Adeline Hvidsten and Anna Kirah
Kristiania University College, Oslo, Norway
This paper explores designerly tools for visualising insights, generative creativity and mirroring complexity. As designers are increasingly facilitating complex and wicked problems, making sense of and communicating large amounts of insights becomes a challenge (Kolko, 2010; Talgorn & Hendriks, 2021). We focus on the potential and importance of such tools for designers, as well as highlighting potential pitfalls for design as designers’ good intentions meet the demands and complexities of “the real world”. We address the issue of representation through discussions of the expert power of designers and the power of design tools, as well as organisational and wider system components. We believe that a key challenge is developing and applying approaches to design based on non-representational foundations. In the last part of the paper, we explore some existing approaches and potential directions for research and practice. Here, we highlight non-human lenses that acknowledge more than human agency and narrative and reflexive approaches that might acknowledge bias and a multiplicity of presents and futures. Further, we briefly explore the topic of transdisciplinary action as well as organisational and industrial transformation to address what we call a “resource/relic dichotomy.” While we do not claim to have many answers as of now, we raise some key questions we believe will be of importance for system and service design practice and research.
KEYWORDS: systemic design, complexity, gigamaps, personas, visualisation, representation, power
Sketchnote by Patricia Kambitch | Playthink
