Andrea Alessandro Gasparini
The design community has approached time in various ways. As time has many uncovered facets and characteristics, systemic design research could rethink how to use time as a significant stakeholder in framing solutions addressing complex situations and wicked problems. Using explorative activities as an arena to map and discuss new possibilities in systemic design with a particular mental representation of time, this paper brings new possibilities and insight. Research into how we think and speak about time offers interesting inspiration for designers. An example of alternative space-to-time associations is reversed time. It can be found in a tribe in the Andes in South America that describes, when speaking Aymara, both vocally and with gestures, that the future is presented as behind and past events as in front (Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). This article shows how the use of reversed time, as it brings the past in front of a co-design process and the future “back”, could bring additional value to the generative needs in systemic design. The paper presents two small explorative activities. The goal of the first activity was to firstly address the challenges students of philology meet after their study and secondly observe whether using a reversed time approach could bring new insights and perspectives. The second task was named “Recall of a past event”, which aimed to elicit important and unique past events, helping participants bring the past in front. The use of reversed time seems to potentially change the mental representation of time for designers and participants and enrich the design process with a higher focus on past experiences. For instance, one possible effect is that the innovation factor becomes tamed in the generative phase of creating representations of organisational and societal complexity. Concluding, as one of the goals of systemic design is knowledge creation, the value of past experiences should not be underestimated.
KEYWORDS: time, reversed time, systemic design, creativity