Donut Economics: Kate Raworth
Diagrams are forms of drawing that help us to see how things fit together and any system that embraces collaboration, recognises interdependencies, and helps us to understand how everything is interconnected can benefit from being visualised in diagrammatic form.
I can still remember the first diagrams I used in relation to systems thinking. I was undertaking a training course for Further Education managers back in around the mid 1990s. As part of the course I was given a challenge to think about how as managers we could think about the future needs of our sector and implement changes within the institutions that we worked in. I had to come up with a way to convince other managers that my ideas would work, so as a visual thinker, I decided to use diagrammatic drawing as my main rhetorical device. I had seen some systems diagrams based on grids, whereby information came in from one side and was enmeshed into a complex of factors that became entangled, but then reconciled and actions then emerged from the other side. In particular the contextual studies area of my college, (Leeds College of Art was not a university at the time) had for sometime been advocating the ideas expressed in E. F. Schumacher's book 'Small is Beautiful' and students had been introduced via Schumacher's ideas to systems thinking. I was also becoming more interested in the idea of 'flow' and staff on the Foundation course at Leeds where I taught had come up with various 'flow' diagrams, illustrating how real world experience and visual language could become fused together to create new ideas.
Design for a better art college 1990s
I presented my idea of the educational process as a series of flowing wave like movements to the then new principal. It was heavily criticised as being unworkable and naive and I realised I was seen as a typical arty type by him. I was soon gone from the management team, the then principal criticising me for my constant need to understand why we might be doing things, rather than me just telling people what needed to be done, which is what he wanted managers for. Even so, my early experience of systems thinking did stick and I have remained convinced that diagrams can be used as levers for change.
Systems thinking has moved on considerably since then. The diagrams below offering a few tools that might help someone setting out to think about how to choose an approach.
Systems thinking
A diagram can be used as a collaborative tool for regenerative and transformative change. For instance when looking for an ecosocial equilibrium that a society might try to establish, diagrams were used to help people think about how to collaborate. By seeing yourself as part of an overall plan, it gets easier to both have belief in what you are doing and to feel supported in your beliefs by others who have agreed that the diagram works for them too.
My worry with diagrams is how much annotation they need in order to be understandable. The ecosocial diagram above that uses the triple infinity symbol, needs a vast amount of text to anchor it and give any meaning to it. Even when I read the text several times, I still am not sure what it means. Balance and flow are obviously good things, but the text that is used to show how these are achieved feels too like a hopeful wish-list.
Diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank should operate
I drew a diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank operated for the Proto-Publics research project. At the time I was part of the management group of the Timebank and I firmly believed that this could be a way of developing a non cash economy. Looking back on those days, we were perhaps naive but the diagram still feels as if it has some sort of dynamic agency and that it represents possibilities of how people could support each other by offering their particular skills. However it is not annotated and therefore it is very hard for someone from outside the organisation to get an idea of what is going on.
Mark Lombardi
Diagrams have also been used by artists to reveal hidden structures and to give people the information needed to effect change. For instance Mark Lombardi's drawings of relationships that illustrated the connections that people in power had and the resultant networks that enabled them to exercise their power. His drawings often reminded me of organic life forms. The patternings of connections between people, were also not unlike the interconnections we make using our own neural pathways. Hans Haacke's, 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971', was a diagrammatic illustration of ownership. In this instance the New York properties of a single slumlord, were investigated through charts, maps and photographs. Both artists allowing the diagrammatic form to reveal the hidden interconnections that shape people's lives, rather than dealing directly with the emotional messiness of lives themselves. In this case information set out in a clear, easy to grasp, visual way, became the lever for change.
Hans Haacke: 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings'
All change is an emotional ride, one that I'm beginning to understand as something to either experience as exciting and exhilarating or something to fear and hide away from. Hopefully I can embrace the former and move beyond my fears and worries about what might happen. There are always other people out there who also think in similar ways, other artists that have taken similar paths. In 2023 the Marlborough Gallery in new York put on an exhibition entitled, 'Schema: World as Diagram'. It was an exhibition designed to highlight how artists had often been drawn to the diagrammatic in order to express their ideas.
Loren Munk: The Ontology of Art: 2016
Thomas Hirschhorn: Schema art and public space: 2016-22
Some diagrams seemed overly simplistic and others almost as confusing as the mess that they were trying to understand, but running throughout the exhibition was a sense that diagrams allow us to render visible what would otherwise remain unseen.
I can see an interesting issue in relation to my recent thinking. When I was looking at how to visualise issues related to getting older, I came up with a diagram that allowed me to communicate ideas about the various stages of ageing. I wanted to at the same time find an overall image that gave the diagram shape and a more mythic context.
Diagram of the ageing process
As you can see from the image below, at one point the diagram was very scarab beetle shaped, but I wanted a less obvious image and perhaps looking back the scarab design would have been better, as it communicated the idea more clearly.
Perception, reality and the cosmos
The observable universe: A logarithmic illustration: Pablo Carlos Budassi
Pablo Carlos Budassi is a musician as well as an illustrator, he is probably rarely thought of as a fine artist, more an infographic designer, but his work has made me think a lot about how different scales can be found to mesh together and although it could be argued that he often deals with clichéd imagery, the beauty of his constructions has convinced me that he is an authentic artist, very worth looking at, especially if you want to get a feeling for how everything might possibly fit together. I still do like my own idea though, perhaps simply because it includes my coffee cup, masquerading as a devil, as well as that spiral, that keeps reoccurring over and over again.
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