Peter Jones
Systemic design and systems
Design practices generate concepts and intervene for change. Design sidesteps entrenched systems and unpredictable leaps. Creative orientations to products and services are based more on human behaviour and culture than systems understanding.
- Systems thinking draws from system theories
- Tools and perspectives for understanding and reasoning
- Don’t mistake the map (method) for territory
- Theory guides everything in systems practice
How can we enhance the outcomes that matter?
Creating an inquiring system … A collective anticipatory system … A dialogic social system
Our challenge seems to be “improving design practices by integrating best knowledge of systems thinking.”
- Do we have that best knowledge? We’re at a bit of a new starting point and yet …
- Systemic problems go beyond planning & politics
Common principles – systemics & design thinking
- Framing – Refraining from premature problem solving
- Iterative inquiry
- Human-centered – Different contexts
- By participants with a stake in the outcome
- Selected for requisite variety to the problem
- Dialogic process
- Complexity embraced as the reality of the situation
- Multiple design actions over time
- Temporality is critical to decision/intervention
- Understanding systemics does not assume action
- Design actions need not be systemic in every case
Unpacking the problem elements
Based on R. Horn, 2004, Adapted with permission.
Image: Vanessa Tan (vantan at flickr.com) – History of Cybernetics and Systems Science, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3898828
