SystemViz

SystemViz is a research project by Peter Stoyko about how pictures can help people think about systems, especially when the people come from different disciplines. Its best-known piece is the Visual Vocabulary: a codex of two hundred elements and dynamics that turn up again and again when anyone describes a system, whether it’s an ecosystem, a supply chain, an economy or an organisation. Each one has a name, a one-line definition and an icon. In 2023 it received an award from the International Institute for Information Design.

The problem it starts from is familiar to anyone who has sat in a room with an engineer, an ecologist and a strategist. They’re often describing the same mechanism with different words, or the same word for different mechanisms. Stoyko read across the systems literature of the natural sciences, the social sciences, design and management, grouped what kept recurring, and gave each pattern a single label “in good currency”, in Donald Schön’s phrase. He’s explicit that the inventory isn’t exhaustive. The point is a common reference, not a final theory.

How the vocabulary is built

Every element belongs to one of six categories, and each category has its own outer shape, so you can tell what kind of thing an icon is before you know what it means.

• Drivers, the active causes of something happening. Superellipse.
• Signals, communication that can trigger an action, whether or not it’s received or understood. Epitrochoid.
• States, conditions of a system or of something inside it. Mokkougata.
• Boundaries, which separate parts of a system, fixed or moving, real or imaginary, porous or not. Hexagon.
• Relations, the patterns of interaction between parts. Astroid.
• Domains, the context the system sits in. Ovate.

The inside of each icon isn’t a literal picture of the concept, which would be impossible for most of them. It’s built from a small set of shared tropes: arrows for forces and flows, brackets for sets, a heavier line for drivers than for boundaries, a different line style for signals and for time delays. You have to learn them, and the poster says so plainly. Once learned, they read faster than words.

Six of the two hundred, with Stoyko’s own definitions: two drivers (kludge, cascade), a signal (echo), a boundary (leakage), a relation (holon) and a domain (friction).

What it’s for

The vocabulary is meant to be used by a group, out loud. Stoyko suggests a few ways in. The elements are printed as cards or chips, with the six categories as suits, and a team flips through the deck while discussing a system, pulling out the ones that apply and laying them out with notes. Or the icons go on top of an existing map as an annotation layer, marking where the interesting behaviour is. Or the codex is simply a checklist: have we talked about boundaries at all? About what this system leaks, or what traces it leaves behind?

That last use is the one I find most valuable. A long, named list makes you notice things you’d otherwise look straight past. Having the word echo makes data exhaust much easier to notice.

The rest of the project

Three other pieces sit around the vocabulary, all downloadable from the site.

ESCALADE is a framework for judging a system map. It names eight dimensions a map can be turned up or down on: expanse, scale, cadences, abstraction, layer, aggregation, detail and enlivenment. Turn them all to full realism and the map becomes the territory, which is useless. Turn them all down and it stops being recognisably about anything. The job is to set each one for a particular viewer doing a particular task.

The Anatomy of System Notations goes through seventy existing ways of diagramming systems and catalogues sixty-five graphical devices they use. The larger aim is to compare what notations can draw with what the systems literature says matters, and find the blind spots.

The Pattern Atlas of System Vulnerabilities uses a tangle of threads as its metaphor and names about thirty ways elaborate human-made systems go wrong, at four levels of scale: brittle, starved, crufty, stuck, quirky, propped up, untethered and so on. It’s the most opinionated of the four, and the most fun to read.

Where it stops

A vocabulary names things. It doesn’t tell you how strong a feedback loop is, which way a system will tip, or whether your map is right. Two people can lay down the same cards and mean different things by them, and nothing in the codex will catch that; a good facilitator will. The taxonomy also involves a lot of what Stoyko calls lumping and splitting, and specialists will sometimes find their own field’s distinctions flattened.

It’s also mostly static for now. Motion and interaction are the project’s third strand, and the part that’s furthest from finished.

None of that is a criticism of what it sets out to do. It’s a very carefully made common language for people who’d otherwise talk past each other, and it’s free.

Using it

The icons, their labels and the basic descriptions are released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence: free to use and modify, as long as you credit “Peter Stoyko, SystemViz: Visual Vocabulary (www.systemviz.com)”. The source package contains the icons as vector files and the definitions as plain text. The rest of the posters’ text and graphics stays under the author’s copyright, and the posters can be shared unmodified. The icons and definitions on this page are used under that licence.