archive.Joe Lamantia.com

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.