A deck of cards used to mock up a system for instruction, discussion, or design.

Any type of system.

This System design deck comes with a story.

My grandpa managed a team of programmers that worked with some of the first computers at ALMSA (Army Automated Logistics Management Systems Activity).

They designed systems for handling the movement of everything in the US military. He did a fair amount of programming too.

When one of his programmers would bring in a problem they couldn’t solve, my gramps would have them design a flow chart for the system they were programming. (keep in mind, they were writing programs on punch cards at this time… if you are a programmer and don’t know what that means, look it up.)

This helped the programmer quickly visualize what was necessary to complete the project; it also helped with finding flaws and pointing out all connections required to make the system work.

This deck was born out of this theory.

Examples

Alert System

Use them with a White board.

Use Dry erase markers directly on the cards.

Logging System

Solar System