See It! Days 1-5

This post is part of a series showing my working through the 2025 Advent of System Seeing exercises set by Ruth Malan. For background see the introduction.

The initial exercises introduce some core concepts and a couple of approaches to modelling, and encourage us to think about our work and the system we're looking at.

Day 1

Task: (1) Draw a Bubble Diagram of a bicycle (2) Sketch a bicycle from memory (3) Pick a key capability [and use] sketches and words to explore and convey how it works (4) Reflect on what you learned.

I'm comfortable doing what I'd call "factoring" which tries to find different angles or features or affordances of a thing that could be useful seams to follow when testing. I've used plenty of tools, such as the Six Thinking Hats or SFDIPOT to help with that, and represented the outcomes with a mindmap often.

Although my in-the-moment reflection says that I didn't find the bubble diagram helpful, I can see now that it's because I didn't sacrifice any of my 15-20 minutes to reading the (long) reference. Having looked a little closer, I see that it's a tool used in architecture and the spatial aspects (proximity and size) attempt to model features of the physical design, making it more like a map than a traditional mindmap, where the diagram's topography is typically not part of the model it holds.

It makes me think of the building blocks of models and the hybrid models I've made (e.g. Going Underground, The Testing Kraftwerk, or Granularity Familiarity) and I think it'll be a useful tool to have in my back pocket in future.

Day 2

Task: Draw a diagram to explore the world around bicycles. Zoom out, so that "bicycle" is just one bubble in the centre of the diagram.

Where are the edges of the context? is a question I have asked myself many times. It's fascinating to see how other participants broke the space around the bike down, seeing concepts that I didn't and leaving out things that I included. Sebastian Hans suggested something important: "some contexts have more depth than others, maybe because I have more experience riding a bike than building one."

That's the thing: our biases are hugely influential in this kind of exercise and it takes conscious effort to leave them at the door. Having multiple people on a task can help either synchronously or by sharing the model with others for comment. Be careful though: I have seen conversations break down because two people have formed mental models that don't fit together. Externalising the models can help massively but I find many people reluctant to do it.

Day 3

Task: Use a Futures Wheel to explore a change that is impacting cycling or the bicycle industry, in terms of direct and indirect effects.

Another new diagram format for me, the Futures Wheel. Again I didn't spend any of my time reading about it in advance but this time the exercise contained enough clues to get me going. There's a flavour of of Weinberg's diagram of effects or causal loop diagrams but I like how this visualises things like ripples in a pond, moving outwards from a centre.

One of the challenges in designing anything that will exist in the world is anticipating the impacts, particularly given that the world is a complex system and the impacts are indirect and subject to feedback mechanisms. I like this diagram as a potential tool for exposing some of that visually.

Reviewing the other participants' work I was struck by how easy it is to fall into the trap of not describing the impact. I've done it myself here: "more accidents" (an impact) and "policing costs" (not an impact, as stated, but an area that will be impacted). I see this all the time when we do exercises such as risk storming at work. Describing the impact means being explicit about the mechanism, it's another deeper layer of analysis.

Day 4

Task: Draw a Rich Picture, exploring all that happens "behind the scenes" when you fill a kettle or pot with water.

Patrick Prill said everything I'd want to say about this one but I'd add links to Fail Here or Fail There, Read it and Weep, Fail Over.

Day 5

Task: Gather some of the thoughts that have been percolating around systems as the introductory page to a zine on 5x3 index cards.

In contrast to the other exercises so far, I took a few minutes to think about how I wanted to lay out a 5"x3" card. I quickly decided that the key thing I want to get across about systems is that it's easy to forget that you're looking at one.

I drew the hard-to-read central panel to try to make that point and then tried to list things that are relevant to getting a model of a system on either side. I didn't intend to categorise them as "to consider" and "to look for" before I started. I am still not sure they are good labels, but I kind of feel that the list on the left are things that could perhaps be considered in the abstract and on the right things that require looking at the system. Very roughly.

Next: Days 6-9
Image: Inspired by Explore It! by Elisabeth Hendrickson. Pragmatic Press

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