Welcome to our Advent(ure) in System Seeing!

Our Advent(ure) in System Seeing begins on December 1. There will be 24 days of daily journaling prompts and quotes that inform our systems understanding.

The concept borrows from the Advent of Code, but focuses on understanding systems. Like the Advent of Code (in past years), there are daily challenges. In our case, prompts guide short bursts of daily practice, sketching and writing in a Systems Adventure Journal (with some side-quests). More background here.

Day 1: Draw a Bicycle

This is a warm-up exercise. As warm-up exercises go, what are we warming up for? A daily practice of noticing (what we don't notice, too). Of using a journal to probe deeper. A daily practice of doing just enough, just good enough to learn something (we're aiming to keep this to around 15-20 minutes a day). Where we will use different perceptual and conceptual tools, and follow prompts that are open (so ambiguous) enough that people in very different contexts can do something meaningful.

If you've done the "draw a bicycle" exercise before: skip step 1, and go to step 2, so that you can get to step 3 (it's new) and 4.

If you're new to this, do steps 1 and 2, and 4, and step 3 if you have time.

  1. Draw a Bubble Diagram of a bicycle. Use labelled bubbles (circles) to express the key concepts of a bicycle; use placement and size to convey relationships. [Bubble Diagrams come from building architecture, where they are used to sketch room layout.]
  2. Sketch a bicycle from memory. (Don't look at a bicycle or picture of one, just go ahead and sketch it.)
  3. Pick a key capability or function of a bicycle, like steering, braking, moving, ... Use sketches and words to explore and convey how it works. (e.g., if you picked steering, what parts are involved and how do they work, to enable going in the intended direction.)
  4. Reflect on what you learned. What do you notice (more)? Jot down some notes/observations about drawing to see, to think, ... And jot notes on what we learn about systems, and our observing and making sense of systems we encounter. And perhaps even interact closely with.

At the end of Day 1, we'll add some notes and link to some of the work folk have shared on Mastodon, Bluesky or LinkedIn.

'Drawing [isn’t] just for “artists” [..]. Think of it as a way of observing the world and learning' — Anne Quito