If you think that technological systems are complex, imagine what that implies for the combination of technological and social systems. The socio-technical systems arena has been a rich vein that’s been mined in the organizational design and development world for decades. In general, though, that literature has been ignorant of the world of systems design [...]
There seem to be a whole series of great entries showing up in my aggregator around the theme of how technology interacts with the world at large (that’s the point of using RSS aggregators isn’t it?).
The more time I spend trying to mesh technology with organizations, the more cautious I become. I still believe that [...]
Like Jerry Michalski I’ve long been a fan of Ackoff’s. Here are two posts of Jerry’s from October that provide access to some of Ackoff’s insight and wisdom about how to think about complex design problems. All of these items are worth your time.
Idealized redesign
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m a big fan of Russ Ackoff’s [...]
Scalable Software ().
Jaron Lanier tries to get his arms around the issue of software scalability.
The reason we’re stuck on temporal protocols is probably that information systems do meet our expectations when they are small. They only start to degrade as they…
[The Bottom Line]
There was a time when I thought Lanier was just a flake with [...]
Information on the Assembly Line. Rats…it’s a class night, and I’ve got to catch up on a couple chapters. So I can’t do much more than make a quick blog entry for Jason Nichols’ very intriguing looking masters thesis called Information on the Assembly Line (subtitled A review of Information Design and its Implications for… [...]
A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have. A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my friend Rob Landley, I’ve come up with a classification schema for the levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build competence. The base assumption is that for [...]
How designers work. I haven’t looked at lots of dissertations, but this one is a beaut. It’s Henrik Gedenryd’s How designers work: Making sense of authentic cognitive activities. Here’s the abstract: In recent years, the growing scientific interest in design has led to great advances in our knowledge of authentic design processes. However,… [IDblog]
More from [...]
James Vornov has been posting some interesting reflections on Murphy’s Law over on his weblog, on deciding…better , recently. Here’s where he started.
Murphy’s Law Was Invented Here: It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can [...]
Viridian books.
Former colleague Paul Beard to made reference to “Viridian Design.” I haven’t really groked what that means yet, but I did found a list of Viridian recommended books. There are some very interesting titles on that list; if these books are related to the Viridian movement, I’ll have pay more attention to it.
[Paul Holbrook's [...]
