Manasi Kumbhat, Janne Brok, and Erik De Ruijter
Systemic design provides powerful approaches for analysing complexity, mapping relationships, and understanding systemic behaviour. However, many existing methods primarily support the analysis and optimisation of current systems and offer limited procedural support for systematically generating alternative realities. This paper introduces the Reality Canvas, a fractal mapping framework designed to support transformative change through the exploration and reconfiguration of nested realities across scales.
The approach is grounded in a distinction between essences and manifestations. Essences function as descriptors through which realities can be articulated and compared, while manifestations represent the specific forms these descriptors take within a particular configuration. Drawing conceptually from set theory and semantic relations in natural language, the framework operationalises complement-based exploration through a small set of operators of change: IS <-> ISN’T, WHOLE <-> PART, and LOTS <-> LITTLE. These operators enable systematic exploration of alternative manifestations while remaining grounded in the structure of the current reality.
The paper further introduces the Reality Canvas as a recursive representation of nested realities inspired by the Sierpiński triangle. The canvas supports movement across hierarchical levels of reality, enabling practitioners to zoom in towards essences that describe the system’s details and zoom out towards higher order essences that describe the context. Complementing this, the Inversion Canvas provides a practical mechanism for generating and refining alternative manifestations around specific essence–manifestation pairs.
An illustrative application focused on office-centred work and digital nomadism demonstrates how the framework can be used to explore emerging realities, identify tensions, and iteratively construct increasingly coherent alternative configurations. In contrast to causal modelling approaches such as causal loop diagrams, the proposed framework is configurational rather than causal: its primary purpose is not to predict system behaviour, but to support generative exploration of transformative possibilities across scales.
Keywords: systemic design, transformative change, fractal systems, nested systems, complement, generative design, systems thinking, reality canvas