Systems Seeing Adventure – Day 1: Draw a Bike
My friend Vernon made me aware of this post from Ruth Malan. It’s about a 31 day systems seeing adventure. This is fully up my alley at the moment. So I’ll take you with me on this journey.
Next step: Draw a bubble diagram of a bike.
This task is for me. Two years ago I built a gravel bike with a bamboo frame from scratch. While I had basic know how of bikes and bike maintenance before, my knowledge grew massively, and I know that I still lack a lot of knowledge. So putting together the bubble diagram was limited by available space and time.
Disclaimer: I tried to make the diagram in English, except where I didn’t know the words, I used German.
Next step: Draw the bike
I’m not good at drawing. I absolutely lack practice. As said before, having built a bike recently helped a lot with this exercise.
Next step: What do we notice (more)? Jot down some notes/observations about
drawing to see, to think, …
What I observed is that making the bubble diagram before helped with remembering all the different parts. The bubble diagram is a bit built like a mind map. When you start with the frame in the center, then there are several points on a bike that attach more elements.
Whole-Parting helps here. That is a technique I learned from the Cabreras, about zooming in and out of parts. You take a part, dissect it into parts. Take each part and see it as the new whole and dissect it again. This helps to see more details. Take the front wheel for example. It consists of a hub, spokes, nipples, rims, tube and tires. The spoke needs to have a certain form depending on the hub, crooked or straight. It needs to have a certain length, thickness. It needs a certain material and color. The thread on the top needs to fit to the nipples.
You see, diving deep goes quickly. And while whole-parting, you can also see certain obvious relations. e.g. hub to spoke, spoke to nipple, length to spoke and rim. There are not so obvious relations, like thickness of the spoke to the weight of the driver.
With the bubble diagram done, it was not so hard to draw the bike and think about all the details. One lead to the other.
Last step: Additional read
Ruth then added a paragraph explaining in more general what I wrote in the reflecting part. Writing down and drawing about the system helps to analyze what we know and what we don’t know. It helps to see new parts and relations that we might have not thought about before.
Conclusion: This was day 1 of the adventure. I like it. Probably because I know a bit about bikes. It was an interesting start into this journey. I have sneak peeked to other days already, and there are lots of nice tasks ahead. See you next time with day 2: draw your org.