[Post and comments (including from me) here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cameron-tonkinwise-80a5987_i-saw-this-diagram-in-my-feed-while-thinking-activity-7310815781389275137-4zdw?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

I included the full main text here as I couldn’t work out where to cut it and it’s not long – responses please at the link and to Cameron]

I saw this diagram in my feed while thinking about Brian Marick’s recent Oddly Influenced podcast – https://lnkd.in/gSAHBmvP – about the way in which Winston Royce unwittingly misdirected his argument by the way he diagrammed what was then taken to be the ‘waterfall’ development process. I hassled Brian on Mastodon by saying that the problem is not diagrams, but diagramming without the expert help of an information designer. When non-designers, or non-expert or overly ‘modernist’ designers, diagram – in ways better than Bruno Latour https://lnkd.in/g3xNbTQB – they tend to fetishize symmetry. This ‘theory of change’ diagram made me wonder how many ‘theories’ have aspects that are a bit gratuitous but included to ensure the symmetry of the resulting diagram. Perhaps not every one of the three points in each of the three segments had to have two opposing dynamics? Perhaps one of the segments should actually only have one or two points in it, or five? To what extent has the diagram designed the theory rather than than diagram being designed to illustrate the theory?It made me wonder if anyone has ever seen a good ethnographic account of researchers developing diagrams of their research without using (expert) designers? I feel like there should have been something in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge or STS world?Do also let me know if you see a well-designed conceptual diagram that looked like it was on the way to symmetry but then is conspicuously not symmetrical given the actual concepts being diagrammed.

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