Leander Kreltszheim
Complex systems routinely challenge us to shift from certainty to curiosity, planning to emergence, and solving to adaptation. However, while systems design practices have developed a range of tools for understanding, representing and responding to such systems, they less frequently attend to a central aspect of being within them: the affective experience or ‘felt sense’ of being part of the system. My research explores how humans, as beings embedded in complex systems, both cognitively and somatically experience their interconnection with those systems, and asks what new, pluralist knowledge(s) an exploration of embodiment might offer systems designers.
Watercolour is a creative medium that often resists control. It bleeds, pools and responds to conditions beyond the painter’s intention, often creating affective responses that can be felt in the body and experienced as delight, wonder, discomfort or a range of other emotions. My developing practice of ‘being with watercolours’ offers an opportunity to explore such dynamics experientially. Drawing on my own watercolour practice plus relational watercolour encounters with over 100 participants, this paper shares current reflections on how being in relationship with water, pigment, paper and other materials can suggest new possibilities for attuning to the dynamics that complex systemic designers seek to explore conceptually, including complexity, entanglement and emergence.
Through three specific encounters (detailed through autoethnographical vignettes, visual images and traditional prose) I share some emerging insights about what new, pluralist ways of knowing might be explored through ‘being’ with watercolours, what such embodied experiences might gift us about the experience of being part of interrelated systems and, perhaps most crucially, what we might need to ‘unlearn’ or let go of to more fully inhabit complexity, rather than simply represent it.
Keywords: systems design, materials, knowing systems, felt sense, arts-based practices