Katherine Mollenhauer, Gaspar Jarry, Karen Silva, Javiera Rodríguez, and Kay Bergamini
Design practice has transformed from problem-solving to situational and systemic involvement in complex social systems. Consequently, Service Design has progressively expanded its scope towards systemic perspectives to address problems characterised by multiple interdependencies, conflicting values, and high uncertainty: the so-called social messes. In these contexts, conventional Service Design tools, such as journey maps and service blueprints, while essential for understanding actors’ activities and emotions and for conceptualising solutions, prove insufficient for modelling the full complexity of the system and its interactions. On the other hand, broad-level soft systems mapping on its own tends to overlook the specificities and pain points of users’ real experiences and the lived tensions that characterise social messes from the inside. The system-oriented design perspective, when integrated into a Service Design process within a social mess, enables a parallel and interconnected view across the macro, meso, and micro levels.
The article illustrates this multi-level mapping approach through the Environmental Observatory of Mining Projects, an applied interdisciplinary research developed at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In the social mess context of environmental information management in the Chilean mining sector, marked by institutional dispersion of public environmental data, asymmetries in information access, and deep socio-environmental conflicts among civil society, the private sector and public institutions, a design-led interdisciplinary research team operates at both a systemic and experiential level to specifically address information asymmetry among actors.
Through a retrospective analysis of the mapping activities carried out by the design team throughout the project, the article identifies and describes the different types of mapping that emerged during the applied research stages: from the framing of the problem and the delimitation of the system, to the visualisation of the methodological strategy, the analysis of the actor ecosystem, the synthesis of needs findings, and the modelling of the value proposition. Each mapping instance served a different purpose: fostering alignment and collaboration within the interdisciplinary team, deepening the analysis of complexity, structuring the problem-solution space, or facilitating co-creation with key actors, all while maintaining a systemic perspective consistent with the inherent complexity of the project.
The article concludes that, in contexts of high complexity, rather than a one-off sense-making exercise, shifting through the levels between Service Design and Systemic Design through mapping is a dynamic practice that keeps complexity visible and actionable as the project evolves. Systems thinking does not come at the expense of user-centred depth; rather, it equips the design team with a strategic mindset capable of simultaneously sustaining a macro, meso, and micro view of users’ reality. The linearity of Service Design is not abandoned but enriched: it allows the team to trace breaking points in ecosystem interactions and translate them into concrete, user-oriented interventions.
Keywords: systemic service design, multi-level mapping, sustainable development, environmental information, interdiscipline