This Handy Tool Makes It Easy To Visualize Whatever System You Can Imagine
Sometimes in life, explaining something with cause-and-effect reasoning will suffice. Your kid spilled water on your laptop; now it's stopped working. Often times, things aren't so simple. You let your kid borrow your tablet; they download a lot of bloated apps, lowering performance; now you like using that tablet less; you let your kid borrow it some more; more bloated apps follow. Alas — a feedback loop.
Nicky Case's Loopy is an interactive web tool that makes describing systems with feedback loops a fun and visual affair. Here's a diagram of the tablet scenario generated in Loopy:
Loopy lets you draw the nodes and arrows of your system and give them definitions. Then, you can actually interact with the model you made: add inputs into the system and diagram animates. The "+" or "-" sign on the arrows denotes the effect one node has on the next, and the nodes grow or shrink accordingly. If you start by adding a positive input (hit the "up" arrow on the node) to "Kid downloads apps," you'll watch the "performance" and "joy" nodes shrink while "willingness to lend" grows.
You can share your Loopy models with a link, and editing existing models is as easy as drawing more nodes and arrows: try this more complicated version of our tablet scenario, or this model by Case that shows how depression and anxiety are irksomely linked:
From our testing it looks like you can make your Loopy models pretty sprawling before they start to chug. Whether you're the type who would illustrate the effects of clickbait journalism on trust or the kind of person who just wants to make a really good joke about The Shining, Loopy might be right up your alley.
Case calls Loopy an "explorable," referring to a movement encouraging active learning through interactive design. More examples of "explorables" by Case and others can be found here.
Has all this thinking about systems got you hungry? Perhaps you'll be interested in a super-scientific meat cooking simulator.
