︎ journalofdesignhistory.com

Written with compassion and earnestness, Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World is a book concerned not only with the ways that systems are made understandable but also with the ways we experience how systems behave. “At their core,” Georgina Voss writes, “systems are about the relationships between things, and then the relationships between those relationships” (p. 7). It is this complex entanglement of connections that Voss gives plain-spoken narrative to in Systems Ultra.

The book encourages a different way of knowing about and articulating the things that make up our complex world. Voss admits, these things are “difficult to approach, hard to conceptualise, emerging and submerging through our limited human consciousness” (p. 6). As such, one of the aims of Systems Ultra, which is made explicit from the start, is to make sense of “what is meant by ‘systems’” (p. 7). The challenge however, is that general “systems literacy” is poor and the innately complex nature of systems themselves means, as Voss confesses, that “it is extremely difficult to write about systems given that they cannot adequately be described using words” (p. 7). Voss’ attempt is far from half-hearted, though, and is certainly a meaningful contribution to ongoing research on systems and to broader, related fields.

Read the full review here.