As you can see, India’s like a big fat gulab jamun. It’s fried, it’s sugary, its loaded with calories, and the after effects of eating one are more complex than you might imagine. Infographics and systems diagramming allow us to take a fresh look at these statistics and cultural values so that we may draw new connections we didn’t think existed before.
“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all other things we know.” – AI researcher Marvin Minsky
A couple of weeks ago, we were given the task to map out a complex system of our own choice. A small side effect of Donella Meadow’s ”Thinking in Systems” is that you start to think of everything around you as a system. Excited by this thought I set out to map the system of love between two people. When I was finished, I looked at the result thinking that it looked too simple and too clean. And a similar feeling came over me when I saw the systems that my classmates had made. Certainly, these system diagrams where only models but I still could not help but feeling that they were deceiving everyone that looked at them.
In an attempt to explain Beirut city trends from a system thinking perspective, I bow to the nighthawks of the city and to Gregory Buchakjian (my inspiration for the title).