Advent(ure) in System Seeing — Day 4
Day 4: Going Behind the Scenes
We want to continue, for a while, to focus on concepts and systems that are at least somewhat in everyday encounter (and not private or “business sensitive”) so that folk can generously share their work if they’re willing to contribute to community learning that way.
Rich Pictures (example above) come from Peter Checkland’s work on soft systems, and are useful to explore the interaction of people (roles, groups, etc.) and organizations and systems of various kinds. They are informal “visual stories” depicting the relationships and flows of interactions among entities involved in some situation of interest.
Draw a Rich Picture, exploring all that happens “behind the scenes” when you fill a kettle or pot with water. Unravel the story of that pot of water, going further and further back. Perhaps you get to rain drops. But also teasing out other systems that are involved in getting water to you. Perhaps you get to metering and payments. To prompt more ideas to mind, what if you go to draw a pot of water, and there is no water, what could have failed? The graphical language is informal. Identify who (people, organizations, systems in the landscape of this frame) is involved (with sketches, annotating to add what their purpose and role is as it relates to this situation, what they care about, their concerns, and so forth), how they interact (using arrows and labels). Stick figures and block buildings are fine! The key is to have fun.
Continue adding to your picture, using judgment not to over-clutter, but to draw in people, groups, organizations, systems and their interactions and roles and concerns, as they seem significant to you, to understand the various systems in the background, managing water getting to your pot or kettle.
Once again, reserve some time (in your 15–20 minutes) to step back and reflect on what you learned. What do we learn about what we take for granted? About infrastructure and dependencies? About system properties like resilience? How does this relate to our work?
“[Infrastructure] “Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout.” — Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of Infrastructure
There’s a long chain of dependencies in water supply. Recently I’ve read stories that the capital city of Iran is being abandoned because there isn’t enough water, and that water is being polluted by agricultural fertilizer runoff. Climate change is disrupting rain patterns, over-use is draining aquifers, old mains pipes fail and leak, and some houses may have lead pipes or contaminated water supply.
Our house has an integrated softener and filter that I have to top up with salt regularly, and I’m the chef in our house, so I’m usually the one filling a pot with water. We used to live in a house in the Los Gatos Mountains of California that had its own well, pumps and storage tanks, and after large local earthquakes, the wells often run dry for a while, or may never return to use.
