CLOSING THE LOOP

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.