New Perspectives in System Design

Insolvent by Christoph Becker is a comprehensive, transdisciplinary critique of current perspectives on sustainability and justice in system design. The author tackles the complexities of technology and societal interactions. Many concepts discussed here are far-reaching into computing, society, culture, and politics. Those can not be decomposed into atomic problems without losing or changing the scope of their meaning. The author illustrates the impacts of the increasingly opaque information technologies and the rapidly rising amount of computation with significant sustainability questions and unknown societal implications. This is a very timely framework given the generative AI revolution currently underway. The author proposes changes in direction in system dynamics and critical system thinking conceptual frameworks that often show nonlinear counterintuitive effects from minor leverage point influences.
The book's first part discusses the societal impacts of computing systems, including sustainability, societal debts, and an exciting discussion on "problemism," a term that the author uses to describe our preoccupation with problem-solving. In the second part, the author presents new system design approaches focusing on sustainability and justice in the context of critical systems thinking. The author discusses value-neutral, rational decision-making concepts and critical requirements engineering from the systemic point of view. Finally, the author proposes a reorientation of professional experience and presents professional ethics codes in computing along with their societal impacts.
The book is broadly addressed to readers within the computing and neighboring fields. It is a rich discussion with many alternative perspectives and intellectual practices currently shaping computing.

#sustainablecomputing #sustainability #sustainablesystemdesign #ethicalcomputing #systemdesign #LLMs #generativeAI #AI #systemdynamics