Systems Scribing
Systems Scribing is a visual practice that combines scribing—visually representing ideas while people talk—with systems thinking. This is a new, tangible approach to representing dynamics, occurring in the moment and over time, between a scribe and a social body. This discipline develops a critical skill to facilitate a system’s ability to see and sense itself, as well as crystalize ideas into action.
Learn more in this excerpt Systems Scribing: An Emerging Visual Practice, authored by Kelvy Bird and Jessica Riehl, from the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Systems Thinking, Edited by Derek Cabrera et al. 2022
Key Elements
- Annotations: Text that helps to name the elements of the picture and provide context to the system.
- Parts: Elements within the system. It can be people, ideas, or things. A scribe might represent these with shapes, images, or key words.
- Wholes: A combination of parts that comprise a unique system. Wholes can be groups, organizations, ecosystems, technologies, or knowledge. A scribe would draw lines or frames around parts to indicate a whole.
- Boundaries: Defining boundaries and the differences between parts and wholes, to determine what is in or out of a system. A scribe would reveal this with visual devices such as frames, borders, colors, size of shapes, textures, and with layout choices.
- Relationships: Interactions between parts (and wholes) that hold the system together. Relationships can also be processes. A scribe would employ arrows, lines, annotations and proximity of size and shape to show how one part influences another.
- Patterns: Behaviors of a system that happen over time or space, repeated. A scribe would reveal this with behavior over time graphs, causal loop drawings, images, or annotations.
- Perspectives: The point from which the parts and wholes view the system. A scribe would utilize annotations and place sections of content in relation to other content to illuminate perspectives.
- Systems: Interactions between parts and wholes. Through use of parts, distinctions, relationships, perspectives, frames, and annotations, a scribe makes the system visible.
The Systems Scribing Canvas
The Systems Scribing Canvas can help to guide your thinking before, during, and after drawing.
