Authors: Josina Vink, Kaarina Wetter-Edman, and Kaisa Koskela-Huotari
With growing interest in systemic design, there is a demand for designerly approaches that can aid practitioners in catalysing intentional social systems change. As social structures have been recognized as a critical leverage point for systems change, this paper conducts an exploratory analysis of how designerly approaches can be developed to intentionally shape social structures. By combining theory and “research through design” experiments, this paper presents a portfolio of experimental designerly approaches for shaping social structures and identifies four key design principles to guide systemic design practitioners in doing this work. This research contributes to the open, pluralistic and evolving methodology of systemic design by showing alternatives to system mapping that can help practitioners address the invisible structure of systems and re-entangle themselves in the systems they seek to change.