Blog 3 - Systemic Viewpoints: Introducing and Questioning Systemic Design (with)in a Public Service Context
Soundtrack Blog 3: Trettmann — Grauer Beton (Lambert Rework, 2018)
Artwork for Blog 3: “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle” is Indigenous artist Kent Monkman’s shape-shifting, time-travelling, gender-fluid alter ego who shows up in his paintings such as “The Wooden Boat People” and “Resurgence of the People” (2019).
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) Collaborating Design Story (blog 8), 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” to generate “symbiotic” well-being between communities, places and the natural world.
Let’s recap. In blog 2 (“A Complex Matter”), we looked at the challenges faced by public service designers in delivering meaningful and impactful work. We uncovered that public servants must navigate a complex array of perspectives, including the context of their policy task, methodology, politics, and their own perceptions and experiences. Those working to innovate, transform, and reform within government find themselves in a deep socio-economic “paradox” with unique patterns. They must operate within the confines of a “silo-ed” government system that simultaneously upholds and protects patterns that perpetuate “crisis” (extract, remove, oppress, enrich, protect!) while also attempting to reduce “crisis” for both people and their environments through designing and delivering public services. For example, the “Ministry of Justice” and the “Ministry of Forestry” may design policies and laws to protect the forestry or mining industry and to police protesters, while the “Ministry of Housing”, the “Ministry of Indigenous Reconciliation” and the “Ministry of Disaster Response & Climate Response” design policies and services to provide support to communities and environments negatively impacted by these industries and value sets in place.
When public service “innovators” then attempt to address this “deep paradox” by unravelling the “entanglement” of these issues and pushing the boundaries of the status quo at the highest levels, they often encounter resistance from existing protocols, procedures, rules, regulations, policies, and work cultures, as the inner workings of governments are inherently risk-averse and geared towards maintaining the status quo by design. How can public servants “jump out” of these constraining structures and innovate for transformative, diverse and regenerative futures, while not getting “pushed out” for being too “unruly”? That was the question we were left with.
While blog 2 laid the foundation for a contextual understanding of our complex world, and in particular from a “public service” perspective, blog 3 lays the foundation for a deeper understanding of “systems” and “design”. In blog 3 we:
- introduce, explore and situate “public systemic design” as an approach to overcome the “deep paradox” as found in a government context and to start working with complexity, instead of trying to reduce it or leave it behind
- present “public systemic design” examples
- question the Western focus on and notions of the word “system” by discussing: “What kind of system(ic design) are we talking about?”.” We uncover two different systemic views: a human-created systemic view, and a natural systemic view, and we discuss its implications
- find a curious “systemic design dilemma” that deserves more awareness in both the public sector and in the systemic design community at large. What would be a way to overcome this dilemma?
- introduce “squircularity” as a design principle for a “3rd” design space in between differing systemic views that could hold potential to transcend both the paradox and the dilemma
Blog 3 contains a few technical bits and pieces, but we are making sure that the theory always connects back to the practice through anecdotes, examples and stories. Just let our minds wander and wonder into the deep, complex rabbit holes of “systems” and “design”. Be warned though, we might not be able to “un-see” what we came to see. Have fun!
Introducing Public Systemic Design
Systemic design, also referred to as systems innovation, system-shifting design, systems oriented design or (co)-design for complexity, brings together systems thinking — a way of looking at the world and its complex challenges as interdependent and connected — and design practice — a pragmatic, iterative and collaborative way to generate creativity, imagination, initiatives and interventions — to transcend and expand our thinking and actions to work with(in) complex challenges (see Sevaldson & Jones, 2019, System-Shifting Design Report, 2021).
Here we introduce the term “public” systemic design to refer to the application of systemic design in policy-making, project-program designs, and product designs (with)in governments or other public entities. Public systemic design highlights collaborations between and within governments, organisations and communities, over applying systemic design merely in or for individual organisations or businesses.
The characteristics of public systemic design practice in a contemporary, predominantly “Western”* public administration context, could be described in the following “technical” ways:
- Acknowledging complexity: public policy, program or service design teams that acknowledge and respect complexity by seeing how the issues people work on are interconnected and transcend institutional boundaries (see blog 2). New collaborations therefore require long term, “big picture” visions and investments that transcend those human-made boundaries. Acknowledging complexity also means designing ways of working that simultaneously influence systems as well as the people or actors in it.
- No one is an expert: collaborative policy, program or service teams that consist of people with different, cross-disciplinary knowledge backgrounds, including peer researchers and people with lived experience. Everyone brings their own knowledge to the process, acknowledging that no one knows everything.
- Inquiry through numbers and stories: systemic design practice investigates a situation by combining rigorous (quantitative) data gathering with qualitative, action research, such as gathering stories of people with lived experience, to infuse a collective process of sense-making and meaning-making
- Building trustworthy, equitable relationships: the focus lies on building relationships between people, across Ministries, across sectors and across communities
- Developing shared visions for the long term future through creativity and imagination: developing a shared narrative and vision for the long term helps to better connect short-term outputs to continuous innovation, for example launching a new service to address immediate social housing shortages while also creating housing security for the long term
- Reflexivity and learning as an evaluation and impact strategy for transformation: applying rigid measurement and summative evaluation methodologies to predict or measure “impact” is not a useful activity when looking at innovation in complex settings, since the future is unpredictable, dynamic and uncertain. It’s also undesirable to isolate one part of the whole to study/evaluate it. Instead evaluative, reflexive strategies that support generating rapid, real-time learning, relationships and insights are applied, such as “dynamic evaluation”, “developmental evaluation”, “participatory systemic inquiry”, “systemic action research” and “ripple effect mapping”.
Systemic design as a contemporary academic field and work practice is only just over a decade old. It emerged from different, more mature streams of thought, such as systems theory, environmental philosophy, and design thinking. The Systemic Design Association globally unites academics and practitioners in yearly symposia and is a hub for active discussions. There are also local communities such as the Edmonton-based Systemic Design Exchange which convenes a growing systemic design community in Canada. Public systemic design as a way for public servants and governments to work with and respond to complexity is just starting to gain traction now. This development is potentially spearheaded by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which many governments were forced to develop public services across silos at warp speed.
What is the value of public systemic design for the public sector? Public systemic design’s popularity is on the rise for its intent to operate at a “systemic” level. It intends to influence “human thought” and intends to operate at high-level organisational structures and institutions, such as laws and policy. In doing so it encompasses other “human” centred design foci (human actions, human things, and human symbols) and design disciplines, such as UX/UI design, product design and service design.
Its value as a practice might lie in its ability to support public service workers in better situating public services in an interconnected “ecosystem” of services and relations. Public systemic design could provide new ways forward in designing government services, programs and policies that respond better to complexity because it can:
- make complex, systemic challenges more visible and tangible, and therefore make the long-term future more actionable. Systems theory on its own has a tendency to stay in the theoretical realm but design pulls it into practice.
- provide a concrete way to work in collaborative, regenerative processes with communities (outside government), which is an inherent requirement to be able to work in complex, systemic issues
- reduce risk of designing the “wrong” (short-term, harmful) services, programs or policies by looking at the interconnectedness and interdependence of sets of services
- respond more freely and intuitively to ever changing, emergent realities of complex systems as design practice is an iterative, nimble cycle of research, experimentation/action, reflection, trial and error (“This didn’t work, let’s try something else”)
Here is a short story of a designer who works for a Provincial Government in Canada to give us a taste for what it is like to design “systemically”:
“My first and maybe only experience of “true” systemic [service] design was when we had to come together in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic to figure out a way to safely welcome temporary migrant agricultural workers into the Province. It was an incredibly fast design process, something I had never witnessed before. All of a sudden everyone who was involved in the “problem” was in our Miro board [digital whiteboard tool] trying to make sense of the entire service system: from the executive, to the digital folks, to the health workers, everyone showed up in the same space to work together. All the silos and the hierarchy that usually existed were gone. Everyone was talking to each other. People who usually don’t think about the whole system, had to work together to rapidly test and improve the new processes and tools. It was kind of… magical. Exhausting because of the time pressure we were under, but magical.”
Which other practical examples can we uncover?
The Practice: Public Systemic Design Examples
Systemic design approaches in the public sector are far from an established field. There is little empirical research and there only exist a few well-documented case studies of systems approaches in the public sector. Justin Cook and Piret Tõnurist (2020) suggest that governments currently lack the internal capacity for complexity- and systems-led responses. This might be the case.
When we look and listen more closely there are stories to be found, especially at the intersection of government and society collaborations. Here are a few practical examples of “public systemic design” that have emerged globally in the past decade.
Example 1: The design team in the Australian Tax Office (ATO) introduced a system-led design approach to manage increasing complexity in the Australian tax system. Their approach does not only focus on the best experience for people who use tax services, but also takes into account other systemic features, such as budgets, policy conditions and the broader environment. Their approach led to a better shared understanding of both the system and its “clients”.
“The ATO’s executives wanted to understand what the cumulative impacts of COVID-19 economic recovery measures were for different clients so they could identify opportunities to better support clients in the 2019–2020 tax return time.” (..) “The work uncovered a lot of insights about the tax and superannuation system at that time, including how various measures interacted with each other, at times making it challenging for clients to understand what they were eligible for or how to benefit from them. Additionally, it raised questions regarding the flow on effects into the tax and superannuation system, including the sustainability, complexity, and accessibility of the system, and the impacts once the measures were removed.” (Misha Kaur, 2021)
Example 2: The Energy Futures Lab is a coalition of diverse Canadian innovators, organisations and the Government of Alberta working together to accelerate the transition to a future-fit energy system. With stakeholder insights from across the energy system, they are collaboratively developing solutions for a low-emission and socially equitable energy future.
“One of the Energy Futures Lab’s strengths as a social innovation lab is holding the tensions and tradeoffs of the toughest energy challenges in a way that is generative, inclusive of opposing perspectives and makes space for creative solutions to arise. For example, the question, “How can we accelerate the transition to a net-zero future, while also staying true to our intentions of an inclusive and equitable transition?” could be seen as too cumbersome to be worth exploring. But the Energy Futures Lab prides itself on rising to the challenge this kind of complexity invites”. Read more about the Energy Futures Lab in their 2022 Impact Report.
Example 3: The (late) systemic design Alberta Co-Lab (led by Alex Ryan) was the very first “systemic design lab” within a public organisation in Canada.
“CoLab had become in the eyes of many a successful model of public sector innovation: ministry clients were happy; demand for services outstripped capacity; and other departments and governments were imitating CoLab’s model. But after three years of operating as an in-house consultancy, we were starting to plateau.” The team then pivoted towards a different model. “CoLab basically went from supporting thirty projects a year to three: each pitched, designed and led by the team. Co-Lab became the “Energy Transition and Policy Innovation team”.” “The ownership of projects — something not fully possible in a client service-model — has been key for addressing the tendency for projects to lose momentum and lose design intent once they left the Lab. As owners, we were positioned to better steward an innovation through government policy development processes while maintaining design fidelity.”
Example 4: The Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions and the Service Design Team in the Province of British Columbia (Canada) experimented with taking a systemic design approach to better understand and influence the ongoing drug overdose crisis in the Province by building relationships between people and organisations to lower the number of people overdosing.
“The methodology included working with peer researchers, combining stories of people with lived experience with rigorous data and designing human-centred design capacity building within the Ministry to continue this way of working. The project informed the strategy for the Emergency Response Operation Centre, the direction of a Province-wide anti-stigma campaign and policy-making on the decriminalisation of personal drugs possession (under 2,5 grams). But above all it instilled a more collaborative way of working with people and organisations.” (See blog 8 for the full practice story)
Example 5: Stimulab was initiated by the Norwegian government in 2016 and is a collaboration between Design and Architecture Norway (DOGA) and the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency. StimuLab is a learning platform for public innovation that supports and encourages user-oriented experimentation and innovation, using design methodology across 29 projects in collaboration with private sector partners. StimuLab supports projects ranging from contained, single-owner services to complex multi-stakeholder challenges, such as reducing the risk of getting into financial debt.
Questioning Public Systemic Design
Governing bodies have a major role to play in imagining and creating regenerative and equitable futures. When large governments catch on to a new “trend” like applying “systemic design” or thinking in “systems” — such as the UK Government recently (check their Systems Thinking Suite for Public Servants), there lies massive potential to change people’s mindsets, actions and outcomes. However the field of systemic design itself is still very novel, especially systemic design in the public sector. In its novelty lies a risk of seeing “systemic design” as an inherently “good” practice, without questioning what kind of underlying cultural or political ideas it is trying to advance at a systemic level.
In doing so systemic design practices and thinking could then inadvertently perpetuate oppressive systems and structures that hold socio-economic inequalities and ecological imbalances in place. Systemic design practice in a public context needs to sufficiently acknowledge and challenge power dynamics to uncover whose socio-cultural-economic views are dominant versus whose views are subordinate or oppressed, and consequently whose needs are addressed versus whose needs remain unaddressed, and why. Systemic design without questioning its political intent could then further promote a dominant paradigm of “bigger, faster, better, more!” and its approach to “extract, remove, oppress, enrich, hoard!”, leading to even deeper socio-economic inequities and destructive planetary “overshoot”. Dominant systems will eat a-political systemic design for breakfast since dominant systemic patterns will absorb whatever is similar to its intent, and will expel whatever is too different.
Dominant systems will eat a-political systemic design for breakfast.
A similar point was recently pointed out by a systemic design panel (“Confronting Legacies of Oppression in Systemic Design”, RSD 11, 2022, oa. Frederick van Amstel). The panel consisted of diverse (“Western”, “non-Western”, “Indigenous”, “queer”*) complexity and design researchers whose worldviews are underrepresented in academia, design firms and governments.
Whose worldly views are dominant and whose views are oppressed? How can public systemic design reframe and re-envision societal, ecological and economic challenges by initiating collective research inquiries that question our systemic worldviews and reveal the interconnectedness between our personal worldviews and our government policies and services?
For these questions we have to dive deeper into a question that is often left unaddressed as well:
“What kind of system(ic design) are we talking about?”
What do people mean when they say: “I want to redesign the system” or “we need to work more systemically”? Do people then perceive themselves inside or outside of the system? Does the system need design? Or has the system designed life, and thus humanity within it, and should we therefore focus on “redesigning” ourselves instead? By better understanding each other’s mindsets and assumptions we can better understand why people think the things they think, and thus why people do the things they do.
So what kind of “system” are people talking about in the “systems” world?
* We invite everyone to think of words as social constructs that are given meaning in their context (see Blog 1 for our writing principles). Here “Indigenous knowledge” is understood as “any kind of application of Indigenous people’s memories of lives lived sustainably on a land base, as part of a land base, as living knowledge applied to complex contexts” (Tyson Yunkaporta, Sandtalk, 2020). Here “Western” refers to a paradigm of modernity, progress and industrialisation, based on principles of “reductionism”, “determinism” and “objectivism” as found in the works of Descartes, Galileo and Newton.
Seeing in “Systems”
When people are asked how they understand the word “system” we get a broad array of answers: an engineered system (e.g. computer software), a social system (e.g. local community), a family system (e.g. in therapy settings), an institutional system (e.g. healthcare), a bodily system (e.g. our human immune system) or a living ecosystem (e.g. a forest). There is often a strong focus on “the system” and “changing the system” and less so on how people situate themselves in and relate to “systems”. What happens when we look in this direction? Here we can roughly distinguish two kinds of “systemic” views to understand and navigate the world we live in.
Human-created, human-centred “separate” systemic view
In a human-created, human-centred (“separate”) system, people view systems as human-created systems, with human-defined edges, such as a justice system, an education system, or a forestry management system. In this view humans have externalised themselves from the system to reduce and manage worldly complexity. In this view we see ourselves as objective “observers”, independent “operators” or inter-system “change agents” who connect people and systems. Systems, and especially “nature”, then become “things” that can be intervened in, built on or extracted from. They are defined by how people bound or find the edges of the system. What do we fit in, and what do we then leave out?
This Newtonian, mechanistic worldview that became dominant in “Western”, “Enlightened” thinking since roughly the 16th Century, forms the foundation of modern-day science and technology, including certain streams of complexity science. Up to this day it propels humanity into the future by inventing “ingenious” vaccines and “incredible” machines, such as the internet, mobile phones and spacecrafts that can destroy asteroids. Externalising ourselves from “the” systems that we imagine or create can not happen without creating “imbalances”. These “imbalances” present themselves in various ways, such as in the mass destruction of our natural habitats.
Natural “wholistic” systemic view
In a natural “wholistic” system view people understand a system as one whole, unbounded, self-organising, unimaginably big universe where everything living and non-living is interconnected and interdependent through regenerative cycles of time, place and space (with)in complex, adaptive, self-organising living systems that thrive in the presence of freedom, diversity and movement. Examples of complex adaptive systems are: a forest, a river delta, a flock of flying birds, the human brain, or our solar system and its black matter.
In this view entities have equal weight and humans are not external to the system. In this view we understand ourselves as part of complex adaptive systems through the air we breathe, the food we eat, the ancestors who came before us, the future generations that will outlive us, and the gravity that makes us stick to the earth. Our role within is to seek balanced relationships between everything living and non-living and to design for conditions that are conducive to generate “life” until the end of humanity.
This latter view can be hard to grasp philosophically, but it has been practised since time immemorial. Pre-colonisation Indigenous peoples in all parts of the world lived in balance with their surroundings, in part to physically survive, but also to spiritually and culturally connect to one another and the universe. People who didn’t grow up with Indigenous ways of thinking, feeling and seeing the world, can also still access this innate “feeling” of being part of a bigger “whole”, for example by listening to long-winding family stories, digging into local, place-based histories, or by sitting by a bonfire and staring at a dark, starry night sky.
This view lives in all of us, albeit more buried for some than others.
Applying and Recognizing Two Different Systemic Views
Humans often use both of these systemic views simultaneously and interchangeably on a daily basis, mostly without noticing. For example, we can visit an oncologist to seek treatment for cancer and seek traditional, spiritual healing. We can scientifically calculate that humans carry stardust in their DNA and we can tell stories about our connections with our ancestors and the universe. We can self-identify as “Indigenous” and enjoy all the wonders modern science has brought us.
However we might experience cognitive dissonance, grief or anxiety when we do notice the contradictions between the two views and the conundrum it holds. For example, we can draft a policy to reduce carbon emissions during work hours, and then drive home in a “dinosaur-burner” (aka diesel car) and feel guilty about doing so. We can aspire to buy everything second-hand, and live a zero-waste lifestyle, yet still wheel out a garbage can of “waste” out to the street and sense a feeling of sadness. We might long for a “return” to live on “the land”, but we also realise how there is no escape anymore from mobile phones, satellite internet or the notion of “land ownership”. We have yet to find new words to express these emotions, writes eco-philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his book “Earth’s Emotions” (2019).
We see value in getting better at recognising which viewpoint is steering people’s thoughts when talking about “systems’’ in a public service context. First, it’s important to grow this capability as a public servant, because systemic worldviews show up in our (policy, program, project, website) designs at a daily basis, and not without consequence. The following anecdote illustrates how this happens. The anecdote was told by an architectural designer who was given the assignment to design a Municipal community-centre building with Indigenous peoples in a large Canadian city:
“For designing a First Nations community-centre building our firm had come up with a first prototype of this building. We had included huge windows because we assumed that Indigenous people wanted to see the trees outside, so that they could stay connected to nature while being inside, you know.
But when we started working on this design with the First Nations people, they asked us: “Why did you focus so much on the design of those big windows? We want to be able to focus on each other, to connect to each other. Why didn’t you design for that kind of connection? To us, we ARE nature. There is no distinction, no separation.”
To me that was such an important lesson and it surfaced my own assumptions of how I perceive and experience“nature” as something external to myself, and how that thought became reflected in my designs.”
Second, getting better at recognising and acknowledging different systemic worldviews can help to address and ultimately overcome the “deep paradox” that is found in public government contexts, as we talked about in blog 2 of this series (see introduction of this blog, and blog 2). It can be quite the conversation starter to pop the big-S question: “What System are we talking about here?” (see blog 2 for a service design story on mining, in which this question was relevant yet left untouched). How do we “view” the world, how do we situate ourselves in the challenges we work on, and how does that translate into our public designs? In the next paragraph we take a first step, and there is more to come in our following blogs.
Introducing Squircularity
To help visualize conversations about different systemic world views, Maori “system navigator” and design thinker Johnnie Freeland (from Aotearoa / New Zealand) brought forward this idea of visually representing the “human-created systems view” as a square, and the “natural systems view” as a circle.
The square represents human-created, human-centred, more logical, linear, reductivist (“Western”) based knowledge systems, “where man sits above nature, man tries to control nature”, while it also “pushes people into corners”. The circular or cyclical form stands for understanding how we locate ourselves as humans within our living and non-living contexts, places, ancestors and future generations, and is more akin to the way traditional (“Indigenous”) cultures perceive natural life more wholistically, as “all my relations”. In his work Johnnie suggests presenting the circle and the square as two overlapping, complementary lookouts that could mutually benefit from being used simultaneously, instead of being positioned as two polar opposites on a linear spectrum.
We have found this a very useful visual image to remind ourselves of the two systemic views and to spark conversations. In speaking about it from a design perspective, we started calling it “squircular” seeing, “squircular” thinking, or “squircularity” by phonetically merging the words “square” and “circle”. “Squir-cu-lar” sounds a bit clunky, and it is meant to be that way. The “squircularity” design principle refers to that conflictive yet productive, collaborative “in-between” design space, that is neither circular or square shaped, and that transcends time, place and different “life” forms beyond just humans. In this “squircular” shape, different worldviews come together, yet do not merge. This “squircular” design space is somewhat “magical” too, in that its synergy might contain “shapeshifting” properties, to enable us to “escape” and transcend disconnected status quos, and to create new design shapes, spaces, thoughts and collaborations that could not have come into existence without intentionally holding space for both “conflict” and “relationality”.
We think that collectively “visiting” this difficult to navigate “squircular” design space might be a helpful, or even necessary step to take in overcoming both the paradox and a curious, yet to be uncovered “systemic design dilemma”. We’ll write more about applying squircularity below and in the upcoming blogs.
To uncover the “systemic design dilemma” we have to first turn our discussion to the second part of the “systemic design” concept: design(ing). What is design(ing)? How do these two different ways of “seeing systems” show up in our design choices and in the outcomes of design interventions? What kind of curious dilemma does it hold?
Design/ing
What is design, or designing? In popular notions the word “design”’ is associated with aesthetically and visually appealing graphics, products, websites, marketing and things that people can consume. Designing in this context is then understood as a collaborative, creative process of trial-and-error to get to a service or product that works (and sells), led by one or more expert designers.
In the past decade “human-centred design” has brought a different, broader view on design, away from the designer as an expert towards designing for and with people in society. In the process of “co-designing” everyone who participates in the process of designing becomes a designer. Together people shape and design new services, outcomes and relationships in and for human society. “Co-design” has quickly gained momentum in the public sector as a viable approach to build and deliver good digital and in-person public services and policies together with communities through the process of (public) service design. Public or civic service design works “through complexity” by roughly following a “design stages”, as linearly presented in the often referred to “double diamond” or “design squiggle” (designed by Damien Newman; see blog 4 for a provocation on the linear “design squiggle”, by proposing to use a “design squircle” which explicitly intends to work “with” complexity, instead of leaving it behind).
In this blog series, designing is understood more broadly as the act of actively intervening, to make something, to intentionally bring about something: building a house or a road, or a public program or service, even new thoughts and new relationships. Designing is also understood as an act of bringing about the human imagination of the adjacent possible, by using our creativity to create art, metaphors, stories, narratives and visualisations to provoke and invite feelings and thoughts about what might be “possible”, “real”, “normal” and vice versa, what might be “impossible”, “unreal” and “abnormal”. An example of how “art” is used in this space is the Dutch design research project: “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, which invites people into the idea of “downsizing” all humans to 50cm’s tall, to make our total footprint better fit the earth.
In this act of designing both decisions and imaginations people make active, conscious choices and decisions. Therefore design is ultimately an act of bounding: “This we include, that we leave out”.
Design is ultimately an act of bounding: this we include, that we leave out.
Anyone who facilitates the iterative design cycle of doing collaborative research, imagining, prototyping, gathering feedback, building, intervening and “bounding” becomes a designer.
How are designing in or with a human-created systems view and a natural-wholistic view different?
The “Systemic Design Dilemma”
Applying these different ways of seeing systems in designing imply not only different design actions, but also different design outcomes as our designing follows our systemic views, and our systemic views also follow our designs.
Different design outcomes
In the human-created view of systems — where humans externalise themselves from the systems they intervene in — the act of designing, of bounding, of quickly finding the edge of things gives a very active, tangible and immediate “product” focus. It also provides a frame for creativity and action. This was quite visible in both stories as situated in a Canadian public service design context from blog 2. In the “water” story the public service designer ended up with a new digital form, and in the “mining” story the design team landed on a new communications campaign about mining reform.
However, deploying the “human-created systemic view” also means that we put aside what we don’t see or what we don’t think is worth seeing or questioning, taking time for or taking care of, for example the needs of other natural living beings (animals, plants), or the needs of Indigenous people of Turtle Island/Canada who were custodians of the ancestral land long before settlers came.
In the “natural system view” an eternal balance is sought between ourselves, our actions and the way our actions and views shape and interact with societies, economies and ecologies around us to sustain all life forms on our planet. Working within this view requires reasoning through every potential intended and unintended consequence through infinite time and space in order to respect and work with “interconnectedness”. It becomes imminently harder to decide what to bound, what to do, or design, and it takes time.
In both the “water” story and the “mining” story (see blog 2) this would require us to fundamentally question our worldly views, our relationships with each other, and with the government and with Indigenous peoples with whom relationships and questions around how to best steward natural resources remain unresolved. It would mean coming up with designs that respect and create conditions that are “conducive” to regenerate planetary “life”.
Different design costs
The costs of these design outcomes are also fundamentally different. “Cost” here is defined as: something that is given, needed, or lost in order to get a particular thing. How are the “costs” different?
The “cost” of bounding in the human-created systems view can be expressed in knowingly building up detrimental consequences for current and future generations in the collective commons. For example:
- we design, build and fly aeroplanes, and we knowingly accept that we are accumulating CO2 in our atmosphere
- we design equipment to cut old growth forests, we ship the timber to foreign places (where they are ironically being used to power a “green” power plant), and we knowingly accept that we are disrespecting Indigenous land ties and that we are destroying ecosystems
- we design “predictive” policing algorithms to reduce crime rates, and we knowingly accept that it increases institutionalised racism and imprisonment for people of colour
- we design fertilisers to grow our food faster, and knowingly accept that they end up in our rivers and lakes, spurring algae growth, which leads to dead fish
- we promote the use of e-bikes but we make the harmful extraction of “lithium” minerals and the cost of labour to make e-bike batteries invisible and there are no incentives in place for e-bike battery companies to take back used e-bike batteries
The “cost” of bounding in a more natural system view design process can be expressed in taking the time to (re)balance, (re)build, reconcile, “re-circulise” or “re-indigenise” relationships between people and the land. It might come at the necessary “cost” of slowing down: slowing economic growth, slowing technological innovation, slowing decision-making. But how do we then go about making choices as to what to restore or regenerate given the “urgent” multiple crises the world faces?
That’s what we might call the “systemic design dilemma”, in which the central question is:
How big are we bounding things, across time, place, space and relationships, while acknowledging that we need to make design choices now, especially in such a decisive decade?
Using “Squircularity” in Design
Our “systemic design” consultant who was working on mining reform with a public service design team (blog 2) thinks it could help if we would make a prioritisation within the “systemic design dilemma”:
“How do you, in a world where we are told that it’s a decisive decade and we have no time to lose, then identify what systems are worth redesigning right now, and what would be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? I think it’s those human-created systems such as “health care” or “forestry management” that were created without applying a more natural, “whole”, connected lens that we need to be focusing on and redesigning first.”
Another way of overcoming the systemic design dilemma might lie in actively acknowledging this dilemma in every design process, especially by inviting in the circular “natural view” in design processes where square-shaped (“Western”) separate systems thinking is dominant. Introducing “squircularity” as a design principle invites us to simultaneously apply “separate” (“Western”, square, scientific, dominant) and “wholistic” (natural, circular, “Indigenous”, previously marginalised) ways of seeing systems to transcend into a 3rd hybrid, “synergetic” design space in which a new collective design process of understanding, imagining and decision making can take place.
Applying “squircularity” in design processes could help us to slow down, widen our views, and expand our creativity by inviting in a diversity of views and actors. It invites us to question more deeply the sum of things we previously externalised. It invites us to internalise as much as we can of what and who was previously externalised, disconnected or misplaced in a (policy, program, service, website) design. It invites us to put mechanisms in place that better allow for learning, adaptation and reflexivity when designing and applying (policy, service, program, website) design. It invites everyone into a space of exploration, wonder and connection, regardless of whether people culturally identify as “Western”, “Indigenous” or both. The latter makes “squircularity” a place where ambiguity and conflict becomes a driver for novel thinking and acting, instead of being hijacked by debilitating polarisation that has become so dominant and omni-present in our current debates.
“Squircularity” is a place where ambiguity and conflict becomes a driver for novel thinking and acting, instead of being hijacked by debilitating polarisation that has become so dominant and omni-present in our current debates.
When we do this we arrive at interventions or designs that are more conscious of the systemic design dilemma itself, and therefore could carry the ability to overcome it. We might then start to ask different questions in design situations, such as in the “water” story or the “mining” stories (from blog 2):
- “How did abandoned, contaminated mining sites that threaten water, wildlife and the health of Indigenous communities come about?”
- “Why do humans want to licence groundwater?”
- “How do we humans relate to each other and to natural resources, such as minerals and water?”
- “What if we also cared for the toad colony in the water, the contaminated water itself or the blasted rocks? What would our relationships and our designs then look like?”
How “squircularity” works in practice can be understood from stories in which it is applied, for example in blog 8 of this series, where applying “squirculartiy” in architectural design led to a fundamentally different kind of thinking around “imprisonment” and “justice”, than if a purely “square”, human-created “separate” view had been applied in understanding “justice”. It then led to a very different kind of prison design, one that centers communities, natural elements and “openness” over “disconnectedness”, separation and punishment. In this story it also becomes apparent how “squircularity” can not happen without questioning power relations, and questioning which view is dominant within the systems that breed the design assignment (“build a prison”). See blog 8 for the full story.
Another story is this story (listen to the podcast here) about a research project in the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada. In this project both Indigenous ways of knowing and Western scientific ways of gathering knowledge are applied in an attempt to better understand the effects of river barriers on the natural flow of fish species through an ecosystem in the Bay. This way of working is generating different kinds of solutions and different kinds of insights that would have never emerged if either one or the other worldview were to be applied on its own. It’s also creating new relations and collaborations where there were none.
In academia this collaborative approach is called “two-eyed seeing”, or “etuaptmumk” in Mi’kmaw. It was first introduced in academia by Indigenous Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall — along with his late wife Murdena Marshall and Cape Breton University biology professor Cheryl Bartlett 30 years ago. “Two-eyed seeing” is now also gaining momentum in the academic fields of public health and biodiversity conservation as an approach to not only bring different knowledges together, but to reshape the way “science” is done itself by actively inviting in “subjectivity” and collaboration across different systemic views, cultures and institutions.
What’s Next
In blog 3 we introduced “public systemic design”. We uncovered how mainstream “public systemic design” holds a risk of perpetuating oppressive systems and structures that hold socio-economic inequalities and ecological imbalances in place if we don’t question the systemic viewpoints of human public service designers. Do we inhibit “square”-separate systemic viewpoints, “circular”-whole systemic viewpoints, or both? The question we were left with was: how can public servants then design systemically by internalising the interconnectedness between ourselves and the issues we work on, as well as with all the (human and non-human) elements that are affected by these issues as much as we can, while avoiding stalling in “paralysis-by-analysis”? (aka as “the systemic design dilemma”).
In blog 3 we suggested widening our existing design approaches by using a new design principle called “squircularity”. “Squircularity” stands for applying both human-created, science based design methodologies (represented in the shape of a square) as well as natural, wholistic approaches (represented in the shape of a circle), to invite us into a new, 3rd hybrid, synergetic design space that is neither circular or square shaped, and that transcends time, place, space and different “life” forms beyond just humans.
In blog 4 we dive deeper into the practice. In order to acknowledge the “deep paradox’’ (blog 2) and the “systemic design dilemma” (blog 3) we need a new kind of public systemic design that allows us to both be in the paradox and dilemma, but to also transcend them. This new design practice needs to aim for systemic “liberation”, while being able to function in a complex context such as government. In the next blog, blog 4, we
- introduce a new kind of public systemic design practice — “shapeshifting” design — that positions squircularly-shaped “designerly views” more prominently and pragmatically between “systems” and “design” to generate anti-oppressive, more open and diverse design outcomes
- imagine what this new practice can do for the designs of public services, policies and programs in a government context
- re-situate public systemic “shapeshifting” design in a “5th order” of design
- introduce “view-relating” as a necessary dialogical step in public design processes
Further reading / listening / watching
Expand our thoughts, views and senses ….
- Maori “system navigator” Johnnie Freeland talks about Squares and Circles in the Field Guide (2020 — published by the New Zealand Design Assembly) and in a podcast with dr. Daniel Christian Wahl (2020)
- Continuous thoughts on Systemic Design — by scholar dr. Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer
- The Value of a Whale — On the Illusions of Green Capitalism — Adrienne Buller (listen to a podcast here)
- Take a 3-part video course on “essential world view skills” to better engage with and understand different world views, and the conflicts it might generate — facilitated by Jessie Sutherland
- Atmos— an online magazine that wonders about the end of the Anthropocene: “The human epoch has undoubtedly brought our planet to a tipping point. The question is: will we see this juncture as a time to turn things around, or will we drive ourselves over the edge?”
- Read “Sandtalk: How Indigenous Thinking can Save the World”, by Tyson Yunkaporta for a deeper understanding of complexity theory and thinking from an Indigenous perspective (in Australia)
- The Art of Living — The Art of Interbeing — Thich Nhat Hanh (2019)
- Watch the video “Critical Reflections on Design in Government” — in which dr. Jocelyn Bailey says: “As designers and design advocates [in a government context], we really didn’t understand in any meaningful way what we were busy doing — and I don’t mean at the superficial level of how to run workshops — but at a deeper level of the political chess board we had wandered onto.”. “We risk evangelizing design as something that’s inherently good”.”
- Design follows worldview and worldview follows design — 2017 by dr. Daniel Christian Wahl
- Nora Bateson writes about Aphanipoieses: a theoretical basis from which to address all that coalesces prior to emergence
- 10 “artivism” case studies (Hivos) on how art is used as a platform for introducing issues, as a medium to facilitate dialogue and express learning, and as a means of transformation in climate justice advocacy across the globe
- Read Joanna Macy (environmental activist, author, and scholar of Buddhism) on general systems theory and deep ecology
About the Author, this Blog Series and the Collective
Get in touch! 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 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)
