Week 0
A new chapter in my life, learnings from systems thinking, what is numerology and a thought about using mathematical notation to communicate ideas.
Tomorrow, I begin my new job as a Design Researcher at TinkerLabs.
This blog was a promise that I made to myself over a couple of years ago. As I interacted with more designers in the industry, I realised how easy it is to lose touch with the learner you once were. Soon, it’s about aligning yourself to frameworks and templates in a mad chase for efficiency.
This blog is my revolt against that path. Every week, I wish to critically mull over my week and record the learnings, ideas and thoughts that I had during the week. This is my promise to remain a lifelong learner. Here’s what I came across during the last week:
[Article] Tools for System Thinking
While coming up with an exercise to teach free association and systems thinking, I stumbled upon a Medium article by Leyla Acaroglu, titled Tools for Systems Thinkers: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking
In the article, Leyla expands upon certain tools that one can use to visualise and imagine a system by using the “system mindset”. An interesting visual from the article is attached below and depicts the tools of a system thinker.
Designers are often taught to map connections and relationships while synthesizing information. However, what is often left unaddressed is how to depict different relationships.
Not all relationships impact in the same way. In order to create an intricate system while trying to understand a mass of information, it would also be helpful to think about the kinds of relationships and depict them differently.
This is what one means by visual thinking.
[Thoughts] Using The Language of Math to Communicate Ideas
I recently enrolled myself in a free online course titled, Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, by Dr. Keith Devlin. The course is all about developing the “mathematical way” of thinking, which goes in line with my thoughts about how we must strive to have an arsenal of different ways to think.
Although I’m still very early in the course, I was thinking about how we could use specific mathematical tools to communicate information. Think about it: math is the “science of abstract patterns” and abstract patterns are often what we deal with in design as well. Let me illustrate this with an example.
Say you’re looking at efficiency in completing a task. You could break down efficiency with the following equation:
You could write the same piece of information as a function, signifying that a change in the variables would spit out a new number.
And now, you could probably use it to explain the relationship that time and effort have on efficiency. Change either one of them, and you’ll get a new efficiency score. What a succinct way to explain relationships! All by using mathematical notation.
I can’t wait to extract more concrete ideas from the course and the field of mathematics.
[Reading] Numerology Graph
I’ve been reading Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos. Although the book has many fascinating concepts about the made-up world of numbers, here is a passage that I found particularly interesting this week.
The passage expands upon the field of numerology: a field that explores the relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events. In the above-attached passage, Alex is in conversation with Jerome - a professional numerologist.
The interesting bit is how human beings scramble around to try and find logic behind everything. Whether or not this logic is true, I cannot say. There is an actual term for this, apophenia: the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things.
I believe all human beings have this ‘tendency’ and this is precisely why subjects such as mathematics or even design (to an extent) exist. I wonder when it turns into apophenia as the line between something being related or unrelated is just a matter of perspective.