Alignment charts

The belatedly viral intellectual meme of today, alignment charts have been revived and have taken the internet world by storm. There's even a subreddit committed to alignment charts. They originate from Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax, who was inspired by the fantasy fiction of Moorcock and Anderson, according to Wikipedia. It was designed as a tool to build and classify characters' moral behaviors, where uncharacteristic behavior would be penalized.

With the way that the internet meme (and 1977 release of D&D) goes, there are two axes: lawful-neutral-chaotic and good-neutral-evil, for a total of nine alignments. You can even take an old quiz from the year 2000 here to figure out which bucket you fall into. If you'd like to read about each alignment à la MBTI test, here is a reference.

Template from Know Your Meme

The following are descriptors as per the third edition of D&D manual:

Attribute	Pros	Cons
Lawful	Honest, trustworthy, obedient to authority, reliable	closed-minded, traditionalist, judgmental, not flexible
Neutral	Respect for chaos and law	Susceptible to temptation
Chaotic	Free, adaptable	reckless, resenting, irresponsible
Good	Altruistic, respectful of life, concern for dignity of sentient beings	Self-sacrificial
Neutral	Reluctant to harm life	Committed to personal relationships
Evil	Compassion-less and unmerciful to eliminate lives as convenient	Even actively pursues malevolent killing

Source

Source

This Archer chart is gold. [Source]

In the chart below, I've referenced a variety of sources, including Autostraddle, the general internet (first author is always hard to find for memes), and my unbridled opinion to demonstrate the many possible applications of alignment charts.

Making these charts is a bit of haphazard and highly subjective fun that requires that you brace yourself for unsolicited opinions from even people you haven't spoken to in years.

Problem-solving reconfigured

Eugenia Cheng, author of The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, gave a talk titled, How to Think Like a Mathematician at The Royal Institution. She argues that pure math is about how to think, rather than about how to exclusively work with numbers. She addresses how she uses math to think about analogies, interconnectedness, relationships, pivots, and intelligence. Cheng provides her audience with methods to gain flexibility to our thinking, which is a goal that design often seeks to accomplish.
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Two different maps of the London tube.
"You can think about certain aspects of a situation for some purposes and other aspects for other purposes." - Eugenia Cheng

Her explanation of interconnectedness was familiar and compelling. She explains that framing problems in a specific way can lead to more illuminating and productive arguments, or problem-solving. Problems should be evaluated, not linearly or by individual factors, but as a web of relationships. This bigger picture should help stakeholders distill and better evaluate the broader dynamic that is driving a problem.

Cheng's flowchart of The United Incident.

Cheng's flowchart of The 2016 US Election.

This is familiar to me because I am a student currently studying pathophysiology, where interconnected processes form cycles that literally represent the difference between life or death. Specifically, there are both positive and negative feedback loops for every bodily process, ranging from the kidney regulation of blood pressure to the oxytocin delivery to the uterus to stimulate contractions.

Homeostatic feedback loop.

I can attest that framing processes or problems as charts is incredibly useful to both the dissemination, interpretation, and policy- or procedure-building of solutions to problems both broad and small. (Otherwise, modern medicine wouldn't be a thing.) Most importantly, I think that Cheng's (rather preliminary, to some) idea of interconnectedness is useful to design because it's a reminder of inclusivity and transparency.