Blog 10 — The Story of Us-In-Between — Collective Learning for Liberation in Public Systemic Design

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Unbounded Affairs

31 min readJun 4, 2023

Artwork blog 10: Thank you — I’m Sorry — Art exhibit by Kyle Scheurmann about connection and deforestation in Fairy Creek — southern Vancouver Island. The Fairy Creek protests have been called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, with arrests numbering close to 1,200.

Soundtrack Blog 10: Nils Frahm — For Peter — Toilet Brushes — More (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2015)

Read other blogs in this series: Prologue, Introduction (blog 1), A Complex Matter (blog 2), Systemic Viewpoints (blog 3), Shapeshifting Design (blog 4), De-methodising Design? (intermezzo blog), The Relating Public Servant (blog 5), Relating Design Story (blog 6), The Collaborating Public Servant (blog 7) Collaborative Design Story (blog 8) and The Learning Public Servant: REWILD-ing the mind (blog 9) and Learning Design Story (blog 10)

Systemic design thinking and practices are gaining momentum by entering the field of government policies, services and program design. In the 10–part “Unbounded Affairs: Systemic Design (with)in Government’’ blog series a diverse collective of thinkers and practitioners explores the concept of “public systemic design” for a relational future. How to deliver “good” public services in an increasingly “complex” world?

For the final part of this blog series we explore how the blog series itself is an example of a “Far & Wide” (inter)systemic public design practice (see blog 9), in which recognizing opportunities to “slow down” (time) and to create space for interactive “learning” (expanding our minds, our awareness to observe action, reaction, interaction) can be a way for designing public servants to experience / be “complexity” and thus to “shapeshift” into new, liberating, anti-oppressive realities. To do so, Marlieke Kieboom (public servant, service designer, mother, anthropologist, generator of this blog series) reflects on how the blog series unfolded, what the series “shapeshifted” contextually for her, others and her government work, what was learned, and what could become from here?

What unfolded

“Why did you write this thing, what was driving you?”.
“How on earth did you do this, in between mothering two young kids, work, life?”.
“What, you are still working on this?! Why?”.
“What does this have to do with your government work in service design?”.
“Why did you do this unpaid, in your own time?”.

Just a few questions from the past year and a half while I was working on this blog series.

It is hard to point at a specific “why” for this blog series. In hindsight I think it was forming, constructing, dying, reforming, shifting and brewing underneath my skin for a very long time.

Maybe it started “in-between” my maternal lineage, “in-between” my orphaned, traumatized, “schizophrenic” grandmother on one side, my Soviet-block “oma” on the other side, and my own caring mother, who, “ in-between” mothering me, my sister and her suicidal mother, helped refugee families access government services and navigate life in our tiny, pre-dominantly white-skinned, Dutch farmer village.

Maybe it started with the land where I am from, a place “in-between” Belgium and the Netherlands, locked “in between” the ocean, a river mouth and an invisible land border, where we speak our own language that is not Dutch or Flemish, where we do not belong to anyone but to each other and our connected past?

Or did it start with my immigration, from a country with a colonizing past-present (Netherlands) to a colonized country (Canada | Turtle Island), where I came to observe and meet people with ancestral ties to the land, but who are displaced, oppressed and continue to be discriminated against? How am I connected, and how could I become part of our “healing”, without doing further harm?

All of those processes coalesced into a perfect storm. But which events propelled me to start writing, to start “creating”? I think I can bring it back to three interlocking, personal “life events’, that together became my own personal “shapeshifter” (see blog 4) if you will. All 3 events involve the state and its ‘public services’, sometimes showing up as serving, caring, and sometimes as deeply oppressing.

Event 1. In becoming “mother’’, I perpetuated humanity for at least one more generation. Whether that’s for better or worse, is something I can’t answer. I hope it’s for the better? With this joyful fluke, my genetic lineage and stored memories from long ago not only leaped into the future, but also sit more firmly “in-between”. I enfolded myself “in-between” my parents, my partner, his family and my children. That’s a weird sensation, this “simultaneous’ belonging to the past, present and future. Beyond a deeper valuation for our “caring” public healthcare services (would I be here without them?), mothering also brought a deeper questioning: what is this magical and at times torturous thing, called “life” as it unfolds in its cycle of life and death, life and death? The idea of my children dying one day is … unfathomable, yet life. Is that love?

Event 2. During the pandemic summer of 2021 we, my family consisting of two parenting public servants, a toddler and a 3-month old baby, left for a trip “into the forest”, an ancient forest on so-called Vancouver Island. We went there to witness the “Fairy Creek” deforestation protests together with Huu-ay-aht, Ditidaht and Pacheedaht Indigenous youth and elders, left-leaning hippies and peaceful shit disturbers. While we were there, we were heavily policed by the state (C-IRG, a special police-military “Community-Industry Response” unit, or “Pipeline Police”, who wear “thin-blue lines” on their uniforms) with violent arrests happening daily and helicopters flying over our encampment. Our presence was both appreciated and distrusted: some people welcomed the medical aid we were able to provide, some people questioned our intentions by thinking we were government spies.

In between seeing the environmental devastation first hand, and being among people’s high energy and polarizing views and emotions, I was trying to understand what was unfolding. Could actively contesting the “oppressor” bring about a more “relational” future? Who or what is being oppressed here? Connections were found with others who were trying to make sense of it all, by sharing stories and conversation with each other, in the bare gravel pit where giant trees once stood.

It was here that I saw a first glimmer of what else “public systemic design” could be, beyond polarization, beyond “saving the trees”, mapping the problems to change “the system”, towards seeking a true and free connection to ourselves, in relation with and relating to other humans and the land. How could I bring this insight into my work? What is then the role of a designing “public servant” in such contested spaces?

Fairy Creek camp entrance (left) — my child playing with rocks in the gravel pit while listening to elders and stories in the evening circle, with bare, clearcut mountains in the background — Summer 2021 (Photos: Marlieke Kieboom).

Event 3. Then we lost our home. It was our 4th rental home in 5 years time, and our second “sale-eviction”. Our wealthy “landlords” (what’s in a word.. ) sold our rental home to another millionaire couple (sailant fact: both couples own more than 1 home). The new landlords “disposed” of us as anonymous “inhabitants” in a 2-month time frame, perfectly in line with the Provincial residential tenancy act, the “law” without ever meeting us. This sale-eviction was different though, because this time we effectively became “unhomed” with two little kids in tow in an overheated post-pandemic private rental market with unbearable prices. We were privileged enough to only go unhomed for a month (our belongings packed in a friend’s garage and travel nomadically) before moving into another rental. However this event woke up a dormant, protective lioness in me that I didn’t even know existed. What is this confinement, of having to earn a double-income just to separate my family into childcare/jobs and all the other un-liberating, disconnecting elements, just to afford middle-class, urban “life”?

My own “shapeshifting” stories mapped onto a “squircular” (square and circular) way of seeing “systems” and “complexity” — Marlieke Kieboom CC-BY-4.0 2023

It became apparent to me that what is going on in the world at scale, was playing itself out through me, and it wasn’t feeling good. It crippled me with stress and a deep desire to escape. But where or what into? I started to wonder, dream... would the reverse then also be possible? Could I more firmly instil a different kind of approach and agency within me, away from oppression and extractive capitalism, and let it help “shapeshift” the future?

I also became curious to what this idea could look like in my work as a ‘human-centred’ “service designer” in the public service. Would it be even possible to make a meaningful, ethical contribution to the future of “liberated” humanity as a designing public servant inside the confines of a human-created concept called “government”, my own employer who took care of me when becoming a mother, but who oppressed me as a citizen in Fairy Creek and who evicted me as a resident in favour of people wealthier than me? Or is it futile, and is “government” part of an “old” system that is in need of dying? Should I then step out sideways to help speed up its process of dying and composting?

The same question popped up for my design practice: if service design research and concepts like “systemic change” originate from an oppressive, consumerist, capitalist paradigm, then what should they evolve into, or better, what could sprout in their place? What could my previous public “systemic service design” experiences, in which I deeply “connected” to the people who are living through the trauma of mental, societal and bodily breakdown by being indebted, overdosing, dying and grieving, teach me about transitions and transformation in “systemic design”? (see blog 6)

I decided to find out, but kept this “questioning” place deliberately “free” as an unpaid, untethered place “in-between”: “in- between” work and mothering, writing “in-between” day and night, “in-between” us-two, a term dubbed by Indigenous thinker-activist Tyson Yunkaporta (Sandtalk) to talk about that entangled learning space “in-between” myself and other people on a similar path. What could be and become of this place?

It’s from this “free” place of deep questioning that I started a (then invisible to me) generative (life-giving) “pattern” of relating <> collaborating <> learning, which generated the blog series in relation to and with others and which ultimately “transformed” and “liberated” my ways of working and thinking, and ultimately living life.

What generated

This blog series started in 2022 with a series of open-ended conversations, collaborative writings and reviews, before I published the blogs in “unfinished” form as an open-ended experiment in 2023, one by one. Based on what kind of knowledge the “Unbounded” people (people who were reading and contributing to the blogs in comments, conversations), but also based on what kind of knowledge the algorythms of the publishing platforms were attracting, I would rewrite what was written, and publish the next blog, one by one.

In doing so I unknowingly took you, the reader along for a ride to not only come and learn about the content of the blog series: complexity, uncertainty and public systemic (service) design. I somewhat unintentionally also generated a way to experience “complexity” and to “complexify” together, to feel it, to be with it, and to change with it, through it. Together we were able to demonstrate that systemic design is not a “thing” that is outside me or you in the shape of a business plan, an academic article, a public service, a systems map, a new behavioral framework, a “case-study” or a huge system in need of “change”. Instead “systemic design” is close to us at all times, right in front of us, always embodied in between “us-two” and our designerly minds. By observing it, becoming aware of it, becoming part of it, mimicking it, and start moving with it, we can enable others (willingly or not) to come along for the ride.

This insight slowly emerged as an unintended consequence of my “in-between” actions: it was my observation about what was happening that became the “action” (putting thoughts into conversation and writing) that created the “reaction” (response to my writing) in its surroundings, like a ripple in the water. Through observing this process very closely (“learning”) I came to see that this process in itself is a generative “interaction”: by making my writing and reviewing process a collaborative, open effort over time others could become “generative” with me, and … we were following a certain pattern (relate <> collaborate <> learn).

It was through this process that I came to see that I am “complexity”, I am “interconnectedness”, I am “in-between” everything else and that I am thus able to “complexify” my “interconnectedness”, my “entanglement” by “interacting” with complexity, with our “in-between”-ness, “interconnectedness” itself. I came to see that this formative process was “alive”, like the ends of branches on a tree, with an ever growing collective of “unbounded” people across the globe, one blog after the other. I also came to see that it dies when the pattern (relate <> collaborate <> learn) is let go off.

It blew my mind. For a short while we made visible that invisible, connective “in-between” energy, as if we temporarily dyed that unbounded, stateless “space” in a bright color. And then poof, it was gone again, back into its elusive state.

But .. before it disappeared we caught a glimpse of the pattern (relate <> collaborate <> learn, and that we could practice it in a REWILDING mindset) by observing our actions, reactions and interactions during the process of writing, reviewing and publishing the blog series together.

We also learned on which part of the pattern to focus our attention when wanting to “shapeshift” in public systemic design scenarios (from Light to Deep to Far+Wide, see blogs 5, 7, 9). It’s in this way precisely that we liberated ourselves of the confines of what “systemic design” ought to be: a Western theory, an Indigenous ancient way of being, an AI-entangled intelligence in which our planet itself is becoming self-conscious (listen to the podcast “Edges in the Middle III, Indy Johar + Báyò Akómoláfé)? It doesn’t really matter, the answer will always lie “in-between’.

The designing, shapeshifting public servant transcending the systemic design paradox in government work- Marliekek Kieboom 2023-CC-BY-4.0

What matters though is that you, learning and designing public servant, can do what I did. With some openness, creativity, perseverance, vulnerability and courage you can start interactive, “generative”, “shapeshifting” learning processes: bring an “in-between” group together, and start talking, start learning… about shapeshifting, oppression, and life’s unbounded boundaries. These people (or dogs, plants :) could be inside or outside your organisation, inside or outside your country. Try to find a group of people different enough from you to challenge your perspectives, but not too different.

Though my learning journey was far from linear. Blog 1 became blog 3, blog “intermezzo” and the concept of “shapeshifting design” were non-existent before I started publishing, and the entire series sequence shuffled multiple times, much to the demise of my patient partner. The process of “unfolding”, of learning and observing in collaboration and in relation with my context also dramatically “lengthened” (slowed down) my publication process due to wanting to be patient and mindful to mending and attending tensions that arose in conversations (“what is wrong with human-centred design?”), work through conundrums I couldn’t find answers or words for at first (“the systemic design paradox”) or be respectful of people and their way of thinking about “time”. I felt pressure at times to write and publish faster, just like in public service design projects. But I resisted, and tried not to give in, in part because there was no formal publisher or “deadline” but also to literally slow down and give conversations and dialogues a chance to form into relationships. It led to a deepening and learning in ways I could have never imagined.

What helped the process was an “intimate” interactive phase, with a small, 10-person group of conversationalists, reviewers (2022), kind of like a “greenhouse” where seedlings could grow. And then there was a “global” phase, the bigger “garden”, where I started publishing openly on Medium and LinkedIn (January 2023).

To my surprise each blog magically attracted new people, new information, new knowledge, new ideas, in part generated by you, the “Unbounded” gardeners on LinkedIn and Medium. This magical, generative, mostly positive “energy” made each blog flourish and grow upon publication, along with the accompanying visual language, art pieces and music.

From seedling to garden to forest: how the blog series sprouted and grew — Marlieke Kieboom CC-BY-4.0–2023.

At the end, approaching May 2023, I felt I had created this gigantic, sticky snowball that was hard to melt back to its core, fractal snowflake. It led to experiencing a strange, alienating sensation: “did I write this, or was it something or someone else that was writing through me all that time?”. At times I felt major imposter syndrome. Who am I to put anything out there, “in-between” the big contemporary philosophers (Nora Bateson, Indy Johar, Bayo Akomolafe Báyò Akómoláfé Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens, Daniel Christian Wahl), the deep complexity, academic folks (Peter Jones, Dave Snowden) the experienced public sector design/innovators (Christian Bason, Geoff Mulgan) or Indigenous thinkers (Melanie Goodchild, Tyson Yunkaporta) whom I all admire and feel inspired by.

Wasn’t I just a plain, no-name, no-PhD public servant? I let that feeling just be, and decided to see it as a valuable position to be in, and to not be afraid but to be curious. After all, I thought it was more important to crack the operative shapeshifting “code” so that everyone can do what the “us-in-between” folks are doing, big or small. There is no time to waste when it comes to our current times of poly-crises. We need all of us. So what could this creative process generate?

We need all of us.

What became

I can’t name or capture it all. Here are some bits and pieces. Most are completely unintended consequences I could have never foreseen, but coalesced and emerged nonetheless:

new knowledge and learning on the practice of public systemic design in government, free of oppression and respectful of the earth’s rules of life (unbounded boundaries), which in reverse changed me, and my perception of how to to “be” (or interbe”) in my work environment of “service design”
a 20-person collective of “Unbounded Affairs” co-authors, reviewers, friends
over 100.000 individual views of the blog series and images on LinkedIn and Medium (at times “trending” as top-author on the topic of “government”)
2 blog reading “collectives” that continue to meet: one is a circle of public servants in the North Americas and the other is a collective of public servants in Helsinki, Finland. ‘We always start discussing your blogs, but always end up talking about things I never thought we would talk about. That’s the beauty of it.’
almost 800 new people as connecting nodes in my network, vastly expanding my connection to new, interesting, diverse thoughts and knowledge
connecting conversations with my family and friends. My dad – from whom I inherited an experimental mind – thinks I should send the blogs to Putin, in the hopes of ending the war. I told him I am afraid he will find it and use it to end humanity, since design and ‘shapeshifting’ can be used either way. My mum uses REWILD-ing in her (non-public service) work. And my partner is happy I’m finally joining him in being a post-modern “anarchist” PLUR (Peace Love Unity Respect) public servant (haha). He still wonders why I needed 1,5 years of torturous blog writing for that.
attracted innovative, new design talent to the BC Public Service (even though these blogs were written on personal title)
a new collaboration with a local art + design university (in formation)
a new collaboration with a global cohort of public sector innovation evaluators (in formation)
a new job in which I can practice my newly acquired values about design, oppression, taking care and power distribution
designing public servant colleagues who are now experimenting with the REWILD mindset and “relate <> collaborate <> learn” pattern on major policy changes and contentious portfolios (“let me be your guinea pig!”)
the formation of the “Shapeshifters”, a new public “Far + Wide” design collective of designing public servants in my public service organisation (in formation)
by applying principles of “shapeshifting design” in my work I was able to connect and build relationships between 3 distributed government teams that were previously not connected
practising “REWILD”ing daily in my personal life and work life by asking questions: how can expand and widen my mind, how am I connected to what I am working on, what or whom is disconnected and why, am I being oppressive or liberating, and how am I respecting the unbounded boundaries of “life” on Earth?
invitations to present at conferences, provide workshops, podcasts (and .. no time to go)
an invitation to co-write a book based on some of the thoughts the collective of “Unbounded” Ministers brought forward

Some of the blog reviews that came from “far” and “wide”:

“The REWILD is a fascinating vision for public sector service, in that you’re implying intrapersonal, relational and collaborative development of the whole person. The alignment with complexity concepts is mind-expanding and really aspirational.” — Systemic Design Academic Professional, Canada | Turtle Island
“These blogs are leaving a big impression. It is a really super honest reflection of you as a whole person. It’s unvarnished thinking and a critical design discourse in the public design realm, something I have not seen before. — Strategic Design Director, Provincial Public Service, Canada | Turtle Island
“I write about transition design, but I look at your work for inspiration for where our practice could go. Your blogs are about transformation, and are, in that sense, transformational for anyone who genuinely engages with the material.”- Systemic Design Consultant, Netherlands.
“I find myself using the new words you are introducing in your blogs, such as view-relating, and squircular. Squir-cu-lar, I still struggle with pronouncing that one though, haha”. — Public Servant | Academic, Federal Government, United States of America
“What you’re doing is mixing theories of “complexity” in there — but without letting yourself be pinned down by anything. It’s almost like you already morphed into something else when people try to grasp it. You should start a global public service design group, the “Morphers”.” - Service Design Consultant, UK
“The first thing I want to say is a huge thank you for your writings. I have read all the Unbounded Affairs posts. There is not only smartness, but also a lot of heart and lived experience behind your words. What you write resonates and helps people like me. I also think the frame of systemic public design is right on and I encourage you to keep thinking in that direction. I want you to know that you make a difference. You are not writing for nothing, not throwing words into the void.” — Public Servant, Indigenous Services, Federal Government Canada | Turtle Island.
“One of the most interesting elements of this series is the time and intention in layering the square (Western) view over the circular (Indigenous view), and how this occurs in nature (Phi!): this is a massive contribution to the public innovation discourse, and is supertangible for those of us at the Federal Government. The blog series is also interesting because it is about government delivery of complex tasks in complex environments: “design” is one lens to wade through the mess, but even if a bureaucrat wants to be method agnostic, they won’t argue with the context. Well done. What’s next?” — Public Servant, Youth Employment, Federal Government of Canada
“Thanks for sharing your latest blog. It hits right to the heart of my experience in my current role, and exactly what I needed today especially” — Innovator for UNDP — Chile.
“Today, I want to reach out to you to sincerely express my appreciation for your excellent articles in the series “Unbounded Affairs.” I came across your articles a few months ago, and since then, I became one of your very loyal readers. I enjoyed reading them a lot as I found your insights to be very fruitful and inspiring, particularly with the visual frameworks and project examples you provide.” — Design Student, Technological University of Delft, Netherlands
“I was really moved by your medium article, blog 6. It is so heartening to read about other public servants’ experience in trying to do things differently, sometimes never feeling like we are doing it “big enough” and the roadblocks that need to be maneuvered out of the way or climbed over.” — Public Servant in the BC Public Service
“I want to question your argument about living in more “complex” times. I don’t think we are.” — Public Service Design Consultant, Netherlands
“Your blog series is like a piece of art to me, it’s a creative expression of you in the field of systemic design that is pretty unforgiving towards these kinds of expressions that are outside the established forms and norms.” — Public Servant, Academic — USA
“I was wondering if you could make a plain-language version?” — Colleague, BC Public Service

The relevance of “shapeshifting” systemic design in public service work

You might wonder: why does sharing this story of how this blog series came about matter for our public systemic service design profession?

Well, it matters, because governments worldwide are in the “service business” of “taking care”, in part inspired by a frame introduced by Cameron Tonkinwise, 2023) to understand service design in the private sector. Governments circle a (mostly invisible and often disconnecting) border around (ceded or unceded) land, and demand from its people inside the “bounds” to pay taxes and give up certain freedoms. In return for a little bit or a lot of oppression (depends per “circle”) governments promise to “take care” of certain things in the shape of “public services”: education, healthcare, safety, border security. Within those bounds “extractive capitalism” is used as the predominant economic model to generate trades and income (ie. selling energy from human labour, natural resources) and thus… money for taxes.

As a designing and researching public servant I am mostly asked to assist in designing public services that ought to “take care”, and not to attend or mend the contradiction between “oppressing” and “taking care". For this business of “taking care”, I have to “connect” to what is in need of “care”: I need to interview, empathize and listen to individual citizens and their experiences with their connected and disconnected public service environments. My designing self sits perfectly “in-between” to perform this task: I sit “in-between” unknown-to-me citizens and elected officials, “in-between” my personal life as a citizen and my work life as public servant.

But where my task becomes “hard” is when I have to bring this “taking care” business into my organisation (government) and point out the shortcomings (“we can do better here, here and here, according to citizens, public servants”) without being tasked to mention or mend the contradicting way of organizing both “oppression” and “taking care”. I have dubbed this the endemic “systemic design paradox” in which public servants are being asked to not take care (oppress people, extract finite resources, destroy the earth) as well as to take care (of the detrimental consequences caused by not taking care of people or the earth, see systemic design paradox in blog 2: A Complex Matter).

Second, we have organised our government organisations in ways that do not resemble “life” in the way life organises itself. Governments are organised and structured in such highly “disconnecting” and “separating” ways that it has rendered itself incapable of responding to “complexity” in meaningful ways. We have put perfectly connected things into such neatly separated boxes: Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Housing, and we put perfectly ‘complex’ people into org charts and roles: Service Designer, Deputy Minister, the individual citizen in need of public services. The further and higher up you go into the chain of government command (power), the deeper the disconnection is from the people we ought to serve, and the problems we/they face. This is by design: the “government as machine” is a reflection of the way we have come to think and act in the past 400 years. It disconnects, distances and desensitizes us in order to fulfill its paradigmatic duty of “oppressing” while “taking care”.

And third, as a public servant I am asked to disconnect myself, and my own ways of being and feeling connected from the service design problems and the people who experience them, even though I am, like them, a citizen, a resident, oppressed and taken care of in various ways. It’s in my public service oath to be “neutral” (meaning: a-political), but it comes at the expense of recognizing that humanity is inter-connected with its context.

We have put perfectly connected things into such neatly separated boxes.

These three “systemic” patterns make it much harder to “care” for what I, as a human public service designer, need to connect to. At times my public service (design) assignments feel so impossible: my task is to genuinely connect with people, and bring their public service experience and insights (“we need connection, collaboration”) inside “the system”, where it has nowhere to go for how deeply and systemically we engrained “disconnection” into our governmental ways of doing things to enable “not taking care”. The government system is broken, and we broke it ourselves.

So what is then the actual task of a “designing” public servant, or “service designer” in government, if it’s not “taking care” or “oppressing”?

So what is then the actual task of a “designing” public servant, or “service designer” in government, if it’s not “taking care” or “oppressing”?

I have come to a few insights. And yes, I am still working as a public service designer, even with more joy and a sense of purpose than before. I have come to see that it doesn’t matter from which place or angle I practice my newly found, liberating, unbounded, rewilding version of public “inter-systemic design”. I will try to organize my insights according to the REWILD principles: Relate, Expand (views), Widen (approaches), Imagine intergenerationally, Liberate and Distribute (power, stories, love), in no specific order:

“connecting”: I connect with people who experience difficulties in life that are caused by (governments, people) not “taking or giving care” and disconnection, by tracing how I am connected to what I am working on. Within this space I try to do the same for and with as many people as my energy allows within government, and I focus especially on those in power holding positions by introducing the “relate <> collaborate <> learn” pattern. I tune in, mimic and move along at the speed at which a certain challenge is “orbitting”. It is in this space that I get to expand views, and widen approaches, and come to ideas for how to reframe and redesign public services. If I was able to make them only even a fraction more “relational”, if they only resonate a fraction more with their surroundings than before, then I feel my work has purpose.
“work in-between”: I can be a public servant and a writer, I can be a public servant and work with academia and communities. From this place “in-between” I can better embody “interconnection”, and you can too. It doesn’t need to be writing, it can be anything that involves a small group of folks “in-between”, relating, collaborating, learning in open and creative ways.
“we are complexity”: I have come to see that my personal life-events are not standalone, disconnected, “personal” events. Instead they are an expression of the state of humanity and the earth that have found a way to express themselves through me. Every human is currently experiencing the effects of oppression (i.e. income inequality, climate change) in some shape, way or form. Some more than me, some less than me depending on their degree of “liberation” from being oppressed by other humans. Going forward we can question more deeply: how do I oppress and disconnect, how do I connect and liberate? How can we make better use of our personal stories about “disconnection” and bring them deeper into our public service design work as useful, valuable storytelling nodes that can also represent “interconnection”. If we can’t “connect” to what we are working on, then we can’t “shift” together either. This element is especially true for both ends of the power spectrum: people with power holding positions and people disproportionally affected by the negative effects of our “power over” paradigm. It is my task to “complexify” (“squircularize”) in this space particularly.
“an expanding profession”: as a profession service design is moving into the direction of “ecosystem service design” in which clusters of services are offered around “life events” (retirement, death, health event) due to the way AI is developing as well as due to a growing pressure to meet the expectations of citizens with “no time”. Are these “relational” public services? Not yet, since they still reason from the human as an “individual”, but this movement will require and create more “openness” to thinking about “complexity” and interconnectedness. In that sense it is an opportunity to generate as much “relatoniality” as we can within this new “service design” space.
“agency”: As a public servant I am not the mere “Uber” of elected officials, a service delivery arm to the unknown, individual citizen. I am a designing, connecting public servant with agency and an ability to connect, to learn, to be curious and to be critical. Learning and slowing project spaces down are my acts of service design ‘activism’.
“awareness”: My increased awareness of “complexity” in my work surroundings helps me to see what to focus my energy and efforts on. If I want to go from “light” to a “deep” scenario, then I can start my efforts with “relating”. If I want to move from a “deep” to a “far+wide” scenario, I can focus on “collaborating”, and if I want to move into “far+wide” over a long period of time, then I focus my attention on generating collective “learning”. This awareness saves me a lot of wasting of energy as I can better accept what is, be more patient and also be respectful of how change wants to show itself.
“undoing my mind of contemporary, disconnecting, polarizing, objectifying constructs”: Thinking in fixed “noun-dichotomies” such as: Indigenous, Western, Black, White, save the trees/cut the trees, is part of our crisis and deepens oppression by disconnecting people with similar values (against oppression, for a healthy earth). It pitches people against each other and does not contribute to creating “in-between” human agency. It serves the old paradigm, not the new. In this realm I have made new (global) friendships in which we openly explore our pluriversal identities and how these are connected to the “land”. I am also sharing a fixed percentage of my monthly income to contribute to the income of a local family with ancestral ties to Turtle Island to support them in meeting their basic needs. This relationship is based on trust and time, and does not include asking questions about how the money is spent.
“De-romanticising a return to a mythical, simpler past”. I accept that I cannot return to a mythical past, where I go back to “nature” and leave “society” or “technology” en masse for my permanent entanglement with the here and now and interdependance with modern technologies. I can not ignore or undo harm that has been imposed by colonisation. What I can do is change my relationship with and in between myself, others and our living environment.
New language and new imagery play a crucial role in imagining new futures and inviting different ways of thinking. When I am at loss for words I invent new words, such as “view-relating” and “squircular”, and new concepts such as “intersystemic” / “shapeshifting” design. Some die, some stick, some form into something new.

Introducing new imagery: thinking about how to flip “org charts” and demonstrate new ideas in more distributed, less hierarchical ways — Marlieke Kieboom -CC-BY-4.0, 2023

Experimental sketches and images that sprouted from when I first started thinking about view-relating, squircularity (square and circle thinking) and complexity. These images didn’t make it into the blog series but helped form ideas and new visuals — Marlieke Kieboom 2023 — CC-BY-4.0

So long

How to be entangled, unbounded and free while respecting the bounds, the rules of life on earth? This was blog 10, and I”m leaving this question here as a witnessing guard to everything that is yet to come.

This systemic design practice story serves to demonstrate how “learning” and “slowing down” are deliberate, highly personal yet activist acts that can be started by anyone at any time, regardless of a “systemic design” project space or government context. Public systemic design, systemic change or systemic innovation do not only find their strength in yet another systems mapping exercise, or in some kind of grandiose effort to move mountains. Instead systemic design can be as small as a firefly, a personal “shapeshifting” dance that everyone and anyone can start every day of our lives, through liberation of our minds, through respecting life’s unbounded bounds and its eternal balance until the end of time.

The blog series that is now in front of you is crystalized in its current shape on our pixelated screens. Its stillness enables you to react to it, respond to it and work with it by taking its knowledge into your life and into your (public service, design) work. There it might continue to grow or meander, in relation to you and your “view-relating” perspectives on systems, design and public services. But the blogs won’t talk back now, unlike during its formation. Remember that the blogs are “dead”, just like public services that are not connecting to their creators, their users and the environments in which they reside (context), because we set them in stone and forget how they and we could evolve and “learn” in-between. How to generate public services that are “alive” and follow a life-generating pattern?

It is for this reason that I will refrain from presenting the ideas that sprouted from the Unbounded Affairs blogs series as a new public systemic design “theory”, “framework” or “model”, and I will try to keep refraining from it even though it is tempting as the current systems might want to praise and reward ‘us-two’ for it. Our work has a high need to remain free, uncaptured from the dynamics of extractive capitalism, colonialism and “New Public Management”, which emphasize oppression, competition, performance, efficiency and public choice (over public value) by importing business concepts, techniques and values.

Through this blog series I lost my way, together with you. Thank you, dear reader and creator of “Unbounded Affairs”, for following along. This is our artistic contribution to imagining and transforming into a new, liberated future of humanity.

“What are the modes of responding to a crisis that is not a repudiation or a resolution or a cancellation of that crisis, but is an invitation to develop new intelligences, to shapeshift? It’s what Félix Guattari, the psychologist is saying, “Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”. To me, that is post-activism.” (..) “The modern myth is that we are in charge of ourselves. I think microbes and trees and textures and archetypes and colors and buildings are participating in what it means to be us. And so post-activism says we need to meet the prosthetics. We need to touch the conditions of our becoming if we are to shapeshift, or else we will keep on being there. So how do we lose our way?”

Báyò Akómoláfé — “Redefining Crisis: Creating Change Through Shapeshifting”, April 2023 in the “Points of Relation” podcast with Thomas Huebl.

About the Author, this Blog series and the Collective

Get in touch! My email is: first name dot last name @gov dot bc dot ca

Marlieke Kieboom (white, she-her, Zeeuws-Flamish-Dutch-German and “unknown” roots, MSc Political Anthropology + MA Complex Emergencies, immigrant settler* in Canada | Turtle Island) is a public service designer with 20+ years of experience and knowledge in the fields of social innovation, systemic (service) design, complexity science and public policy. Marlieke has led major collaborations between academia, governments, non-profits and communities in Europe, Canada and Latin America. She finds joy in developing new approaches for coming to see and relate to each other and the complexity of our worlds in collaborative, participatory and decolonised ways. Read more about what inspired Marlieke to write this blog series in the Prologue.

Marlieke wrote this blog series based on conversations with a like-minded and like-hearted collective — the “Ministry of Unbounded & Entangled Affairs” — whose people work and think at the intersections of design, public policy, complexity, social justice and deep ecology. The series was written over the course of 2022. Read more about the collective and the blog series in Blog 1.

Marlieke currently works for the Public Service of British Columbia in the field of public service and systemic design. This blog series was written in her personal “in-between” time on personal title. Her personal views are mixed in with the collective she spoke with. They do not represent the political views of the government she works for.

Consider making a one-time contribution via Paypal or becoming a supporter on Patreon to get early access to upcoming blogs and express gratitude for 300+ hours of “free” research and to nurture future writing, community building and the development of open learning material on systemic design for public servants. Thank you!

“A settler is someone who benefits from the privilege of having their worldview imposed upon the lands and the bodies of everyone living in these lands” — Chelsea Vowel (Vice, 2019)