Kavitha Ravikumar
This essay invites you to adopt a relational stance towards systemic thinking in design spaces as a means of enabling transformational futures. In doing so, it calls for an expansion of the design space to go beyond the definitions of linear pathways or user centric logic and instead invite entanglement with the richness of relationality in systemic design. With roots in problem-solving and product development, the understanding of the design space has evolved into a collective experience, embracing social complexity and the emerging contours of distant futures shaped by diverse possibilities. Social design is expanding through the involvement of non-expert designers and multidisciplinary perspectives. This brings the space of systemic design into the ebb and flow of changing life conditions, giving it the potential to become even more plural, dynamic, and alive, and embodying the capacity to hold many ways of knowing and being.
Building on scholarship in this area, the essay argues that the current breadth and interdependence of societal challenges necessitate that we reorient our design spaces towards more desirable and transformational futures. This, in turn, requires the design space to embrace a systemic relational ethos of interconnection and care. To arrive at this position, the essay first introduces the changing nature of design and brings it into a conversation on design spaces.
It then traces the threads of relationality woven through design literature with systemic perspectives and discusses viewpoints from published research, such as communicative and associative relationality, that can support more transformational contexts. Through this exploration, the essay offers a gentle and hopeful call to designers navigating the webs of systemic complexity. By releasing rigid frameworks that focus on deterministic futures, designers can instead inhabit spaces that are supple, relational, and responsive, and offer alternative ideas that align with relational change and transformation.
Keywords: design space, systemic design, transformational design, care, relationality, futures, collective design, social design, relational design