Circular Food and Complexity: Systemic and Transformative Design Practice
By Lindsay Cole, Manager of the City of Vancouver Solutions Lab
Welcome to Learning out Loud! This is where CFIL collaborators reflect on what we’ve been learning and trying in this experimental space. Thanks for joining us on our journey, and if you have any thoughts on what you’re reading we’d be happy to hear from you!
In Vancouver’s Circular Food Innovation Lab (CFIL), we’re building and exercising our design muscles in lots of ways. Some of our team members are trained designers with skills in specific approaches. Others are learning and practicing design approaches in applied and on-the-job ways. ‘Design’ isn’t one thing in our practice and experience — it is a mindset and is multifaceted, with many different purposes, approaches, methodologies, and techniques. This post describes what design means for us in theory and practice in CFIL.
Richard Buchanan talks about four orders of design that can help us to organize our thinking about what approach(es) to design we are using in our work: 1) symbolic and visual communications; 2) artifacts and material objects; 3) activities and organized services; and 4) complex systems and environments. Even though we are doing things that look and feel like orders 1–3, our work in CFIL is focused on this last order — increasing the circularity of the food system is definitely a complex challenge. We draw upon the fields of systemic, strategic, and transformative design to put that into practice, and briefly describe our understandings of each of these design approaches here.
So what is strategic, systemic, and transformative design? These frames draw from several different design (and beyond) lineages that we’ve pulled together and mashed up into our own approach.
Strategic Design
Strategic design inspiration comes from a mentor of ours, Moura Quayle, and her book Designed Leadership. Angèle Beausoleil describes strategic design as explicitly engaging in strategic and reflective thinking alongside creative action. It attends to connections and consequences, and invites and initiates diverse conversations, experiences, and social interactions in a complex communications process. It considers power relations, communications and trust, and enables transformation to emerge into innovation. Moura connects her worlds of leadership, management, and design and offers a set of ten principles for ‘designed leadership’: make values explicit; know place and experience; value diversity; emphasize edges and boundaries; bridge gaps and make connections; evaluate for fit, scale, and context; learn from natural systems; apply the Jane Jacobs test; attend to patterns; and never finished but always complete. We put these principles regularly into practice in our work.
Systemic Design
Systemic design brings systems thinking and design into a deep and interconnected relationship. Peter Jones describes systemic design as an orientation, or a next-generation practice developed to advance design practices on systemic problems. Sharon Zivkovic emphasizes that a systemic design approach is particularly appropriate for working on wicked, or complex, challenges and also when place-based approaches are appropriate and essential. Systemic design purposefully integrates systems thinking and methods into human-centered and service design approaches to work on complex challenges. This approach tends to follow a variation of a design process of ‘ask-try-do’, ‘discover-design-deliver’, or ‘discover/orient, define/conceptualize, optimize/plan, execute/measure’ and cycles between convergent and divergent work with a strong action bias.
Transition/Transformation Design
Transition/transformation design is not yet as coherent or widespread a design approach or modality, so we pull on a few threads to weave this approach into our practice. Carnegie Mellon University is developing a transdisciplinary transition design research and teaching program, and is connecting the urgent need for sustainability and socio-ecological justice transitions with design practice. They describe transition design as: bringing together a clear vision of what we are transitioning toward; a theory of change that describes the dynamics of change at play in complex systems; open, collaborative, and reflective mindset and posture; and new ways of designing that arise from the first three practices. The new ways of designing include systems interventions that solve for multiple issues at the same time, that amplify what is already working, and that occur in multiple ways over many years/decades. The work of Maya Goodwill, Yoko Akama, Joyce Yee, Antoinette Carroll (Creative Reaction Lab), Sascha Costanza-Chock, Penny Hagen, Angie Tangaere, and Panthea Lee describe different ways to center equity, justice, and reconciliation in design theory and practice. Acknowledging and working with power, recognizing privilege and positionality and how this shapes the work/perspectives of design(ers), considering intersectional identities, and designing with (not for) are stances, perspectives, and practices held by the designers in CFIL.
We look forward to sharing some of the ways that this multifaceted approach to design is being implemented in CFIL, and what we’re learning as we develop and practice strategic, systemic, and transformation design in subsequent posts.
Disclaimer: the opinions and perspectives expressed within each of these posts are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and perspectives of all CFIL participants.
