How are systemic design’s tools shaping the reality of systemic problems?

ARC25 SIGHTLINES | Anthology of Reflexive Contributors

I don’t think about relationality all that much. I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships. How I relate to things like work or play, for example, and how I can relate one to the other—How can I work and play? These are pragmatic concerns, though, born of the need to make decisions about how I want to spend my time, or at least justify how I want to spend my time. But, I don’t spend much time thinking about relationality itself, the condition of being related, or what it means to exist in relation to something.

First, a bit of physics history. Heisenberg didn’t just stumble upon this principle, it grew out of his deeply considered philosophy, which was the whole reason he studied physics in the first place. Most of the physicists of the early 20th century were really just philosophers trying to work out the nature of reality. You may be surprised to learn that reality is, in fact, relational, at least from some ontological positions (for those keeping score, yes, that means the relationality of reality is therefore relational as well). I’ve recently been reading a book about Heisenberg’s ideas, and one of the most useful takeaways for me, encapsulated in the Uncertainty Principle, has been the notion that what you measure depends entirely on how you measure it. I’m not just talking about accuracy or margin of error. This goes beyond measurements being a bit off because you had a ruler marked in centimetres instead of millimetres. Whole concepts and assumptions about the nature of reality are entirely dependent on how you measure that reality. It’s more like something is an alligator or a car, depending on your ruler.

This is the example that brought it home for me. Many know that light can behave as a particle or as a wave; we often learn this in high school physics. The experiments that taught us this are referred to as a the “double-slit” experiments in which you have two slits in a wall and a screen detecting light on the other side. If you shoot a single photon at the wall, sometimes it goes through one slit, sometimes the other, it’s a 50/50 chance, a coin toss. But if you shoot a stream of photons, you don’t get the 50/50 split; what you get is a pattern, the same pattern you would get if a bunch of waves interfered with each other, cancelling out in some places and doubling in intensity in others. Physicists aren’t really bothered by this anymore; they developed the idea of a “wavefunction” to handle the contradiction. That’s great for keeping physics going, but the so-called “wave-particle duality” and its implications remain, and they aren’t really changed by the math of a wavefunction. Let me sum it up this way — whether light exists as a wave or a particle is entirely dependent on how you measure it. The relationship between light and the experimental apparatus is what makes light one thing or another. The reality of what light is—is relational.

My point in all this is not to dizzy you with philosophical questions and their implications. Rather, it is to make you ask one in particular. How are systemic design’s tools shaping the reality of systemic problems? If something as basic as a photon of light is dependent on the way we observe it, what does that mean for sociotechnical phenomena that are vastly more complex than a photon?

I can offer just a few ideas. One, it cautions us to humbly remember that the map is not the territory. What our system maps tell us about the world is not the world. Second, and – ahem – relatedly, it also cautions us to remember that those same maps are shaping our conception of reality, and are most likely altering it while we measure. Is there an uncertainly principle at work in systemic design? For sure there is, you cannot measure the position and the velocity of a system at the same time. To state it more plainly, you cannot capture a system’s structure and its dynamics at the same time. If you pause the system long enough to map the structure, you lose the dynamics. If you simulate the dynamics, you can’t see the structure. What does this mean for our tools? Our practice? For the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underpin systemic design? I’m not sure, like I said at the beginning, I don’t think about relationality that much. Someone will have to shed some light on it for me.