An Egalitarian Systemic Design?

ARC25 SIGHTLINES | Anthology of Reflexive Contributors

This is a discussion piece and not an academic paper. Please disagree as much as you can.

While systemic design is spreading and developing primarily through academic channels, except for the emergence of a handful of new companies offering systemic design expertise. We need to ask ourselves: Should systemic design evolve into an increasingly intricate and theorised academic speciality, with implicit hierarchies and gatekeepers, or should it develop more through practice and the cultivation of practitioners who can maintain the transition from a competitive mindset and openly and actively share their experiences and knowledge? And if so, how can we do this?

Systemic design is setting out on the most difficult mission: to develop our ability to work with complex entangled situations, and foresee, imagine and act for the future.

I believe that we need a better understanding of the entangled systems we are part of. We need to enculture this understanding on all levels, fields and aspects of life. At the core of this is the question of how all things are related to each other. How do we affect others, and how do others affect us?

The way forward to a better organised world in these times of ecosystem breakdowns—rise of autocracies, uncontrolled release of technology, massive desinformation, genocide, exploding inequality and demolition of democracy, welfare, and financial regulations—requires us to act on all fronts. There is no limited area where a better way of understanding complexity is more needed than others. It is needed in politics, social design, product design, design of new technologies, material and energy flows, economics, services, information design and more. There is no silver bullet, and we cannot know beforehand how effective our interventions will be. Therefore, we need interventions on all scales and fronts.

There is no time, nor might it be possible, to enculture and widely spread an advanced and completely developed theory and methodology of systemic design. Nor is this even preferable to staying open and developing. We are entangled in the academic world, where the drivers reinforce advancement towards theoretical, philosophical and mental models that grow increasingly complex and difficult to understand for anyone other than the specialists. Systemic design might develop into an elitist knowledge domain in our strive to become better. Meanwhile, we tend to forget the practitioners and the development of praxis. Systemic design needs to develop along both paths, the academic and the practice-oriented. We should turn energy from academic exercises to practice. There is no time to wait for the perfect theory. We need small steps of improvement on all frontlines. This implies nurturing “imperfect” practices on a very wide scale.

Systemic design has already taken steps in a non-dogmatic direction by adopting methodological pluralism, multiple perspectives and scales.

Systems thinking, in all its variations, is the science of interconnectedness.
Design is the art and science of changing things.

Systemic design is therefore utterly important and needs to spread widely rather than being cultivated as a specialist and elitist exclusive academic exercise. Perhaps we have the theories we need, but lack the approaches, knowledge, experience, and intuition to turn them into reality.

Systemic design is easy

Systems thinking is, in a way, an everyday activity, and the term “system” is used by everybody. Today, people in general are much more aware of systemic problems than 15 years ago. Most people are now aware that to judge the sustainability of an electric car one needs to do more than just compare energy consumption. They know that the production phase has to be counted as well, and in there is the problem of rare earth minerals and extracting them from warzones or countries being dominated by undemocratic forces. So people in general understand that the electric car is entangled in technological innovation, raw material trade, political and societal dilemmas.

To become a systems thinker, one needs to turn attention from the objects to how they are related and connected. Everybody can do this independent of theories and models. And everybody can improve and get better doing this.

Systemic design is difficult

Beyond this basic step, it can get difficult and challenging. The different theories are most valuable and can help. We need to read and learn, but critically. But we must not let this learning process delay acting. Systemic design, as I see it, is most of all an “art of action,” based on accumulated experience generated through practice. You can start today, but be aware that you are also starting an exciting journey into years of learning.

Hierachies

As with all emerging knowledge fields, we tend to develop hierarchies. Some voices become more important than others. This is natural and needed. Somebody has to go in the front. However, we should be critical of the formations of hierarchies in our community of systemic design.

We love to sort things into categories and especially in hierarchies. Some things are on a higher level and others on a lower level. We tend to strive for the highest level where the promise is greater power to influence and change things. If we find the just right leverage point at a high enough level, change will ripple out and trickle down through the system levels.

The real-world systems do not care about hierarchies. In fact, one could claim hierarchies do not exist. They are mental models, such as the iceberg model. The model of the food chain with ultimate apex predators simplifies and distorts what is really going on. Who is at the top of the food chain, the apex predator or its parasite? The food chain model, with its hierarchy, is debatable (Figure 1).

I would claim that a more networked understanding of systems is more beneficial for the development of the systemic design community than a linear hierarchical one.

In systemic design, there is a predominant logic that there are simple (lower ranking) problems and there are more complex (higher ranking) problems. Systemic design is not about solving complicated problems, but complex problems. As in any knowledge-producing system, there is a gravitation towards the higher-ranking problems instead of trying to understand the complexity of seemingly lower-ranking problems. The more difficult the problems seem, the more status is given to an attempt to solve them. This is based on a belief that more “high level” problems are deeper and wider, have bigger consequences and impact. This gears the attention towards upstream issues and away from people-near problem solving.

Unfortunately, industrial design and product design are, by most hierarchical models, regarded as lower-ranking problems and hence less attractive for the systemic designer. This is most unfortunate because these fields work directly with material and energy flows, the most central things to get a grip on when it comes to sustainability.

Leverage points

Donella Meadow’s leverage points have the unfortunate side-effect that reinforces this belief in hierarchical values. Following this, we tend to seek higher-level leverage, to find those points that will change a lot, if not everything. This is a questionable, and in some aspects, a harmful way of thinking. While searching for those leverage points, we oversee the opportunities that open up in the dance of the system. (Luckily, Donella also introduced this idea) We turn our focus away from the low-level change opportunities and end up with high-impact ideal projects that seldom get any impact.

Low-level things can have a great influence. If we want to influence the broad social system and induce cultural change towards more insight into systems thinking, low-level interventions might have more impact with the potential to go viral. Spreaders of fake news are very aware of this. The enemies of democracy work on eroding all levels of the system. They seem to be especially successful in working bottom up.

Multiscalar

Systems are multi-scalar. They don’t bother about the human-induced value hierarchy, nor the idea of leverage points. The systems are intertangled even across what we perceive as hierarchies. This means that we can’t beforehand know what the best places are to intervene in a system. These can be on seemingly high levels or on seemingly low levels. A change on a low level can have a great impact.

Subsystems and supra systems

An especially stubborn model is the idea that systems are arranged naturally in levels of subsystems and suprasystems. As I have shown before, this is a partly flawed and sometimes counterproductive model. In real life, it is very hard to force this model onto reality. Even with mechanical objects, it breaks down. It is harmful because it moulds our thinking into a model that is flawed. We project the model onto the world. Our perception is guided by the model, and we forget to see (Figure 2).

Impact

What is a great impact? We tend to think that we need to find the intervention that changes everything. Most often, this mindset leads to outputs that change nothing. Instead with the mechanisms of the hive-mind, the ecology of our minds, and digital spread, a low level intervention can have great impact

Low-level interventions

As mentioned, the dominant logic of systemic design has led to the idea that it is not geared towards, for example, product design. This is a particular stubborn misunderstanding. After 2014, there are hardly any product projects found in our archive of systems oriented design projects. Despite my challenging this misunderstanding, it seems impossible to fight.

The basis for this is two-sided. Internally, the dominant logic of systemic design, as shown above, turns attention away from the “low-level” projects, like designing a chair. On the other side, the product designers seem reluctant to dive into the systemic aspects of their work.

Nothing is simple

Everything is connected with everything. A product like a toothbrush or paper cup is part of enormously complex, wide and deep systems. It is just about how we perceive boundaries (Figure 3).

Scholars vs real-world navigators

Systemic design is a young field that, to a large degree, has stayed undisciplined and growing wildly (Nelson, 2024). A threat is that the development of systemic design is going to be disciplined by the further development of great theories. These theories have rarely proven to be useful for real-life navigators. In our scholarly orientation, the real-world navigators will fall short and will not have a voice, unless we also change our orientation as a systemic design community.

Competition amongst us should be less about producing the highest academic achievements and more about supporting, triggering and scrutinising real-world action.

How to build a sharing practitioner community?

The practitioners amongst us are now, to a large degree, silenced. This is due to systemic issues. There is a great award system for publishing academic articles. Some practitioners manage to do that, but much of the experience and competence stays undercommunicated. It is hard to keep a lively discussion amongst practitioners and especially between practitioners and scholars, as we experience it here in Norway. The time constraints on practitioners’ work is a problem. Another problem is issues of confidentiality. How to connect practitioners and put them in the driver’s seat?

Designing a reward system that encourages practitioners to share and report on their experience and to connect them better with the academic realm is one big challenge in our field.

Then we would have an egalitarian systemic design. It’s a systemic design challenge.