Abhay Vohra
Systemic Design is not an individual endeavour but a team activity. Multiple participants consisting of designers, stakeholders and other actors collaborate and make sense of complex systems.
The process of sensemaking requires the team of stakeholders and designers to engage in cognitive activities like acquisition of knowledge, learning, and forming an understanding of complex systems through creation of visualisations and models. These activities require mental processes that come under the purview of cognitive science.
In cognitive science and philosophy of mind, distributed cognition is a theoretical framework which seeks to understand how cognitive processes use external environment
The systemic design team, through the lens of distributed cognition, can be seen as a distributed cognitive system. The team collectively creates external representations (knowledge, visualisations) that extend cognitive processes into the physical environment. Using this lens, we hypothesise how the systemic design team self-organises, and mutually adapts to make their interactions synergistic, and starts to function as a connectionist network, which leads to emergence of collective intelligence.
In this presentation we will establish the relation between systemic design and distributed cognition by theorising the systemic design team as a distributed cognitive system based on the fundamental working hypotheses framework suggested by (Heylighen, Heath, Van Overwalle 2004) and show how collective intelligence emerges in systemic design teams.
KEYWORDS: systemic design, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, embodied cognition, design thinking