candidates by placing them in a larger and more useful context.

History Repeats Itself

In the longer term view of the history of our responses to the problems of information overload, the appearance of text clouds may mark the emergence of a new general puprose tool for visualizing ever greater quantities of information to support some qualitatively beneficial end (like picking a good candidate for President, which we sorely need).

The underlying pattern – a consistent oscillation between managing effectively and ineffectively coping, depending on the balance between information quantity and tool quality – remains the same. Yet there is also value in knowing the cycles that shape our experience of handling the information crucial to making decisions, especially decisions as important as who leads the country.

The NY Times transcript of the debate is available here.

Thanks to Datamining, for posting a writeup and screenshot of a prototype of Community Buzz, which features a text cloud. Community Buzz is a Microsoft Research project, and this is a perfect use of a text cloud to visualize concepts and further comprehension in a body of text.

More interesting than the text cloud is the space in the screenshot that looks like a placeholder for advertising driven by the contents of the text cloud. The annotation reads “Contextual ads based on the Buzz cloud keywords”, implying an advertising based revenue mechanism driven by creation and analysis of a text cloud.

Community Buzz Screenshot

The description of Community Buzz posted on the TechFest 2007 page, includes the following, making the connection to an advertising model explicit:

Community Buzz combines text mining, social accounting (Netscan/MSR-Halo), and new visualization techniques to study and present the content of communication threads in online discussion groups. The merging of these research technologies results in a system that gives great value to community participants, enables highly directed advertising, and supplies rich metrics to product managers.

Assuming it’s possible to provide highly directed advertising and rich metrics based on text clouds, I can see the benefits of for advertisers and product managers, and researchers of many kinds. Yet I’m not convinced of the benefits for community participants. Where will the text clouds come from, and how will their content reflect the needs of the community? How will social dynamics shape or affect these text clouds, to make it possible for them to leverage network effects, differential participation, and the scale benefits of connected social systems?

Text clouds – at least at this stage of development – support rapid but shallow comprehension: maybe this is perfect for advertising purposes…

Like a pile of dry bones that used to make up a skeleton, text clouds lack the specific structure and context of their source, and so cannot replace comprehension. Text clouds deconstruct the word elements that make up a body of text the same way spectrum analysis identifies the different wavelengths of light from a distant star. It’s a bit like using statistical analysis to read King Lear, instead of using a variety of tools to learn more about what Lear might have to say.

A better use of text clouds, or any other type of deconstructive method (a variant of semiotics) is as a tool for enhancing comprehension. Text clouds seem to bypass distinctions between high context and low context that present barriers to understanding deep context, by focusing on the raw content of the source, on the level of it’s constituent elements.

The goal of examining the fundamental or essential makeup of something we’re exploring – as a way of better understanding that thing overall – is an epistemological method pursued by Plato and a host of other Western philosophers and natural scientists. We should be cautious with new tools, however, as the urge to illuminate and dissect the fundamental makeup of that which is complex and nuanced can go too far, crossing from the insightful to the sterile domain of soulless reductivism. Witness the responses of corrupt officials to Javier Bardem’s character Agustín, in John Malkovich’s directorial debut The Dancer Upstairs.
Agustín is a police hero who saves his country from a criminal and oppressive government, social disintegration, and guerilla takeover. He then surrenders all prospects of winning the presidency and leading his struggling nation to prosperity for the unrequited love of a woman who aided the same guerilla leader he helped capture. Agustín strikes a secret bargain to secure her freedom with the corrupt powers that be, on condition that he withdraw from public life. His choice is incomprehensible to the soulless officials in power. To these people, who buy, sell, and execute hundreds without a thought, Agustín’s lover “…is just a girl – 70% water.”

For reference, the overview of Community Buzz:

• Community Buzz combines analysis of the content of online discussions and social structure of the communities to identify hot topics and visualize how they evolve over time.
• Through search and Buzz cloud users can access relevant discussion threads and adverts linked to the search results and Buzz keywords.
• Visualization of keyword trends enables the users to monitor the popularity of selected topics. Mesasages can be filtered based on the ‘social status’ of the author in the community.

And the complete description of the demo mentioned by Datamining:

Community Buzz is a new window into online communities! Interesting and useful conversations, authors, and groups are discovered easily using this tool, jointly developed by Microsoft Research Redmond’s Community Technologies group and Microsoft Research Cambridge’s Integrated Systems team, with sponsorship from Live Labs. Community Buzz combines text mining, social accounting (Netscan/MSR-Halo), and new visualization techniques to study and present the content of communication threads in online discussion groups. The merging of these research technologies results in a system that gives great value to community participants, enables highly directed advertising, and supplies rich metrics to product managers.

Thanks to all who made the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas this year both worthwhile and memorable, by organizing, presenting, volunteering, or attending. Thanks especially to everyone who participated in our panel Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs, and brought with them a willingness to share, laugh, and think differently about a normally taboo subejct.

We limited our presentations to 10 minutes to encourage audience involvement, and reduce the talking-head with a microphone quotient typical of panel formats. This worked well, but meant setting aside quite a bit of material that’s worth bringing out: the abbreviated version of my talk on how states of mind affect failure is available directly from the conference site.

The full version of my slides on state of mind, self-definition, and parallels between individual and societal responses to failure is available from Slideshare here, and appears below.

The full version includes:

• additional discussion of societies in crisis
• President Bush
• a major figure in Buddhist philosophy
• a personal tale of business venture gone wrong
• Captain Kirk
• systems theory
• leverage points potentially useful for averting failure

Stay tuned for a possible written treatment, in Boxes and Arrows soon.

Should I see irony, serendipity, or both in the fact that while I was sharing my tale of not succeeding as an entrepreneur, the room down the hall was hosting Start-up case studies: how five of us started our own businesses – featuring Victor Lombardi, Lane Becker, Frank Ramirez, Lou Rosenfeld, Gene Smith, and Christina Wodtke? If you’re thinking of starting something as you read this, I’ll bet my advice on what *not* to do is better

There were many, many good sessions this year; a few that I considered highlights include:

Olly Wright’s Information architecture and ethical design
Emmanuele Quintarelli’s FaceTag: integrating bottom-up and top-down classification in a social tagging system
James Robertson’s Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier

During 2006, tag clouds moved beyond their well-known role as navigation mechanisms and indicators of activity within social media experiences, emerging as a standard visualization technique for texts and textual data in general.

This use of tag clouds does not commonly involve tags, social networks, emergent architectures, folksonomies, or metadata.
“Text cloud” might be a more accurate label for these visualizations than tag cloud. In addition to recognizing fundamental differences – text clouds differ from tag clouds in composition (no tags at all) and purpose (predominantly comprehension, rather than access or navigation) – distinguishing the two types of clouds will make it much easier to assess their abilities to support user experience needs and business goals.

The emergence of this new form of text cloud looks like a good example of speciation in action (though it’s too early to tell whether the end result will be cladogenesis or anagenesis).

Major and minor publications feature(d) text clouds as visualizations in 2006, both permanently and temporarily:

• The New York Times cloud of most searched items
• The Economist topics cloud
• The Vancouver Sun feature on real estate prices by neighborhood
• discussion on Read/Write Web
• even a book in progress

The Economist’s Text cloud

In 2006, several free and public tools for generating text clouds locally on the desktop or via a service available through the Web were released.  The increase in the number and variety of specific text cloud tools reflects embrace and enthusiasm for text clouds in communities of interest for information visualization, language processing, and semantics.

Some of the better known examples of text cloud tools include:

• Chirag Mehta’s tool Tagline
• Daniel Steinbock’s tool Tagcrowd
• Content Statistics by Ryan Grimm and Andrew Bruno of O’Reilly Research
• RhNav/Text Mining
• TextTagCloud
• IBM’s data visualization service – Many Eyes which I saw demo’d at IDEA 2006

The Many Eyes Cloud

The text clouds created with these tools range across a wide spectrum of speeches and writing:

• U.S. presidential speeches as tag clouds
• The Seattle Post Intelligencer’s analysis of speeches by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and others, or their retrospective analysis of 30 years of Microsoft communications
• a Ph.D Thesis

Text clouds are meant to facilitate rapid understanding and comprehension of a body of words, links, phrases, etc. Any block of information composed of text is open to analysis as a text cloud, as these screen captures of text clouds for restaurant menus, ingredients, wikipedia, magazine covers, and even poems demonstrate.
Tim O’Reilly uses text clouds for a number of purposes:

We used them a bunch to analyze the topics, companies and people at the last FOO Camp, and they were the most useful of the visualizations we did. They helped us see where we were under- and over-represented in terms of companies and particular technologies we were wanting to explore. …So they have many uses beyond just showing what we normally think of as tags.

Non-linear Access

The emergence of text clouds shows continuing exploration and refinement of cloud style displays as a new form of user interface, adapted to specific contexts. Continued refinement of text clouds in this direction may indicate an expanding role for commonly available and sophisticated text visualization tools to support specialized goals for information display and understanding.

Remember that Google is busy right now scanning thousands of books per day from several of the world’s major academic libraries, as part of it’s self-appointed labor of organizing the world’s information. That’s a lot of new text. How will people work with effectively with such an overwhelming amount of text, of so many different kinds, from so many different sources?

Consider the following, from Ulysses’ Without Guilt by Stacy Schiff (in the New York Times):
Recently Cathleen Black, president of Hearst Magazines, urged a group of publishing executives to think of their audience as consumers rather than readers. She’s onto something: arguably the very definition of reading has changed. So Google asserts in defending its right to scan copyrighted materials. The process of digitizing books transforms them, the company contends, into something else; our engagement with a text is different when we call it up online. We are no longer reading. We’re searching – a function that conveniently did not exist when the concept of copyright was established.

On a larger scale, the growing use of text clouds hints at a (potential) deeper cultural shift in the way we go about reading and comprehension: a shift from linear modes based on reading words and sentences, to nonlinear modes based on viewing summaries of content in aggregate as a way of discovering concepts and patterns. (Finally, a legitimate use for Twitter…) Experimenting with text clouds for non-linear reading and comprehension (now that’s a sexy term…) is a natural evolution of the role cloud style displays play as an alternative / compliment / supplement to the list based navigation now dominant in user experiences.

A Text Cloud of Twitter Posts (A TwitterCloud?)

ago applied assuming bad briela classes clean coke decompressing dhowell dinner drinkin eisenbear full ga god guy half happy house ibterri impressing issues jedi joanna knows less lhalff lost minute moment nybble ohhhhh rfk rum ryanjames scholarship seconds sites skiing status summer twitterrific txt tyguy umpteenth vlu77 watched water web created at TagCrowd.com

I’m not predicting the end of reading as we know it, nor the end of navigation as we know it: both will be with us for a long, long time. But I do believe that text clouds might constitute an emerging method for augmenting comprehension and display of text, with broad potential uses.

Enterprising Clouds

What about someone lacking time to fully read a Shakespeare play, or a faddish business book, but who needs to understand something about that book’s meaning and substance? A text cloud creation tool could extract the most commonly mentioned terms, and otherwise profile the words that make up the text. It would be risky to rely on a shallow text cloud (and Tim O’Reilly mentions this specifically) for deep comprehension, but it would be enough to understand the concepts that appear, and allow polite conversation at a networking event, or lunch with that certain manager who recommended the book.

If I were entrepreneurial, I’d source a set of free electronic versions of classic texts, process them with one of the free text cloud tools, apply some XSLT and other transformations to generate consistent readable formatting, and sell the results as a line of ebooks called “Cloud Notes”. Of course, someone’s beaten me to it already…

What’s in store for the future?

In this fashion, text clouds may become a generally applied tool for managing growing information overload by using automated synthesis and summarization. In the information saturated future (or the information saturated present), text clouds are the common executive summary on steroids and acid simultaneously; assembled with muscular syntactical and semantic processing, and fed to reading-fatigued post-literates as swirling blobs of giant words in wild colors, it consists of signifiers for reified concepts that tweak the eye-brain-language conduit directly.

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.