Convening Boundary Relations for Transformative Design

Hira Javed

The complexity of current societal challenges is pushing designers to work across various levels of abstraction. This is necessary to understand how intentionally and collaboratively designed small interventions by interdisciplinary actors can lead to systemic changes. Although this type of change is slow, iterative, and outside of a designer’s control, designers can play a critical role in triggering and steering systemic change by connecting people across silos using various tools, activities, and facilitation methods, as well as surfacing the hidden systems and processes that enable or hinder desired value.

In the language of social learning theorists Beverly Wenger-Trayner and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, systems convenors oscillate between different boundaries and levels of scale within complex systems and create learning opportunities, usually between unlikely partners. Boundaries are subjective lines of division and are imposed when an individual experiences something unfamiliar during social interactions. Designers facilitate the conditions needed for others to navigate uncertainty present at the boundaries and work towards making a difference they collectively care about.

Relying heavily on the seven areas described by Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner (2021) as the “work of systems convening” (pp. 50–51) and the four dimensions of the systems convenors’ mindsets (p.81), this workshop provides an opportunity for designers to learn, uncover, and reflect on different levels of salience and strands of intentionality in their work towards designing systemic change. The workshop intends to equip designers with the concepts and language to articulate what they do as systems convenors, collectively recognise it, and develop strategies for facilitating fruitful relationships at the boundaries.

KEYWORDS: systems change, transformation, boundaries, relational design, social learning

RSD TOPIC(S): Economics & Organizations, Methods & Methodology