A convincing treatise on systems thinking that suffers from inaccessible prose.
International speaker and workshop facilitator Cababa pitches a better way to design in this debut systems guide.
Systems thinking is a holistic way of viewing how a system operates—how its parts work together (or don’t), how it performs over time, and how it fits into an even bigger system or network of systems. Systems exist all around us—every product, service, and company depends on them—and the way they are designed is key to the way they function. Designers tend to look at systems with only the end result in mind, neglecting to consider the entire process and therefore failing to spot potential pitfalls. “They often fail to anticipate and design for the impact on those who are not the direct users of their products, or for long-term effects on those they design for,” writes the author. “And before that, they fail to clearly understand the problem space and the context in which their products will live.” With this book, Cababa puts forth her vision for human-centered system designs. The author provides strategies for designers to map out their current systems to discover where imbalances exist that could be creating slow-downs, burn-outs, or other unintended effects. She also offers tools for designing future systems where such problems will not occur in the first place. The book is, appropriately, a well-designed, attractively formatted text; Cababa’s belief in the importance of human-centered design does not extend to her prose, unfortunately. The book is written in opaque business-speak right from the introduction: “I started broadening my lens and my methods to integrate tools, such as causal loop diagrams, that are typically associated with systems thinking. This has benefitted my practice in centering analysis on understanding problems by extending who I think of as stakeholders…” However, readers who fight through the jargon will be rewarded with a thoughtful description of systems and insightful ways to improve them, along with numerous helpful color illustrations. The author makes a persuasive argument not only for the necessity of better-designed systems, but for their feasibility as well.
A convincing treatise on systems thinking that suffers from inaccessible prose.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781959029885
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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