Wina Smeenk
Systemic Co-Design engages with complex societal challenges that unfold across interconnected social, organisational and institutional systems. In such contexts, co-design cannot rely on single perspectives or linear problem-solving approaches, but requires navigating dynamic relational fields in which multiple stakeholders, knowledge systems, lived experiences and interests intersect.
This paper explores how co-designers and stakeholders can navigate such complexity through empathic engagement. Building on systems thinking and design scholarship, the paper conceptualises empathy as a relational process of empathic system formation: the process through which empathic understanding develops across and through interactions between multiple stakeholders, perspectives, relations, and forms of knowledge. Empathic system formation unfolds through movement across self- and other(s)-oriented, and affective and cognitive modes of engagement, enabling empathy to serve as a systemic capability for navigating differences in perspectives, interests, knowledge, power, and interpretation without reducing these differences to a single view.
Building on the Empathy Compass, first conceptualised in 2019, this study further develops the Compass as a boundary object and knowledge product for Systemic Co-Design. The Compass structures empathic system formation through four complementary quadrants: Affective Self (AS), Affective Other (AO), Cognitive Other (CO), and Cognitive Self (CS), connected through a relational WE-space. Rather than representing fixed stages, these provide navigational orientations for moving between proximity and distance, participation and reflexivity, experience and interpretation, and direct and mediated forms of engagement.
This study draws on longitudinal Research through Design across educational and professional design contexts in which the Empathy Compass was iteratively developed and explored in collaborative processes addressing complex societal challenges. The study connects empathic system formation to four interrelated systemic dynamics —appreciating perspectives, building relations, exploring boundaries, and fostering emergence—and operationalises these through the Empathy Compass. The findings show how the Compass makes distributed and partial ways of knowing visible, supports awareness of positionality and relations, enables movement across differences and tensions, and supports collective interpretation and design action by making different contributions visible and discussable.
The paper contributes a systemic navigation perspective on empathy and demonstrates how the Empathy Compass operationalises empathic system formation as a navigable practice in Systemic Co-Design.
Keywords: Systemic Co-Design, empathic system formation, Empathy Compass, perspectives, relations, boundaries, emergence