Blog 4 — Shapeshifting Design: Imagining an intersystemic space for public service transformation
Soundtrack for blog 4: Freedom — Jon Batiste
Artwork for blog 4: Haegue Yang’s Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity (2019) seeks to understand how extreme climate events might not only fracture societies but also bring them together (source: Prophets at a Tangent: How Art Shapes Social Imagination, by Geoff Mulgan — 2023).
Read previous blogs: 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” for a relational future.
Our previous blogs revealed a need for a public systemic design approach that is more reflective of the complex challenges it wants to shift and the diverse opportunities it aims to activate. In blog 4 we introduce a new, or “evolved” public systemic design approach that enables designing public servants to widen their views and to expand their approaches to work with complexity and uncertainty over place, space and time: intersystemic “shapeshifting” design. We situate intersystemic “shapeshifting” design within other emerging design disciplines and discuss its principles and implications for public service design. What are its characteristics? How is it being practised already by various actors across the globe, and what kind of outcomes does or could it generate? How does it help to overcome “hard” tasks in a public service context?
To see why we need a new approach we briefly recap blogs 2 and 3 first.
Public systemic design is the application of systemic design in policy making, project, program, product and organisational 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.
- We touched on challenges of current public sector innovation methodologies and found a “deep paradox” that pertains specifically to civil servants who design in the public service: they are tasked with both designing new policies and delivering existing public services to reduce (socio-economic, ecological) “imbalances” within a silo-ed, multi-layered context that simultaneously upholds and protects patterns that perpetuate those “imbalances” (blog 2)
- We popped the “big-S” question (“What kind of System are we talking about?” and became aware of how humans deploy different systemic views — the human-created “separated” (square-shaped, modern, sometimes referred to as “Western”) systemic view and the wholistic (circle-shaped, natural, sometimes referred to as “Indigenous”) systemic view (blog 3).
- We understood that it matters to uncover which view is dominant / oppressed, also within the designer, since a-political systemic design risks reproducing dominant systemic views, leading to incremental, not transformative systemic shifts (blog 3).
- We also explored the curious “systemic design dilemma”. We learned to pose a question that we could learn to hold in our design practices: “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?” (blog 3).
- We introduced “squircularity” as a collaborative design principle that invites us to use both separate (square) and wholistic (circular) systemic world views to uncover insights on how we understand the world differently, but also to enable us to overcome and transcend disconnected status quo’s and create design spaces that move towards designing for interconnectedness and “relationality” in an “entangled” world (blog 3).
Our dialogues and research revealed that methods that are commonly used in public systemic design, such as service design and human-centered design originate from Anthropocenic, “square-ized” systemic views that perpetuate individualism, colonialism and extractive capitalism. To get to a different set of outcomes it is crucial to re-imagine the approach for how we design and transform public services. What does the practice of “intersystemic” public service design look like? What does it mean for the way public servants design and deliver services? What would change from the perspectives of both leaders/decision-makers and citizens?
Let’s get to it!
Introducing intersystemic “shapeshifting” design
To introduce this new design concept we start by sharing a story about a new kind of collaboration over the regeneration of a “river catchment”, as told by a “systems navigator” with deep experience working in both the public service and with communities—and who is mātauranga Māori. He is based in Auckland, Aotearoa — New Zealand.
“This story started out with a “square-ized” approach. There were two separate developments. A “human development”-thing over here, by some community-focussed government agencies, and a “river- stream restoration”-project over there, with some other environment-focussed agencies. All agencies wanted to work with the same 3 tribes over what the agencies thought were two different things.
So the iwi-(tribe)leaders, said: “No, no, no thanks.” Because you know, “community development” is often code for:“we are going to deal with the poor communities, the refugee communities”, instead of all the people. It’s a “deficit” approach, in which the aim is to “uplift” the community because of the “drag” it’s causing on the wider community, healthcare, education, whatever the agencies think. Certainly, our Maori data is telling, which is common for many Indigenous peoples across the world. We have this analogy here in New Zealand of “cars in the driveway”. It’s the Ministry of Education, the Department of Corrections, they all arrive in their own individual, departmental cars to come visit that one house to talk about that type of approach. No one talks about: should we all share a car? Or let alone, question, why would we have to drive there, to that house? We don’t talk about how those agencies continue to look at one slice of the pizza, not the whole pizza. So therefore if you have 10 slices of pizza, all those 10 agencies want to go to talk to that same community. But unlike those agencies communities are multi-layered, especially Indigenous communities. They can hold multiple missions and are aligned around a wholistic view.
So we said: “We want to co-partner over this, and we want to join these two things together, because we see them as being related: the state of the stream reflects the state of the people, and both are not in a good state.” This co-partnership was very important to us, because co-design is often just another c-word for “consultation”, where decision-makers are just looking for “input” while holding the pen, not a deep co-working relationship. We wanted to develop our own thinking, and develop a dual knowledge-framework, where Indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge can co-navigate a space together, and that holds deep integrity.
So that’s what we did. There were a few elements that were key to generate and hold space for real collaboration to occur. The first one is preparing the ground for it. So we had 2 “navigators”, one for the 19 tribes, and one for the City Council. We were able to co-navigate and hold space. What was crucial is to learn how to co-navigate our relationship with “time”. Governments are often on “square”-time: chronological, sequential, hamster wheel, “tik-tok” time. Let’s create a project and manage it. Whoever is then driving the project, drives communities into “square” time, while communities operate in “circle”-time, deep time, reflective time. So in that co-navigating space we influenced the council to slow down. This isn’t an easy thing to negotiate, but the time you spend in creating and evoking a state for that collaboration to happen, once you “anchor” that from a time perspective, things will move quite quickly, because you got people on board, you got trust.
Slowing down time is also crucial to co-navigate our different ways of decision-making. Our tribe’s ways of decision-making requires for our communities to come together, to slow down time, to enable conversation over time, to not default to one person who is going to make a decision. This is out of sync with Western forms of decision-making processes. Another thing the co-navigators did was to arrange for the iwi-leaders to directly talk to the elected officials, not their delegates, country officers or staff. This really shifted the conversation, and the outcomes of decisions.
We are now in a space where we can really acknowledge and recognize multiple perspectives, multiple approaches. Our central question in this regenerative project is: “how do we rebalance our relationship between people and nature, within place, over time, together with our whānau (family). We are bringing our elders and we are bringing our younger people along with us, as opposed to a group of individual experts coming up with something. And we are taking a “long knowledge” approach — 3 generations back, and 3 generations ahead — to inform our contemporary response in the 50 or 100 years to come.
Our 3 areas of “activation” are: systems, place and family. We want to create a shared understanding of the levers and influences that we need to shift, anchored in place, the stream catchment. The beautiful thing is, is that a catchment is a physical space. A catchment locks us into the flow of water, flowing through many diverse communities. Catchments are also better at contextualizing where towns and cities sit, rather than a focus on urban thinking only. And the third is whānau, family, our lowest common denominator.
Our work is to work on all 3 areas together, and not just by ourselves. So those two different views, those two shapes, have come together, have started travelling together. And instead of looking at each other, they want to look at the 3rd space, to create a new shape. It’s where we are now, and where we could journey into in the future.”
The “river catchment” story, as opposed to the “water” and the “mining” stories (blog 2), illustrates how taking a public service design approach in between different “systemic views” (intersystemic) can “shapeshift” 3 interlocking, nested systemic “shapes” or dynamics in public service design all at once:
- our ways of thinking within the public service, from domination towards collaboration and co-partnership
- our ways of designing public policies and services, from individual disconnected services towards sets of interrelated and interconnected services
- our ways of influencing and re-balancing socio-economic and ecological imbalances, from “individual” well-being centred on humans towards a “symbiotic” well-being between communities, places and the natural world
The concept of “shapeshifting” seems to contain a somewhat surprising value for public systemic design. In its essence “shapeshifting” refers to the transformation of one form into another. Culturally shapeshifting is found in both ancient and modern stories (in Harry Potter, Moana/Maui, Raven) where humans take on the shape of animals or inanimate objects (rocks, mountains) and vice versa, but it is also observed in nature where certain animals, such as the chameleon and octopus, use shapeshifting as a survival technique. Shapeshifting could be interpreted as a metaphor of the interconnected relationship between humankind and nature, between the animate and inanimate. Shapeshifting is found in mythology and folkloristic stories in almost every culture around the world, which suggests that at one time there was a “shared thought process” that each of these cultures had in common. A motif for telling “shapeshifting stories” is to demonstrate how by changing shapes, someone or something could obtain new abilities in a new form, and challenge or trick the status quo and thus... shape change.
A motif for telling “shapeshifting stories” is to demonstrate how by changing shapes, someone or something could obtain new abilities in a new form, and challenge or trick the status quo and thus… shape change.
From a systems thinking perspective, the idea of shapeshifting suggests that multiple interwoven, overlapping and interconnected logics, such as how racism, capitalism, poverty, health and economic status together can show up in a specific form or shape that can alter both behaviours of and outcomes for people, as suggested by Indigenous scholars Lana Ray and Lloy Wylie (in: Shapeshifters, Systems thinking and Settler colonial logic, 2022).
For example, in a public place like a hospital, where all these factors are at play, it can mean life or death, as demonstrated in the story of Indigenous man Brian Sinclair, who was ignored for 34 hours until he died in a Canadian hospital ER room. All the people who ignored his needs, from the nurses to the security guards collectively “orchestrated” a theatre of systemic patterns. People who are professionally tasked with “taking care” in a public setting, and who in general know what it means to take “care” of others in other parts of their lives, collectively “shapeshifted” into “not caring” for this individual person, due to the interlocking influences of racism, capitalism and colonialism. Human-created systems can “entangle” people, and start governing and “shapeshifting” people’s actions in different ways, both positively and negatively.
The opposite is also true: if we become more “attune” to how this kind of “shapeshifting” works in our daily lives, then the more able we become to see it, experiment with it, and anticipate needed changes.
Our mātauranga Māori systems navigator reflects on the role of the designer in this “shapeshifting” public design scenario:
“In our traditional, voyaging wakas (canoes) we have a triangle of leadership: the captain who guides the mission, the navigator who enables the mission, and the steerer who keeps the waka on course. If the captain symbolizes our leader, and the steerer our communities, then I see designers as the navigators, who enable collaboration within and between communities and the leaders. For this to happen, we need confluence, a convergence approach, not a collision in that “squircle” space. That needs forethought, there is work to be done on how people come together, to ensure the mana integrity of each “square” and “circle” system.
For this to happen we might need to introduce a new shape that could help the “circle” and the “square” to see where they could go in that clunky “3rd” space, that “squircle” space. It’s the shape of a triangle. Instead of looking at each other, or opposing each other from different corners of the “square”, they will look at that 3rd space to generate a 3rd outcome. When this happens, people can start to play and co-partner together, and create solutions to evoke people to start moving together. This triangle, within the “squircle”, might ultimately implode and explode the “square”, and change shapes. Maybe it would re-circulize the square into an infinity loop?”
What does this kind of intersystemic “shapeshifting” design thinking then mean for our traditional service design approaches? To support this kind of thinking and doing we make a first attempt to visualize an intersystemic “shapeshifting” design approach. First we visualize complexity in the middle of the “squircular” design space, while adding time and space in non-linear ways.
By drawing a triangulated “design squircle” (2 triangles situated in between the overlapping space of a circle and square)— as opposed to a linear “design squiggle” that is often used in service design (see blog 3) we situate designers closest to the centre of “complexity” to help navigate differing systemic views, together with leadership and communities.
Shapeshifting design aims to work:
- with complexity, instead of leaving it behind.
- with the “curious design dilemma” (by slowing down, to be able to speed up)
- to transcend the “deep paradox” (see blog 2) as found in “separated”, human-created systems and design approaches
- “in between” human-created and natural systemic views, in between complex adaptive systems, in between “designerly” people
Could this “intersystemic” shapeshifting design collectively uncover, address, challenge, decolonise* and potentially liberate the way humans see and position themselves to create better outcomes for people, places and nature?
For now let’s take a look at its 8 design principles.
* In “Decolonizing Methodologies” Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012, New Zealand/Aotearoa) provides a working definition of decolonisation, which “does not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all theory or research or Western knowledge. Rather it is about centring [our] concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and purposes.”
Characterizing and situating intersystemic “shapeshifting” design
Intersystemic “shapeshifting” design gives a name to a rising body of design thought and practice that is being developed by people from across the globe, especially and not-coincidentally by Indigenous, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ peoples whose knowledges and cultures have been systemically oppressed and marginalised, and who are building on their ancestors’ ways of knowing, being, doing and feeling.
To our knowledge intersystemic “shapeshifting” design has not yet been described as such elsewhere in the context of public systemic design, yet its “magical” practical value to “transcend paradigms” might be what systems-thinker and practitioner Donella Meadows was eluding to when describing her infamous 12 “leverage points” to intervene in “systems”. The number 1 lever being the ability to transcend paradigms and acknowledge the wisdom that diverse, possibly even conflicting perspectives can bring to a situation in full recognition that each paradigm also brings with it, its own limitations and blind spots ( 2017 — Daniel Christian Wahl).
Characteristics of shapeshifting design
Here we describe 8 design principles that could characterise and underpin intersystemic “shapeshifting” design in the public sector.
- View-relating: Coming to see and coming to relate to differing assumptions and worldviews of people in systems and design processes through collective and contextual conversational processes (knowledge sharing & knowledge production) to make sense of, give meaning to and learn from people’s experiences. Choosing to make a new verb out of “viewpoint” and “relating” is done intentionally since there is no English word yet to describe a process of simultaneously “coming to see and relate”. “Viewpoints” can only be seen, imagined, discovered and moved in relation to its context, for example in conversation with other people, hence: “view-relating”.
- Squircularity: The process of simultaneous applying “separate” (“Western”, scientific, dominant, square-shaped) and “wholistic” (natural, “Indigenous”, previously marginalised, circular-shaped) ways of seeing systems to transcend into a “3rd” hybrid, synergetic, design space (see blog 3). In this “3rd” design space a creative and collaborative design process of “view-relating”, imagining and decision making can take place in which continuous learning, reflection and feedback from both a design outcome as well as from the connective, collaborative “tissue” is deliberate and ongoing. Harbouring “view-relating” will help nurture “squircularly-shaped” designs in their ability to transcend the status quo and transform into new shapes.
- Power awareness and power sharing: Understanding socio-economic inequity and ecological crisis as active, intentional features of human-created systems, not as coincidental or unintentional “bugs”. The power of the designer is placed within. “Historically designers have had the privilege over the means of production, and therefore have power over shaping the means of production and the artefacts that we live by. Users have been historically underprivileged social groups.” (Frederick van Amstel, 2022). Sharing power in design and decision-making processes preemptively — prior to commencing design processes — then becomes key in getting to new outcomes in public settings.
- Interconnecting imbalances: Seeing approaches or interventions in relation to the overarching crisis facing the whole system of our planet earth and the human collective, and human endeavours on it. Within we can recognise interconnected (or broken) public service “ecosystems” in which we can start new collaborations. This “interconnecting” work also requires adult development to connect with our inner selves (e.g. cognitive complexity, emotional intelligence). How do we arrive into personal relationships of growth, healing, development?
- Un-centring (humans): Challenging human-centred design thinking in (service, product, institutional) design processes by uncentring humans as individuals, while still honouring designing with people to understand their needs in relation to each other, society and all living and non-living entities on planet earth.
- Valuing relationships: Valuing building relationships, relatedness and collective understanding at least just as much as valuing creating public services and products as outcomes of (public) design processes.
- Situating designs in poly-temporal time frames and situating in contextual places: Honouring past, present and future generations of humans, non-humans and planet in place-based, in-situ, contextualised design processes, for example by giving legal status to a river, or including a tree or a lake as a “design persona” or acknowledging ancestors by including ceremony in our design processes.
- Inviting imagination, art, ceremony, creativity and magic: Inviting the “magic” in: creating free, experimental, imaginative spaces and experiences for ceremonial elements that need space in complex, creative contexts: mystery, energy, emotions and intuitiveness.
Can we imagine how intersystemic “shapeshifting” design is already influencing the way we design, deliver and access public services? Below we visualise 4 evolving public service scenarios:
- from a strictly human-centred public service approach focussed on individuals who access separately designed and delivered services (current state)
- to a “life experience” service ecosystem public service approach, in which ministries work together to deliver sets of services to individuals (not so far future state, the Federal government in the USA is already prototyping this approach)
- to a “community” minded “squircular” service eco-system public service, in which diverse governing bodies collaborate to deliver sets of relational public services to groups of people (already happening in New Zealand, see feature story on the river catchment)
- to a “life-minded” service ecosystem public service, in which the wellbeing of humans, nature and places are taken into account when designing sets of relational services, and in which multiple ways of governing are accepted (future state).
Intersystemic “shapeshifting” design then requires different public service design entry points compared to a strictly “human-centred” public service design approach:
- from starting with individual humans who are in need of services (current state),
- to starting with individual humans & public service professionals inquiring together into the lives of people who are in need of public services
- to starting with sharing power with communities who are most “imbalanced” by the effects of extractive capitalism, colonialism and income inequalities and together inquire why and how the “system” is imbalancing communities
- to ultimately inquire how imbalanced communities, places and eco-systems with living and non-living elements together could give us insights into how to shapeshift intersystemically (future state — but already experimented with in for example Aotearoa | New Zealand).
What will it take to evolve in this direction, and how long will it take? What other scenarios could we think of?
Examples of shapeshifting public design
Let’s look at some global examples of design approaches and frameworks that are not (yet) categorised as systemic “shapeshifting” design but already demonstrate some or all of its characteristics. These practices are emerging across the globe and are or can be applied in public service / government settings.
Example 1: Diane Roussin, ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᒃ Anishinaabe and member of Skownan First Nation practices (Indigenous) “thinking inside the circle” and (“Western”) “thinking outside the box” as well as the “7 sacred teachings” medicine wheel to design and apply a new Indigenous-inspired child-centred policy model to explore new ideas for addressing early childhood outcomes in the neighbourhood of Point Douglas, in the city of Winnipeg (Winnipeg Boldness Project). The project is also employing multi-sectoral collaborative efforts to contribute to systems change and reconciliation.
Example 2: Fogo Island is a small island off the coast of NewFoundland and Labrador, Canada. Local islanders are creating regenerative and revitalising futures through Shorefast, an organisation which has sprouted initiatives that combine principles of art, imagination and “radical hospitality” to generate place-based meaning and income, such as the Fogo Island Inn and Fogo Island Arts, an artist-in-residence program. Shorefast was originally created to support the island’s delicate fishing ecosystem and local economy. Shorefast is now expanding its mission through a Community Economies Pilot — a pan-Canadian initiative to strengthen place-based economic development within the global economy. A similar initiative is now also found in Norway, led by Moa Björnson on the island of Svalbard, in the upper Arctic Circle.
Example 3: In New Zealand more than two thirds of the children in state foster care are Indigenous. In 2019 a Newsroom story about a young Māori mother being threatened to give up her baby to state authorities led to the resignation of the most high placed executive Ministry official and a systemic overhaul of the Ministry for Children to address systemic, institutionalised racism and inequality. Since then Oranga Tamariki, Ministry for Children in New Zealand, has developed an Indigenous, Māori-led practice framework with 8 practice standards. They are underpinned by Māori Indigenous theory, relational-restorative theory, system’s theory and trauma-informed theory.
Example 4: Dark Matter Lab is an architecture firm with five “labs” around the world, but they don’t build buildings, they partner with civic institutions to prototype equitable, caring and sustainable futures. For example, they partnered with the City of Glasgow to create “TreesAI”, a nature-based way of impact investing in tree infrastructure. They have co-designed the “Civic-Indigenous 7.0” framework, to help reshape our legal relationship with “property” such as “land”. Founder Indy Johar describes his work as a necessary step for “the boring revolution” to reshape the rules of engagement in bureaucracies.
Example 5: “Hands up Mallee” is a social impact initiative, based in the Northern Mallee region in Australia. In Hands Up Mallee local organisations, businesses, governments, community groups and individuals are joining effort, resources and energy toward the same community goals, for example addressing social issues and improving health and wellbeing outcomes for children, young people and their families. Hands Up Mallee takes a place-based “systems” approach to work with local issues.
Situating shapeshifting design: a fifth design order?
Shapeshifting design is part of a larger family of design disciplines that are currently expanding and “shapeshifting” into new design practices. In our research we uncover five expanding and “shapeshifting” design spaces: societal, economic, environmental, social justice and public policy design spaces. Which ones are they and what do they have in common?
In the societal space systemic design is widening the mission of human-centred (service) design by focussing on including the role of human relationships, views and learning in (human-created) systems such as healthcare, education and justice. Examples are relational design, relationship-centred (service) design, system shifting design, society-centred-design, humanity-centred design, transition design and service ecosystem design.
Systemic design thinking and practice is also widening the sustainability and ecology design space by including the health and thriving of non-human beings and all living and non-living systems as a purpose of design. The practice listens to names such as life-centred design, regenerative design, planet-centred design, biomimicry design and evolutionary design.
Driven by deep equity social movements, systemic design is widening our approaches in the space of social justice by centering purpose, principles and worldviews in design practice. Examples are equity-centred design, inclusive design, Indigenous design and liberatory design. For this field we could easily say the reverse: social justice is widening systemic design approaches and views, for example through introducing anti-oppressive design. This space sits in between the “societal space” and the “public policy” space.
Similarly in the space of economic design we are seeing a movement away from capital social impact investing towards engagements that require economic collaborations across sectors: systemic capital design, systemic incubation design, Indigenomics design and beloved economy design.
The space of public administration, public policy and governance is starting to see slivers of the same widening movement, for example the “anticipatory governance model” that the government of Finland is experimenting with. “Anticipatory innovation is the ability of organisations to consistently perceive, understand and act on the future as it emerges in the present” (OECD OPSI, 2022). Other ways of working are systemic co-design for participatory policy making and radical participatory design, which seeks to actively decolonise design by divesting the power of designers and giving it back to the communities they work with.
What all these expanding design fields have in common is:
- they centre purpose, principles, desires, verbs and worldviews over mere “users”, “humans” and nouns
- they centre design “values” like anti-oppressive, open, “squircularity”, “emergence”, care, collaboration, and it centres design “verbs” such as regenerating, well-being, trusting, power pre-distributing, stewarding and learning
- they invite us to think differently about concepts such as “time” and “place”
Both thinkers and doers find each other in many learning networks such as Systemic Design Association (SDA), CoDesignCo, System Sanctuary Peers, System Innovation Initiative, Regenerative Conscious Community. Specific to the civic design space, including governments is the Civic Design community. We are aware and admit to our own, “Western”-minded and “Western”-dominated, colonial gaze. We have yet to include more and other approaches as they emerge from Asian, African, Pacific and Central-South-American cultures and continents. Learning network Illuminate Systems has a specific mandate to diversify the systems space.
Previously in blog 3, we situated “public systemic design” in the 4th order of design, as described by Richard Buchanan (In: Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, 1999).
Intersystemic shapeshifting design requires the introduction or imagination of a fifth order in design that encompasses and governs the preceding four design orders as it invites us to start imagining how our human thought and “bounded, finite, human-created systems” interact with “conciousness” in the infinite “whole” system called “life”. It embraces an equally challenging design task: how to design for and in “the whole system” to “sustain and regenerate life”? Is this an order we can or should design for? Or does “life” design us, and should humans thus “un-design” and “un-center” within? These questions are very philosophical and novel, yet designers are starting to explore these exciting questions, such as Manuhuia Barcham in Weaving Together a Decolonial Imaginary Through Design for Effective River Management: Pluriversal Ontological Design in Practice (2022) and Andrea Mignolo (as expressed in written dialogue within the Ministry of Unbounded Affairs Collective, 2022- more to come in her yet unpublished work):
“Design is grounded in cosmology, it comes from a world and through a body. This shapes how we see reality and how we want to extend or manipulate it, which in turn shapes us. So the fifth order as a place of intervention, for me has something to do with being. With creating tools that help us to understand what it means to be human, and to inquire into our own shaping, to engage in the shaping (and re-shaping) with intention and awareness.”
We view the field of “public systemic design” and intersystemic “shapeshifting” within the space of public policy as a promising field. Within this 5th order of design it is important to dive into how “view-relating” enables “squircularity” in design, before we conclude blog 4.
Viewrelating as a necessary dialogical step
“View-relating” is the dialogical practice that enables the use of “squircularity” in design. In the process of “view-relating” the “human-created”, separate, systemic (square-shaped) view and the “natural”, wholistic (circular shaped) systemic views are uncovered and explored. Using different views simultaneously can reveal something that is beyond the reach of the other perspective, writes Italian scholar Fulvio Mazzocchi (2018). This step can enable us to begin to understand and design in the overlapping “in between” space while being conscious of people’s own (power, societal, cultural) positions within.
View-relating can be brought about in many different ways, for example through combining approaches to start conversations in both the human-created systemic design field and the wholistic systemic design field:
- technical systemic design approaches based on the “logos” or “knowledge”, such as systems mapping, “systemic change templates”, boardrooms with flip charts and sticky notes, toolkits — often deployed in Western, new public management settings
- more intuitive practices based on place-based, intergenerational “wisdom”, such as storytelling, singing, medicinal healing practices, integral theory, liberating structures and systemic constellations
This dialogical “view-relating” practice is important to practice because it diverts our attention away from the focus on “changing the system” to a focus on acknowledging our own viewpoints as designers and to changing our ways of interacting with each other’s viewpoints before we start looking at the “things” we want to (re)design and (re)create. It addresses power dynamics in systems and it brings diversity in our perspectives on understanding modern day crises by bringing different, cultural worldviews. It also slows us down, albeit temporarily, to bring in past, present and future perspectives.
Here are some other examples of how “view-relating” is used in shapeshifting design.
Example 1: A practical example of dialogical “view-relating” has been developed by Indigenous Anishinaabe (Ojibway) scholar Melanie Goodchild. Melanie pulled the Indigenous concept of “two-eyed seeing” into the systems complexity and systems thinking sciences. Her concept is called “relational systems thinking” in which the “space in between” different ways of seeing and knowing becomes a “magical place of creation”. Academic writing is often an individual, linear endeavour, in which conversations are taken out of their rich, thick, relational context. Inspired by the Two Row Wampum belt Melanie introduces a two-row visual writing and storytelling code and relational systems thinking to introduce cross-cultural dialogues in academic writing. In the left row Melanie introduces Indigenous knowledge keepers who reflect on awareness-based “relational systems thinking” from an Indigenous perspective, while the column on the right has thinkers and practitioners reflect on the same topic from a more Western-inspired perspective.
Her aim with the two-row visual writing and storytelling code is to introduce cross-cultural dialogues as a doorway to healing, transformation and spiritual understanding and to encourage both strong relationships with each other and with the land.
Example 2: Another example of “view-relating” has been introduced by filmmaker, writer and thinker nora bateson, daughter of late thinker and philosopher Gregory Bateson. Nora has developed Warm Data Labs (“not a tool, methodology or therapy.. yet .. mysterious”), which consist of conversational, transcontextual, interactive, “abductive” in-person and digital group processes to learn from “warm data’’ that remain in their context, as opposed to “reductive”, extractive “cold data’’ processes as practised in most modern science projects. An issue of “Unpsychology” made an attempt to “capture” the outcomes of a warm data process in one of their issues.
To conclude we share a short anecdote of a systemic designer who has seen and experienced the value of taking this dialogical step in their government design work. To her it is a “shapeshifter”, a way to creatively “hack” the (human-created) system that we work in:
“Governments are good at managing risk. But what they are not good at is managing uncertainty. This is where systemic design and co-creation hold a lot of value, because they help us navigate uncertainty. But you have to show how these practices are actually going to work better for what you are trying to achieve. That’s the nugget, the challenging spot.”
“A good place to try are government “committees’’or “working groups” with a newly launched innovation mandate. It’s a more natural place to try out new things. Committees are struck all the time to tackle big political mandates, especially when you are a trusted individual in that space. Within those committees you can build in these structural, deliberate, dialogical tools. Call it a name that is familiar to these committees, don’t call it “systemic design”, but brand it in their language. In this way you “hack” the system so that you can work in it.”
“Here’s an example of how we did it when the “Energy Sustainability Strategy 2050” was launched. It was the first time we got to host a government wide conversation with external networks. We called it a “strategy talk” and we talked about all the challenges we were experiencing as humans and why. At first the Chief Energy Economist arguing with the Chief Medical Officer about climate change. It started as a major disagreement, but then it evolved into a really good dialogue around the systemic connections of all of these things: education, health, human services, all the way into energy. It was the best moment of my “systemic design” life.
“So maybe that is what it’s all about? To shift mindsets, we need to be able to venture into a disagreement, to get to that eye-opening dialogue”.
Re-imagining public services with intersystemic “shapeshifting” design
As one can tell after all this “complexity talk” in the previous blogs: transformative work in the public sector is not for the faint of heart.
As our Maori systemic navigator reflects:
“In the machinery of government, deep in the public service, the ethos is there. We are driven by serving our communities, but we end up doing it for them, not with them. The work itself has been splintered by breaking things down to functions, projects, and what I call “-ologies”. We lose sight of how it all connects back together. And it was designed to do exactly this, it was the machinery that colonized space, and that is now embodied in government agencies. But in the “in-between” worlds, the “inter-space”, that’s where you have the co-navigators sitting together. I believe designers are co-navigators who can bring integrity to mana. It is incumbent on those who hold power to navigate diverse responses, instead of a “one-size fits all”. At the heart of it all is, as the outcome of systems design, or service design, or what I call “whakapapa-centred design”, is the well-being of people, place and nature, and the symbiotic connections between them. It’s the interconnectedness of all things, not just the well-being of people.
So how to create designers, and public servants, who are co-navigators, who are conduits to enable and evoke space for healthy people, nature and places?.”.
To conclude this blog we are looking at the use of intersystemic “shapeshifting” design practice. What kind of complex or “hard” tasks, or “constraints” can be liberated in a public context by using intersystemic “shapeshifting” design?
Hard task 1: Safely guiding governments from FOFO (Fear of Finding Out) to “opening up”
Applying the design principles of intersystemic “shapeshifting” design can help guide governments to open up and become more comfortable in a “safe”, “unrisky” way about “risky”, “hairy” topics fraught with ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity. Fear of Finding Out (FOFO), a term borrowed from medical psychology, has been used to explain why government or regulatory officials may be reluctant to investigate an issue (medical errors, illegal environmental practices, safety incidents, policy failure) because it may reveal potential failures and lapses on their part.
Intersystemic shapeshifting design allows for designing public servants to collaborate with the public and political leaders in an intentional way. It is meant to not only better understand societal needs, but also for coming to see and understand our own assumptions. This approach intentionally includes views of communities that rise up against the political status-quo or have been systematically marginalised. This approach also includes public servants who see problems differently, because seeing the public service merely as a “delivery arm” of governments is a missed opportunity. Governments need to harvest and use diverse ideas from within their public service bodies to help prepare for future shifts that need to happen, such as moving away from fossil fuels towards reusable energy. Systemic design practices can help steward openness and hard conversations, which is a “hard” task that most public servants are still yet very uncomfortable with. As one public policy practitioner in our conversations mentioned with a bit of an uncomfortable giggle:
“But there is ehmm.. no policy yet for co-design or community-led design in policy making. How do we go about this then? ”
Hard task 2: Shifting and sharing power preemptively towards systemic design leadership
Government policies, services and programs are still predominantly designed, executed and acknowledged by people who hold powerful, privileged positions both in governments and society, especially in countries with a long history of colonisation. The biggest hurdle to take is showing the value of taking a systemic design approach to people in leadership positions. How to demonstrate people in leadership positions of the value of systemic design? One of the values of public systemic design is that it provides an intentional approach on how to centre and trust the knowledge of people who have been traditionally marginalised, and learn together in diversity on how to move forward in a well-laid out process.
Hard task 3: Developing personal and organisational transformation
The focus in public innovation work often lies on changing “the system” (that brings about the new policy, the service, the program), while a chance for change equally lies in the way people personally think and feel, and in transforming relationships between people, and between people and their environments, and within ourselves, especially at the decision making level. Shapeshifting design makes us more aware of this innovation aspect. Change won’t happen without an awakening of many people in different organisational and community levels at the same time, all the way up to power holders. A process of “view-relating” and shapeshifting could help in steering what that awakening should be about.
Hard task 4: Overcoming our “obsession” with numbers by sparking stories and learning in governments
Governments have an innate urge to measure socio-economic “growth” and “progress” through evidence in numbers. Numbers are a representation of how current systems are performing, however they are more valued than any other kind of evidence for change. Our infatuation with numbers is seldom looked at as “stifling” innovation with the enormous amount of bureaucracy that it takes to produce all those numbers. What is behind the numbers? Healthy “living” systems naturally innovate and learn through freedom, diversity and learning. The act of learning can’t be measured or held accountable with the same numeric “growth” frame, nor should we want to. Instead we could look at using the acts of storytelling and narrative building, such as what we are doing in this blog series. Can we or should we measure the value of this blog series? No. Does it have an impact? Yes.
Storytelling and story-sharing have a more natural capacity to enable a sense of agency and imagination that people can step into in their own time, and in their own places. How can we start sharing more stories on “navigating complexity and certainty” by public sector servants, and about how we think about delivering on the public good? Examples of storytelling projects are “The Red Door Project” and “Reset Narratives”.
Hard task 5: Taking time for long term, public systemic design work while being under daily pressure to deliver and respond to the crises the current systems are creating
One saying goes: “Today’s problems were yesterday’s solutions” (Peter Senge). Another one goes: “You can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions” (Albert Einstein). The multiple crises we find ourselves in today took decades, centuries to evolve. It’s an illusion to think that governments can respond adequately to big complex challenges in 4-year election cycles. We have to work, think and act more long term with both past and future generations in mind. In public systemic design this task creates an interesting tension: in order to get to that shared, long term vision we have to slow down to “see the bigger picture”, while governments typically already are being perceived as “slow” and “behind the curve”. How to slow down while getting requests to speed up and deliver programs, policies and services? Systemic design is well-positioned to step into this space as it can hold both short and long term perspectives and produce short and long term outputs.
“In pursuing justice, we’re reinforcing the system we’re trying to escape. In trying to climb out of the pits that we’ve dug for ourselves, the pits become resilient. In trying to escape the prison, the prison gains its form. So, in a very critical sense, we are in a crisis of form,” said Dr. Akomolafe. “We need trickster approaches, we need ways of dancing away, or dancing to, fugitive spaces; dancing to sanctuaries where we can shape-shift. Grieving, mourning, even allowing ourselves to partake in pleasurable activities in the face of the storm.”
Bayo Akomolafe — On Slowing Down in Urgent Times (Atmos / For the Wild)
What’s Next
In our next “intermezzo” blog about “de-methodising systemic design” we introduce 5 “design cycles” that could help in how to go about doing “intersystemic shapeshifting design”: understanding (view-relating), imagining (foresight), bounding (decision-making), public experimentation (prototyping service experiences in public spaces) and relational “service” ecosystem design (building and relating to a set of “services”). We describe what holds it all together, design cycle “glue”: continuous learning and reflexive practices.
In blogs 5 to 9 we will introduce intersystemic “shapeshifting” design scenarios and accompanying stories to help public systemic designers recognise when and how to apply intersystemic “shapeshifting” public design approaches. Do we find ourselves in a “light”, “deep” or “far + wide” scenario? Each scenario contains pragmatic approaches, systemic design protocols or “codes” if you will to creatively “hack” human-created systems. Each scenario will be illustrated by a practice story. Stay tuned!
Further reading / watching / listening
- Podcast: A podcast by ttbooks about shapeshifting
- Report: Systems-shifting design framework by the UK Design Council which guides designers to move away from the double diamond to work and think more in the ‘system-shifting’ field
- Book: Design After Capitalism — Transforming Design Today for an Equitable Tomorrow — by Matthew Wizinsky (2022)
- Web: The Systemic Design Practice Wheel that contains five P’s (People, Place, Practice, Process, Principles) to practise participatory co-design in complex public settings, by (Australian) scholar & systemic design practitioner Emma Blomkamp
- Book: In Shapeshifters, Délani Valin — neurodivergent and Métis with Nehiyaw, Saulteaux, French-Canadian and Czech ancestry - explores the cost of finding the perfect mask. Through a lens of urban Métis experience and neurodivergence, Valin takes on a series of personas as an act of empathy as resistance. Some personas are capitalist mascots like the Starbucks siren, Barbie and the Michelin Man, others include psychiatric diagnoses like hypochondria, autism and depression, and unlikely archetypes such as a woman who becomes a land mass by ending the quest to shrink herself.
- Conference: 2021 summary of a conference between public servants, designers and whānau/communities: “Co-design in Aotearoa: Ways of being, knowing and doing” — by Auckland co-design lab/Penny Hagen
- Guide: Life-centered Design Guide by Damian Lutz (2022) and life-centred design thinking by Madeleine Borthwick et al (2022).
- Course: School of Life-Centered Design — By Jeroen Spoelstra
- Book: Michael Pawlyn & Sarah Ichioka — Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency (2022). ‘Humans need to return to a state where they are co-evolving with nature”. “If we carry on believing that it is something to be plundered for resources, it will be our undoing.”. “We’ve got to get to a point where we integrate all our activities into the web of life that surrounds us, overcoming our separation from nature” (Wallpaper Magazine — Oct 2022)
- Practice: Deakin University’s Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab for business and government is being formed by academic researcher Tyson Junkaporta who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland (Australia). “The IK Systems Lab will be a place where Indigenous thinking can be applied to the issues that complexity scientists and technologists are currently working on across economics, design, cybernetics, governance, evolutionary dynamics, environment, cognition and consciousness.”
- Book: Things We Could Design For More Than Human-Centered Worlds — Ron Wakkary (2021): how posthumanist design enables a world in which humans share center stage with nonhumans, with whom we are entangled.
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 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)
