diagram

What Works

Many business courses introduce students to the stakeholder theory of management (Freeman, 2007) which offers a theoretical model that effectively opposes shareholder models in which decisions end up being viewed solely from the perspective of what might serve the firm’s financial goals. In many firms, financial goals are tied to shareholders or venture capitalists or other sorts of more creative investing scenarios.

I find that it is useful to show students a finance-centri version of the same diagram to make the point that the goals of finance (or financiers) are not exactly the same as the goals of the overall firm.

Once students see that finance and the firm are distinct, they are more open to the suggestion (which is made in R. Edward Freeman’s article) that any of the primary stakeholders could be viewed as the central stakeholder. In fact, as a theoretical exercise, every primary stakeholder *should* cycle into position at the center of the stakeholder donut to help understand what each stakeholders priorities are and what all the diverse sources of value may be.

When employees are at the center of the diagram, job tenure and ability to move into fresh and better-paid positions becomes part of the conversation. This is not some revolutionary idea in management. It’s the type of knowledge that becomes available in an organized way by systematically using the diagram to consider each successive primary stakeholder as the most central stakeholder.

When customers are at the center of the model, the user experience, product durability, cost, and delivery become the most salient characteristics alongside marketing and, for a growing number of customers, social and environmental responsibility.

What needs work

This set of static diagrams would work better as an animation.

Still, using them one after the next in a slide deck allows time to have a class discussion about what is at stake when the central stakeholder changes.

Accompanying text

The necessary accompanying text was not part of the image file, but here’s what it says under each panel:

Panel 1: “Instead of being flushed down with as much as a gallon of water, urine simply drains through openings in a specially designed plastic cartridge at the bottom of the bowl.”

Panel 2: “The entry chamber contains a blue liquid—a lighter-than-urine long-chain fatty alcohol. Gravity pulls urine through the liquid, but odors and sewer gases are trapped below.”

Panel 3: “As the urine descends through the cartridge chamber, its flow collides with a barrier, which prevents turbulence from displacing the floating sealant.”

Panel 4: “Urine passes beneath the barrier and into the exit chamber. When the urine level reaches the height of the drain, it spills over and empties into the outbound sewer pipe.”

What works

I appreciate that Peter Grundy, the graphic designer, shows us the macro-scale first and then leaves the detailed working of the smaller catchment valve to the subsequent three panels. When describing something new, it’s good to start at a level that people recognize – presumably, men recognize the basic shape of a urinal more than the recognize the shape of the mechanism that makes it waterless. I probably would have made that first panel slightly bigger than the rest so that we know it isn’t four of the same things at different points in time, but one different thing and three of the same things.

I enjoy the way that the urine is displayed in balls so that it can appear bouncy. The dots are more than simply an enjoyable feature, they also help communicate about a problem in urinal design: backsplash. Urine is a bit bouncier than one might like – the text below the panel explains that dark blue liquid traps odors from seeping up but it is the L-shaped barrier that does most of the backsplash prevention work. I’m guessing it’s actually a combination of the L-shaped barrier and the blue liquid that keeps the urine from splashing. Not enough space for explanatory text to get into those details, but I appreciate the way the diagram brought attention to the backsplash problem and not just the waterlessness.

Another thing: I applaud Grundy for depicting a penis (a stylized penis, but only as stylized as the rest of the diagram) instead of a visual euphemism of the circle-and-arrow ‘male’ sign.

What needs work

The dark blue area is so dark that I initially had to sit and think about whether I was supposed to be reading it as a presence or a void. Perhaps a less dark color would have read more clearly as a presence, something we are meant to notice, than as a void. Yes, I can hear critics pointing out that since the color above the dark blue is white, one would have to assume the dark blue is presence. I speak for my eyeballs and cognitive structures when I say that I had to think about it.

That’s not all where the color critique comes from. Since water is often depicted as blue in diagrams and this diagram was supposed to be about the waterfree urinal, I probably would have chosen a color other than blue, even if the actual liquid in the device is blue. The big point is to remind us that there is no water here – we might lose sight of that amidst all the conventionally blue zones in this diagram.

I also do not quite understand the cylindricalness of this thing because the diagram makes no effort whatsoever to give depth. It’s just a section and a section of a rectangle will look the same as the section of a cylinder. Well. Except that isn’t strictly true. As far back as drafting goes, we know that there were conventions for making sure that cylinders and rectangular solids could be differentiated in section. Those rules might have been handy if extrapolated to fit this case.

The main problem I always run into with diagrams is the balance between image and text. Diagrams, in my experience, end up being more text heavy than other sorts of information graphics. This particular graphic would not work at all without the text, but that may be an unavoidable reality when it comes to diagrams. As I said above, at least the text is subordinate to the images and follows their table layout instead of sort of hanging around the fringes using arrows to connect text to image.

References

Davis, Joshua. (22 June 2010) Pissing Match: Is the World Ready for the Waterless Urinal?. Wired Magazine.

Grundy, Peter. (22 June 2010) “How it doesn’t flush” Wired Magazine. [Diagram]

Falcon Waterfree Technologies.

Trick or Treat

This post has nothing to do with sociology. It offers proof that I should probably learn to leave things alone sometimes.

Recipes

I have long had this hunch that recipes would be better depicted not as lists of ingredients stacked upon lists of instructions but as something more well-integrated. I have many times forgotten an ingredient or messed up an instruction, and I like to think that better graphic design might be able to get me out of this problem. Professional cooks already tend to know which ingredients require what kind of process within certain recipes. For instance, when making cookies, the first step almost always involves creaming the sugars and fats together. But if you didn’t know this and you were used to making cakes (in which the wet and dry ingredients are kept separate from one another), you might absentmindedly tally up all the dry ingredients with your fats when making cookies. That would be a mistake.

So I found the recipe diagram above which is based on the Nassi-Shneiderman structured flowchart and thought it was worthy of consideration.

But…

I wasn’t thrilled with it. In particular, I couldn’t figure out why there were so many separate ‘mix’ steps when some of those ingredients could clearly be mixed in all at the same time. I also wasn’t all that keen with the way the heating instructions were handled. I was also perplexed at the way in which the graham cracker crust was just thrown out there as an ingredient – most people make this from scratch (but I don’t have the ratios for that on hand so I didn’t try to rough them in lest someone actually use this as real recipe).

Here is my modification of the diagram, in grayscale even though I know it would look snazzy in color.

I still have difficulties with this diagram – where are the instructions? “Mix” is too broad a term. The other problem is that I still need to incorporate mention of tools into the diagram. This is related to the lack of instructions generally – if it said ‘hand mixer’ and ‘medium speed mix’ that would be clear enough for me. There has to be a good way to list ‘spring form pan’ in the graham cracker crust box, too. I could have just tools into the text, but that seemed to be cheating on the graphic sensibilities of the diagram. If there is a reason to be listing tools, one should have a place to put them outside the mention of instructions. That’s my biggest problem with recipes – all of the tools, times, temperatures, techniques, and ingredients are mashed together.

What needs work

I am not convinced that further modifications to the Nassi-Shneiderman flowchart are going to solve my problems. There has to be a better way to depict recipes that can provide the overview at a glance – including tools – but that doesn’t sacrifice all of the necessary details.

References

John. (2005) Key’s Corner Blog

Shneiderman, Ben. (2003, May) A Short History of Structured Flowcharts (Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams) Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland.