Conceptual Architecture: What
What is Conceptual Architecture? “Conceptual Architecture” is the conceptual view(s) of the architecture of a system. It describes at a broad brushstrokes conceptual level the significant design ideas...
View ArticleConceptual Architecture: Why
Why: Motivation for the Conceptual Architecture View Conceptual Architecture is a key medium for describing the “big picture” and essential design ideas of our system, helping others to more rapidly...
View ArticleConceptual Architecture: How
How: Some Comments on Creating and Evolving the Conceptual Architecture During early system conceptualization, we start to envision the form or shape of the system, its boundaries and interactions, its...
View ArticleVisual Architecting
The Visual Architecting Process (VAP) supports the architect in leading architectural decision making and the exploration of options, the iterative resolving of critical uncertainties and challenges,...
View ArticleIntroducing the Requisite Variety Blog
Playing with a “learning chemistry” metaphor: Essentially the idea for this blog is to create an architect’s learning lab of sorts, where we create new insight compounds by tossing a starter into this...
View ArticleMastery and Architecting
To launch this series of posts, I thought it would be useful to convene a discussion of the role of the architect and mastery. Talking about Conceptual Architecture several years ago, Dana Bredemeyer...
View ArticleLearning to See
As we start to navigate our way into this topic of mastery, I’d like to explore attention and perception further. Louis Agassiz became known well beyond his own field for teaching observation, and many...
View ArticleBy Thinking!
Still on the theme of mastery, and further exploring attention and perception, here is another story I like to tell alongside the Master Butcher and the Agassiz fish tales. It is one of Richard...
View ArticleConnections
James Burke (Connections, 2007), commenting on the Gutenberg printing press, observed “the easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens.” And “faster change” characterizes our experience of...
View ArticleVisual Thinking
Here is another of my favorite Richard Feynman stories (and fitting to honor the memory of Feynman today, for it is 25 years since the day he died): “When I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had...
View ArticleThe Monk and the Mountain
Let’s do a fun problem. Consider the following problem stated by Rudolf Arnheim (I’ll give the full reference later): One morning, exactly at 8 A.M., a monk began to climb a tall mountain. The narrow...
View ArticleAssumptions
The following passage is drawn from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a wonderful book, sort of to design and systems thinking what The Goal is to process and stochastics...
View ArticleAssumptions
The following passage is drawn from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a wonderful book, sort of to design and systems thinking what The Goal is to process and stochastics...
View ArticleAtt-e-en-tion! To System Design
What we are paying attention to shapes what we perceive and pay attention to. And paying attention, requires attention. The system, thought of, observed and measured, reasoned about, designed as, a...
View ArticleContext Mapping, by Example
I will demonstrate a technique for Context Mapping that leverages David Sibbet/The Grove’s work on Context Maps. We will build up the map incrementally, using the comments on this post to gather input...
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