ARC25 SIGHTLINES | Anthology of Reflexive Contributors
Open and closed systems of inquiry
The edges of open systems of inquiry are permeable, continually adjusting lenses and reformulating filters, allowing new norms and understandings to emerge with the influx of new ideas and people. The boundaries are attended in order to maintain viability and coherence in the process of creating meaning and value from the influx of undisciplined influences of reality. Internal structures are fluid.
The boundaries of closed systems of inquiry, on the other hand, are strictly maintained and carefully guarded to uphold established norms and monitor the flow of data, information, and knowledge following accepted standards.
Closed system boundary keepers.
Open system boundary attenders.
The term systemic design
Similar to what has happened with the term wicked problem, systemic design has experienced a surge in usage, used to label a variety of applications. There are new schools of systemic design, systemic design projects, and a growing volume of systemic design literature. People have been very successful in adopting and adapting the term for a variety of purposes.
This success has primarily been within the domains of narrow bandwidths of disciplines, specialities, or professions rather than the deeper and wider bandwidths of the natural and human world. With the establishment of a systemic design stance, the term systemic design can come to designate inquiry systems designed to interact with real reality.
Broadband and narrowband inquiry systems
Human inquiry systems have evolved over millennia, created to make meaning of the broadband spectrum of real-world sense data (see graphic below). They designed ways to gain understanding and turn the “undisciplined” data and information emanating from the natural world into actionable knowledge in a way that allowed them to engage, survive, thrive, and evolve. But that competency and ability to navigate broadband inquiry was dramatically altered with the emergence of a new spectrum of narrower bandwidth, closed systems of inquiry.
Image: Deep & wide bandwidth of inquiry—open system.
New strategies for describing and explaining humans and their environment emerged from what is called the Age of Enlightenment (see graphic below). The emergent strategies for inquiry from that era were restrictive and a carefully controlled means for receiving information from the natural world and sharing it among other human beings.
Image: Prism of enlightenment.
Through the influence of the Enlightenment, apprehension and comprehension were divided into distinct and separate domains of inquiry. These domains can be categorised as different cultures of inquiry that share little, if any, common approaches to investigating reality.
Image: Reduced bandwidths of inquiry—closed systems.
Reestablishing broadband inquiry
It is obvious that we need to reestablish new broadband designs of inquiry to supplement and balance the dominance of narrowband inquiring systems in a world recognised to be more complex and entangled than imagined, and more challenged by complex technologies than ever expected. The world is complex and indeterminate. Our approaches to inquiry and reflective thinking need to reflect that reality if humans are to continue to adapt, thrive, and evolve.
However, reweaving the threads of individualised designs of inquiry into a holistic means for obtaining coherent understanding has proven to be challenging, particularly when using the same strategy that was so successful in creating the array of narrowband inquiry in the first place. These threads cannot be combined or rewoven just using enumerative means such as aggregation or summation on their own.
Emergent qualities
When water molecules are separated into their constituent atoms, the quality of ‘wetness’ is lost. This emergent conjunctive quality can only be recovered if the constituent atoms are proportionally arranged in their correct relationships. If a biologic form of life is dissected into an inventory of parts, laying the pieces and parts together in proximity does not resurrect the life form.
Human life is an emergent quality that is the result of conjunctions of fundamental attributes expressed, for example, as consciousness, character, personality, and related entangled manifestations of human being. Emergence is the expected consequence of conjunctions in complex systems.
Open systems inquiry, in a similar way, is not just a matter of combining narrowband methods into a toolbox of tactics—it is an emergent form of inquiry. Broadband’s design of inquiry exhibits emergent qualities of inquiry that narrowband inquiries do not. However, narrowband forms of inquiry have proven to be functionally effective in the right contexts. Narrowband inquiry has provided an invaluable advantage for scientific reasoning and technological development.
However, by predominantly using narrowband inquiry, humans have been disadvantaged when attempting to navigate the complex interactive terrain of nature and human nature. The compromises that have been made and limitations that have been accepted have proven to be suboptimal and unsatisfactory in the resultant quality of outcomes.
During the last half of the 20th Century, professionals and academics were scientizing many of the professions. Management, medicine, education, and design were among those being recast as applied sciences. The challenge was that the professions dealt with social systems that were composed of people who were not often amenable to being reduced to a science.
Human beings are complex, complicated, independent, and often unreasonable, requiring a much more open approach to inquiry than is provided by reason alone. Humanity is broadband—a deep and wide, open system. Disciplines and professions, on the other hand, are pragmatic, narrowband, closed systems of inquiry—by design.
Design
Design inquiry was particularly challenging for scientization because, in addition to being rational, it was a compound of creativity, aesthetics, and free will— all qualities of broadband open systems, which are exemplary of attributes that defy AI agent abilities, for example. Design is also not formally logical in many ways since it is a conjunction of qualities that are perceived as paradoxical when encountered outside of a design context.
IMAGE: Design Paradoxes.
The challenge of making paradoxical design more user-friendly is achieved by creating a conjunction of design and systemics, not a mix (and) but a compound (&, AND).
Just as the conjunction of hydrogen and oxygen atoms results in the emergent quality of wetness, design and systemics form a similar synergistic compound when systemics are used as the logics of design.
IMAGE: Bringing together.
Systemics
Systemics’ umbrella has grown by sweeping in strategies that were formulated for dealing with complex, complicated systems.
Some years ago, when I was beginning my graduate studies in Social Systems Design at UC Berkeley, I was integrating my formal training and experience in architecture and environmental design with my growing exposure to all the diverse fields claiming to be on the systems spectrum. The term ‘system’ covered a broad and diverse territory that was united around a notion of seeing phenomena as assemblies of elements, sometimes interacting for a common function or purpose.
When I was asked what systems were, or when I tried using the term in conversations or in formal papers, I found myself listing a large inventory of fields covered by the term system, such as: systems approach, systems thinking, systems science, general systems theory, living systems, cybernetics, etc. The list was long, and people would understandably tune out in a short time.
I was an active member of the SGSR (Society for General Systems Research (now the International Society for Systems Research—ISSS)) during this time, and among the many systems scholars I met, one had written what for me became pivotal in my development as a scholar-practitioner. Charles Francois had authored a seminal paper titled Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective. In this paper, Francois wrote:
Systemics and cybernetics can be viewed as a metalanguage of concepts and models for transdisciplinarian use, still now evolving and far from being stabilized. This is the result of a slow process of accretion through inclusion and interconnection of many notions, which came and are still coming from very different disciplines. The process started more than a century ago, but has gathered momentum since 1948 through the pioneering work of Wiener, von Neumann, von Bertalanffy, von Förster and Ashby, among many others. This paper tries to retrace the history of the accretion process and to show that our systemic and cybernetic language is an evolving conceptual network. —Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Syst Res 16, 203-219 (1999)
Nowadays, the term systemics has primarily become a default link to the field of systems science, which is necessarily a narrowband design of inquiry. This choice was not the only alternative, but it has become a very successful choice when measured by academic standards.
Systemic design
When I first coined the term systemic design, I had a different hope and intent for its use. My intent for the term systemics was for it to be a signifier of an approach to inquiry that was inclusive, deep, and broad, i.e., an open inquiry system. The intent was to champion a type of strategy that was both broadband and exemplary of open systems inquiry. This would be realised through the conjunction of systemics and design.
While the term design is often used to signify a critical approach to problem solving, planning, or industrial design, the intent for systemic design was to treat design inquiry as inquiry for action, followed by action in the service of others—the activity of a ‘wise hand’.
In my case, the ingredients—systemics and design—are both asserted to be more complex than is typical of their normative treatment. The conjunction of the two would result in emergent qualities that enable and support open systems inquiry. ‘Open system’ and ‘broadband’ inquiry does not mean doing whatever you want, a concern of the closed systems inquiry. It actually requires a very high level of competence and ability to think and act in ways quite distinct from those associated with the practical sciences.
Polymaths and open systems inquiry
The challenge is to further develop the foundations and fundamentals of systemic-design inquiry and praxis. This open system, wideband domain is best navigated by polymaths and generalists (vs dilettantes), whereas narrowband, closed systems are best navigated by specialists. Specialists are essential to the modern world, but it turns out so are generalists and polymaths, except they are not well-served in formal educational or training settings, or effectively employed in government or industry.
There is a challenge to changing this because this comes at a time when academics, professionals, and students are apparently migrating away from reading, critical thinking, professional development, and other areas fundamental to the preparation for systemic thinking and deep designing. The trend, with the assistance of AI, is to become ever removed from actively engaging in inquiry, in both open systems and closed systems. Open systems inquiry requires appropriate skills and abilities for full investment and engagement in broadband inquiry. It is necessary to blunt the trend of disengagement to fully animate open systems inquiry.
Panaceas
Specialists and some forms of generalists, appropriately, thrive in the narrowband forms of designing or systems thinking. Praxis panaceas fit well within narrowband inquiry strategies. But panaceas, attractive as they are and as many vendors as there are on social media, do not have the same apposite high value when embedded in broadband approaches to inquiry. Rather, the capacitation of polymaths and polymathic praxis is requisite.
Establishing open systems inquiry through systemic design
The good news is that there are generalists and polymaths in the existing populations of professional and academic fields waiting for recognition and formal support and development. It is possible and necessary to design new academic programs for formally preparing open systems practitioners. Of course, there is also a need to introduce people in institutions, agencies, and businesses on the value of open systems inquiry and systemic designers who are polymaths who are excellent navigators in broadband inquiring systems in open systems. Every high-energy system needs a crucible.
Sightlines is an annual anthology of reflexive contributors—RSD chairs, speakers, and other influential voices whose work is foundational or influential in systemic design. This article was originally posted on Harold Nelson’s Accidental Vagrant Substack on July 17, 2025. The article serves as a reference to Harold’s RSD14-RSDX framing conversation, Every High-Energy System Needs a Crucible.
PROFILE
Harold Nelson
Harold Nelson LLC
Harold Nelson consults with public, private and military organisations on issues of systemic design competence. He has been a visiting scholar in the School of Computer Science at the University of Montana and was the 2009-2010 Nierenberg Distinguished Professor of Design in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Harold has been an occasional Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy and the Defense Analysis program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He was an affiliated Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington and worked in research for the NSF-funded Centre for Learning in Informal and Formal Environments at the University of Washington, Stanford University and SRI.
Harold is a past president and and, at present, a trustee of the International Society for Systems Science, the co-founding Director and President of the Advanced Design Institute (ADi), and the owner of Harold G. Nelson LLC, Systemic Design. As a consultant, Dr Nelson has worked with non-profits and corporations, state and federal agencies, international governments, and the United Nations, and continues to work as an educator, consultant, and scholar on systemic organisational design. Dr Nelson was the head of and faculty member in the Graduate Programs in Whole Systems Design (WSD) at Antioch University. He received his PhD in The Design of Social Systems, graduating with distinction, from the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Master of Architecture degree from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor of Architecture from Montana State University and is a licensed architect in California.
In 2004, The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World received the Outstanding Book of the Year award. The 2nd edition by MIT Press was published in 2012.
Harold also contributed the first article for the Contexts journal with an invited essay in 2023. Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix helps place the footers and foundation into the field that has grown from design for complex scale and generations of systems thinking.
In 2023, Harold launched Systemic Design Master Classes.
The master classes in systemic design are designed to be catalysts in the development of shared understandings of what systemic design is, can be, and is desired to be—some common ground for the place and space to have generable conversations about the aim and outcome of systemic design education and practices—preparation and praxis.
These Master Classes are precursors to the establishment of a formal venue—a Center for Advanced Systemic Design and concomitant Systemic-Design ‘Flight’ School—for the capacitation of emerging systemic designers and their allies.
Sightlines: ARC25
What if design embraced complexity by designing relationships and relationality itself?
Silvia Barbero: Talking about relationality means talking about life, systems, and identities in dialogue, and every dialogue is complex precisely because it is authentic and unique.
Mobilizing the Potential of Systemic Design Research
Peter Jones: Systemic design has learned from its contributing disciplines and has not foreclosed its potentials by defining a canon or narrowing our focus to the issues of the day (even given our continual interests in social change). I see systemic design as taking a long view, toward constructive reorganisation of social and service systems, without the need to address immediate (first horizon) change
Movement, Becoming, and the Cybernetic Archive
Kate Doyle: The modern archival impulse speaks to a very basic tendency toward collection and re-collection, categorisation, and creation. Photography has shown us two sides of the realisation (s) of this impulse: a ready access to creative archival artistry/an enabled pursuit of proof and fixity. We walk the line upon which a production of thingness can exchange experience into commodity and stasis.
An Egalitarian Systemic Design?
Birger Sevaldson: Systemic design needs to develop along both paths, the academic and the practice-oriented. We should turn energy from academic exercises to practice. There is no time to wait for the perfect theory. We need small steps of improvement on all frontlines. This implies nurturing “imperfect” practices on a very wide scale.
Stirring the Sediment: The material practices of systemic design
Chloé Oru: I considered that the river, as a natural system, offers an easy-to-grasp perspective to explore the definition of materiality and systemic outcomes, to explain the power of systemic design in practice, and to explain its strategic potential to support organisational change and fluxes in navigating complexity.
Redrawing the Arcs in Healthcare: On relationality, systemic design, and the weight of where we place our attention
Ng Yeuk Fan: And yet, when we speak with people—not as patients, but as human beings—they do not ask for services, nor do they ask for departments … They ask to make meaning of medical conditions they live with, and to hold onto their identities in the face of decline. These are not unreasonable things.
Crossing Algebra and Systemic Design
Louis Kauffman: What if one also knows a theory? How will that affect the process? Can new theory also evolve with the help of systemic design? What does it mean to creatively use theory and reasoning? Will not such use, if creative, go beyond standard logical reasoning into the use of dialogue and imagination? Will not creative use of theory lead both to new designs and to new theory? It is our contention that the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes.
Co-Creating Social Worlds in Relationship with Others
Abbie VanMeter: CMM has evolved into an important perspective and practice that foregrounds relationality as central to meaning-making, is increasingly applicable in everyday life, and remains rooted in a strong theoretical foundation.
Human Relationships in Complex Challenges—What can we design?
Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: I find human relationships incredibly fascinating, because they are so difficult to grasp and at the same time so important and meaningful to being human.
Three Layers of Systems Thinking
Gerald Midgley, Rachel Lilley, and Raghav Rajagopalan: Could we be approaching a tipping point when systems thinking will become business as usual in our organisations and communities?