Blog 5: The Relating Public Servant — Practising “light” Systemic Design (with)in Government

Published in

Unbounded Affairs

25 min readMar 7, 2023

Soundtrack blog 5: In his track “Dance Party” DJ Fred Again (2021) uses the poem “Explaining Depression to my Mother” by Sabrina Benaim (2014). Sabrina writes: “Mom, my depression is a shapeshifter.”

Artwork blog 5: “Get out of the Cage” — Researchers in Hong Kong have created a humanoid, miniature robot that can “shapeshift” between being liquid and solid, allowing them to be used in a variety of situations.

Read other blogs in this series: Prologue, Introduction (blog 1), A Complex Matter (blog 2), Systemic Viewpoints (blog 3), Shapeshifting Design (blog 4), De-methodising Design? (intermezzo blog), The Relating Public Servant (blog 5), Relating Design Story (blog 6), The Collaborating Public Servant (blog 7) 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. How to deliver “good” public services in an increasingly “complex” world?

In the past blogs we talked about the underpinning theories and ideas of (inter)systemic design in a public service context. The following blogs (5–10) will give ideas for how public servants can start designing for “relationality”, complexity and uncertainty by situating ourselves “in between” people, places, public services and the natural order of things to help create “relating” sets of public services, programs and policies. Through “shapeshifting design” (see blog 4) the designing public servant can help governmental organisations get better at interacting with and understanding complexity, and thus enabling and supporting a future that is “relational”. But how to be a designing, shapeshifting public servant in the catch-22 that is “government”, an organisation that is tasked with both maintaining the status quo (protecting extractive capitalism, economic growth) and supporting people and environments negatively affected by the status quo while having to come up with new ways to get out of the mess humanity finds itself in (see blog 2: A Complex Matter)?

Visual 1: A relational government understands how its organisation and its services interacts with people, planet and places — CC-BY-4.0 — Marlieke Kieboom (2023)

The answer is maybe not that difficult: when designing public servants simultaneously act like “the” (human-created) system and invite people acting “within” to start seeing “the” system in a different way through introducing “guiding” design behaviours, then we might start seeing some movements? To do this we propose “shapeshifting” as a new intersystemic design practice: by “shifting” our own and others views — away from human-created “systems” that serve infinite economic growth towards seeing how our human view is in interaction with the natural order of “life” — we could shift (systemic) “shapes”.

A first, simple step towards shifting “systemic views” could be to enable ourselves to better see ourselves, our actions and our interactions with and within our context. Anyone who works in a public design setting can start observing interactions today. In this blog we first introduce 3 (inter)systemic design scenarios in government settings: “light”, “deep” and “far+wide”. The next blogs will help us to “see” in which (inter) systemic design “scenario” we might find ourselves interacting in.

This kind of “awareness” might help us to better understand which step to take next: decide which new design practices and behaviours create the best chance to “escape” confining, oppressing, affirming, re-iterating cultures, processes and structures that are not serving a future in which humans honour “life” on earth in perpetuity. For each scenario we propose a behavioural design “code” that could guide design behaviour of public servants in expanding views and approaches and thus work outcomes: relating in a light scenario, collaborating in a deep scenario, and learning + being in a far+wide scenario.

Each code comes with suggestions and invitations (“hacks”) for how to start shifting, accompanied by an (animal, folk or technological) “shapeshifter” figure to aid our visual memory. Each scenario will also be accompanied by anecdotes and illustrative practice stories (blog 6, 8, 10). This blog then continues with the “light” design scenario about being a “relating” designing public servant, and the potential for creating “light” systemic shifts.

Visual 2: “shapeshifting” intersystemic design by expanding “relationality” of designing public servants— V1 — CC-BY-4.0 Marlieke Kieboom, 2023

Let’s first recap what was said in some of the previous blogs (4, intermezzo).

Blog series recap: intersystemic design and the “shapeshifting” public servant within

Some people perceive the universe, the world and themselves as one infinite “whole”/complex/interconnected “system” with smaller interacting “complex systems” within, while other people perceive themselves outside of the “whole” as objective “observers”, independent “operators” or “change agents” who connect people and human-created (justice, healthcare, education) systems. Some people exercise a mixed view, yet others see no “systems” at all (see blog 3: systemic viewpoints). In blog 3 we illustrated these various ways of seeing as a circle and a square, with a “squircular” shaped design space in the middle. It matters to better recognise which systemic view is used by whom to enable ourselves to better understand how to interact with the different “systemic design” implications (costs, outcomes) for our planet.

Visual 3: squircular design space — Marlieke Kieboom (2023) — V1 — CC-BY-4.0

In blog 4 we introduced “shapeshifting” design as a way to challenge boundaries, to shift people’s systemic views, and thus systems, cultures, policies and public services, to enable the emergence of “relational” public services and policies that can better respond to complexity in our times of poly-crises.

An example of an “unrelational” public policy is: the “duty to consult” Indigenous communities in Canada without providing incentives, guidelines or compensation for co-navigation and co-decision-making between governments and communities
An example of a “semi-relational” public policy is: the historic Blueberry Agreement (2022) between multiple Ministries in the B.C. Government (Canada) and the Blueberry First Nation that will guide them forward in a landscape-based partnership approach to land, water and resource stewardship
A fully “relational” policy would include current and future well-being of humans and all beings in the bioregion of the Blueberry Nation - beyond just the management of land, water and resource stewardship — into a multi-relational approach with multiple communities across multiple public jurisdictions (ie. municipalities, Ministry of Children and Families, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Land, Water etc.)

From a systems thinking perspective, the idea of “shapeshifting” suggests that multiple interwoven, overlapping and interconnected logics interact with each other and can “entangle”, “alter” and ultimately “imbalance” both behaviours of and outcomes for people as well as the environments (waterways, animals, plants, soil, air) we live in. For example (human-created) racism, capitalism, poverty, health, economic status and the weather (natural order!) together can show up in “ugly”, oppressive or altering ways in ourselves (ie. depression), our family lives (ie. income inequality, foster care), in our public lives (ie. discrimination in schools, hospitals) and in the natural world (ie. floods, drought, landslides). So much so that it “imbalances”* people towards “non-caring” behaviour towards themselves, each other or our environments, especially in people and systems that deploy and prefer “colonial” ways of thinking. This creates further imbalances, even toward a state of societal or environmental “collapse”, in which entire groups of people and whole eco-systems tip towards not being able to live well or live at all, and worse: are not able to regenerate life for future generations. The planet will live on, but will humanity?

*We explicitly avoid the word “marginalise” since it does not include the role of people and systems who intentionally or unintentionally “marginalise” others.

Our hypothesis is that if we, humans — and thus also designing public servants — could become more “attune” to how this kind of intersystemic “shapeshifting” works, and start mimicking (acting like, becoming a shapeshifter!) this cultural and natural phenomenon in both our own daily “human lives” as well as our daily “government lives”, then we could invite people and systems to start shifting their interactions towards creating better, positive, more balanced and relational outcomes (“shapes”) by design.

Intersystemic “shapeshifting” design aims to work “in between” people, places, systems and public services. Part of this idea is based on quantum mechanics, a theory to describe how “matter”, atoms or energy are organised on a very small scale. Quantum theory tells us that we can influence a situation by just observing it. The other theoretical base is formed by the idea of biomimicry: by observing life on our planet and its 3.8 billion years of evolution and development humans can learn from biological organisms (animals, plants, microbes) and how they developed strategies to survive, to optimize their organization and functioning, and to adapt their form to their function. The remainder of our ideas is informed by practicising (inter)systemic design (see blogs 6, 8, 10).

In this blog series “shapeshifting” is thus proposed as a new design technique for a growing group of public servants who feel seemingly stuck “in between” the “boundaries” of the government context they work in and the needs of people and environments who are experiencing detrimental outcomes of multiple, interacting crises, such as income inequality, diminishing bio-diversity and climate change.

“Shapeshifting” might sound a bit sci-fi, especially in a government context, but shapeshifting has always been around. It’s a natural survival technique (for example used by animals such as octopus, chameleon or schools of herring swimming in formation) and it has also been used as a storytelling technique to share cultural (Western, Indigenous, Eastern, Southern, Northern) “wisdom” and values across generations about interactions between the animate and non-animate (for example stories where people turn into animals or vice versa, such as Maui in Aotearoa | New Zealand, Kelpie (seal to human) in Scotland and Kitsune (woman to fox) in Japan).

A designing, shapeshifting public servant can start shifting behaviours and “bounded” views of themselves and others by taking on different “shapes” in different contexts, for example by

1. “chameleoning” (like an octopus!) into different shapes

The designing public servant can be in a community or in the forest in the morning, but can change clothes and dress up for a “boardroom” executive meeting in the afternoon, understanding, relating and translating “in between” both contexts to avoid a threat or being perceived as a threat in either context.

2. “escaping” or “jumping out of” (like Spiderman!) spaces, places, times

The designing public servant has an ability to shape people’s views towards seeing “problems” in a different light and from a different perspective by enabling people to step in each others “shoes” or “view” by creating new experiences, metaphors and new ways of “seeing” in between different contexts to demonstrate interconnections.

3. “transforming” realities (like a psychologist, therapist or a magician)

The designing public servant can help people heal trauma and imagine new futures by inviting people to interact with new designs and stories to form new collaborations and new ideas in between past, current and new realities.

When combining observations from diverse historical and cultural knowledges, the natural world and new technologies we can learn more about how the human species could live and thrive in symbiosis with its environment for generations to come. Through the “river catchment” story, as told from a Maori | Indigenous Knowledge perspective (blog 4), we illustrated how “co-navigating” designing public servants can take a public service design approach in between different (Western, Indigenous) “systemic views”. In doing so the co-navigators “shapeshifted” 3 interlocking, nested systemic “shapes” or public service designs at once towards acting in more connected, relational ways with positive outcomes for all (people, water, landscapes, government):

ways of thinking within the public service, from domination towards collaboration and co-partnership
ways of designing public policies and service, from individual disconnected services towards sets of interrelated and interconnected services
ways of re-balancing socio-economic and ecological imbalances, from “individual” well-being centred on solely (“marginalised”) humans towards a “symbiotic” well-being between communities, places and the natural world over time and generations

To enable this kind of “shapeshifting” in a policy context we identified 5 intersystemic “design life-cycles” in collective policy-making processes with new groups/people “in between” dominant and emerging systems (“intermezzo” blog):

relating and power sharing (1)
imagining and investigating (2)
bounding/decision-making (3)
public prototyping (4)
relational service ecosystem design (5)

Visual 4: Intersystemic Policy Design Life Cycles — Marlieke Kieboom 2023 — CC-BY-4.0

Each intersystemic policy design “life” cycle runs its own natural, cyclical path, in which the “endpoint” (end of natural increase, death) of each is recognised by the design collective as a “shapeshifted” reality, as a situation that feels (shift) and looks (shape) “different”. This “intersystemic” design process happens prior to designing sets of services in a more traditional “service design” cycle. Key to “shapeshifting” design is entering the process with people who have differing systemic views. It is then the task of the designing public servant to create openings to start exploring transformation on equal footing. How long “intersystemic” design takes to transform anything depends on how much trust was broken and how much imbalance was created. The policy design life cycles are held together by continuous learning and reflexive practices.

Introducing intersystemic “shapeshifting” policy design in a government context requires rigorous praxeology (for example by sharing and studying practice stories) but also introducing behavioural “codes” and “hacks” as entry points to start intersystemic shifts.

That’s where we left off. Let’s dive in!

The work scenarios

Part of learning to work with complex issues in government is learning when, where and how to introduce an intersystemic design approach in our work, to our peers, colleagues, managers, directors and decision makers. We don’t want to scare people away with complex concepts or vague terminology. We should ask ourselves if we should call what we do public “systemic design” or “shapeshifting” at all, since it seems to divert our attention towards the “sexyness” or vagueness of such new approaches. At the same time we don’t want people to shy away from or simplify the inherent complexity our work is situated in, or to forget about the actual rigour that needs to be behind our practices, or worse, to not do the work that absolutely needs to be done.

In the next blogs we give clues for how to recognise 3 types of public design work scenarios in which we carry the ability, and maybe even responsibility, to “shapeshift” realities, and that allow for the designing public servant to act as a “shapeshifter”:

“Light” public design scenario, with a focus on generating a different kind of “relating”

Typical design timeline is short (6 months — 1 year), with a focus on designing a product or a service. There is little space to explore the bigger picture, there is no power-sharing, and no time is taken to design collaborations first before starting with the design of the product.

Example: design a public service, for example design a webpage that supports citizens to apply for income assistance in an unexpected life event, such as losing a job or a home.

“Deep” public design scenario, with a focus on generating a different kind of “collaborating”

Typical design timeline is somewhat longer (1–4 or 5 years, typically not longer than an election cycle), there is space to question the ways things are “done”, typically because something “surfaced”, there is space to form new collaborations and question power structures.

Example: design for an understanding or a collaboration that can influence a set of public services, for example design a program, policy or set of new policies that can simultaneously support people in an (unexpected) life event, such as housing policy, income policy and health policy.

“Far + wide” public design scenario, with a focus on generating a different kind of “learning and being”

Typical design timeline is very long from the perspective of a human life, or a government (5–50 years). There is no “set” design space, the designing public servant creates collective learning space across government silos, “in-between” existing structures and actively involves people and organisations from the “outside” in.

Example: design for a new set of principles and values to guide how any kind of public service delivery across the entire organisation is being approached and designed, for example: design a new public service mindset or approach that moves away from aiming for individual “service access” towards aiming for services that enable thriving, aspiration, success and “wellbeing” for all people in a community in relation to their environments.

Typical design timeline: very long from the perspective of a human life, or a government (5–50 years)

In each scenario we make suggestions for what we could do in terms of practising “shapeshifting” in a government setting. Each scenario aims to further widen people’s views and approaches for the complex task at hand to help internalise what we had previously externalised from our viewpoints, to increase our chances of working towards more regenerative, open, diverse and relational futures.

The “light” design scenario: let’s make a “thing” that will “solve” the complex problem (… in 6 months, please)

This “light” design scenario could be described as: there is space to design or introduce a government “thing” (website, product, service, policy, law) that is talked about as something that is intended to “change something” or even “change the system”. We can recognise this kind of situation when people say things like:

“Hey, we want to design an app to solve homelessness”
“Let’s design a website to inform citizens about climate change”
“We are hitting the ground running, can you do some design research with the local Indigenous community, starting next week?”
“We don’t have time”
“Problem X needs solution Y”, for example: “The wait times for people to get an MRI are too long, let’s buy more MRI machines and digitise the waitlist process.”

It’s a good thing to know that this scenario is typically the hardest to operate in when wanting to practise public (inter)systemic design. We assume that the majority of designing public servants finds itself in this scenario most of the time. Even in this scenario shapeshifting is possible and especially necessary.

Visual 5: Recognizing a light design scenario in terms of timing, space, focus, collaboration forms, power sharing, conflict and timeline — Marlieke Kieboom (2023) — CC-BY-4.0

In a “light” design setting the following characteristics are at play:

a short, linear project space with a beginning and end (typically a deadline in 4–6 months)
a traditional, linear-shaped human-centred, service or co-design process, following the “double-diamond” or “design squiggle”
the focus is on designing the “thing” (product, service), not on the relationships or (systemic) views that have formed in the past over decades or centuries, and that will inadvertently form the future “thing”
partners typically have not been able to spend much time together on exploring the complex space in which their “thing” resides
there is no time to design the way people collaborate over getting to “the thing” (no co-navigation prior to co-design), typically leading to disfunctional and unequal collaborations
the public funding is ready to be spent on the “thing” (hurry, hurry before fiscal end!)
there is positive momentum to take action: there are decisions to be made and there are many possibilities to work together across silos and to engage many people at once due to the momentum (the “thing” is going to be “the thing” that solves every-“thing”!)

The design artefacts (websites, services, policies) that are brought forward in this scenario will typically perform like the people who thought of them and will start interacting with the interconnected parts of the complex systemic context it resides in, reinforcing its structures. It is a “systems eating systemic designers for breakfast”— scenario, basically.

In this scenario the designing public servant has a few options. One is to quickly recognise this scenario and create conditions to start designing in a “deep” design scenario (see blog 7). However this is often not possible because too many people around the observing, designing public servant are acting according to the dominant systemic view in place. In this case it is most important to try and find ways to (at least temporarily) revert people’s attention away from the intense focus on the “product” to create more space for “relating” wherever we can. To see and experience “relations” can help widen our views and our approaches to increase the probability of designing public services that can resonate with complexity. Within this “light” design code we can identify starting points (“hacks”) for “relating” in more regenerative, systemic ways.

In the “light” scenario our main task as public servants is to temporarily revert our attention away from the intense focus on the “product” to create more space for “relating”.

Visual 6: 9 shapeshifting behaviours for the designing public servant in 3 scenarios: light, deep and far+wide with 3 behavioural codes: relating, collaborating and learning. Each behaviour is illustrated by a natural, cultural or technological “shapeshifter” to serve as a memory aid. The light scenario focusses on creating “relating” in between public service colleagues . The proposed “hacks” are: co-design in between collectives, introducing and agreeing on design principles and inviting decision-makers into design research activities— CC-BY-4.0 — Marlieke Kieboom (2023)

Hack 1: Co-design in between collectives

Illustrative shapeshifter: the mimic octopus can take on 15 different shapes and colours.

Co-design is an approach to design policies, programs or products with the people who are affected by the outcomes of these designs (read more about systemic co-design principles through the work of scholar and practitioner dr. Emma Blomkamp). There are various ways to do this:

Work with people with lived experience: Engage people with lived experience, people who are “knowledge keepers” in their own places and communities, people who have different cultural perspectives and societal positions (than our own). Engagement happens in ethical, meaningful and participatory research practices. There is appropriate compensation in place. These participatory practices can not be extractive, should be trauma-informed and have healing rituals and ceremonies built in.
Work with service providers in “the systems”: Engage with service providers (ie. elders, social workers, police, hospital staff, midwives, religious leaders, healers) who typically work “in between” communities and people who steer or manage their work (ie. managers, executives). What helps them, what hampers them? Which work cultures, protocols, procedures help reproducing the same outcomes? What are their ideas for change? In systemic service design processes it is often overlooked to make time and budget available for service providers to take part in this process.
Work with a paid peer researcher: A peer researcher is someone with lived experience and connections in the area of interest who onboards as a temporary or permanent design team member. Working together creates accountability and a shared knowledge production process. It’s important to compensate a peer researcher for their time and expertise and to treat them as an equal design team member.
Create a nimble but networked core team: 1 or 2 people with a project lead from a Ministry, together with 1–2 people pulling the systemic design approach and a peer researcher could form a solid, nimble core team that forms networked relationships with both the community and organisations/government
Introduce an “unheard/invisible” design council: create non-human “archetypes” and “personas” that might otherwise have no active voice in design processes and bring them along. What would they think, feel, say about what we are doing? We can create “non-human” personas or archetypes that have significance in their local context, such as a raven, orca, bear, salmon, or an iconic tree, such as “the Lonely Doug” or “the Golden Spruce”. How about inviting our late ancestors (elders, philosophers, controversialists) with stories, messages, quotes?

Hack 2: Introduce and agree on design principles

Illustrative shapeshifter: mitochondria shapeshift to aid dormant muscle stem cells in humans to support repairs.

It is helpful to collectively introduce and agree on design principles prior to starting to work together. Ideally these design principles can resonate with complexity, such as openness, diversity, trust and liberty. Here are a few ideas:

Ask for permission to open up the learning space: What if the service we have to design is part of an ecosystem of services that has become disconnected or broken over time? Can we get permission from the Ministry or assignment giver to dive deeper into the “Why” question? A strategy here that sometimes works is to use the “risk” narrative: “Let’s reduce our risk of designing the wrong service or solution.
Share openly and on the go: Share the process, findings and insights during your project in co-design sessions with executives, decision makers and stakeholders in the field, not just at the end. It’s a way to validate findings, give decision makers the information they need as early as possible, and for stakeholders to meet and guide the work. Consider sharing in many different formats (data walks, presentations) and place-based knowledge sharing, by travelling to where communities are.
Combine numbers with stories: Combining numbers and stories can provide powerful, nuanced insights and learning into complex situations. Numbers or statistics can be used as pointers for where to start qualitative research and with whom, as opposed to “metrics” which are often used to “control” a situation. Once common themes emerge, we can validate findings with stakeholders, cross-reference with the numbers, find gaps and opportunities, and maybe even calculate costs versus benefits for the tax payer / government to attract the “old” systems into change. Numbers alone can be misleading but can also point to “systemic” imbalances, for example:

In 2022 Canada, 53.8% of children in foster care are Indigenous, but Indigenous children account for only 7.7% of the child population (according to Census 2021). What are the stories behind these numbers?
In 2021 Black Americans were incarcerated in state prisons at nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans. What are the stories behind these numbers?
Vessel traffic noise diminishes endangered Southern Resident orcas’ hunting ability by roughly 23%. At least 80% of these Orca diets consist of Chinook salmon. Chinook Salmon in the Salish Sea are down 60% since the Pacific Salmon Commission began tracking salmon abundance in 1984. Southern Resident orca’s population has declined to only 75 animals remaining. What are the stories behind these numbers?

Design visual artefacts: In any given project we encounter complex information that people need to understand quickly and efficiently: system maps, journey maps, network visualisations. Designing artefacts that visualise complexity could help kickstart conversations, even long after a project cycle is over. They should never be treated as a representation of a “true” state of affairs. They are just a tool to start conversations on different (separate, whole) systemic viewpoints, and how people relate. In these design artefacts we could play with different styles. Typical “square’’ systemic representations show dots, lines, graphs, diagrams and network visualisations. What if the system map was built collaboratively and interactively in 3-D with items found in- and outside our work building, items that “represent’’ systemic viewpoints and relations? What if the “journey map” consisted of an actual map and a field visit to experience the government service journey? What if we added ritual and ceremonial elements, smell, taste?
Work more intuitively with “common sense”: our own emotions in our work are often “screened out” and not valued in dominant, operating environments. What happens when we undo ourselves of expectations, rules and measures? What do we feel, hear, see? What do people in decision-making roles feel, hear, or see? How do we all connect to the topics we work on?

Hack 3: Invite decision-makers to do design research

Illustrative shapeshifter: Kwaku Anansi is a trickster spider-god found in stories in West-Africa. The story goes that Anansi spread wisdom to everyone; and “any one who did not pick some up is — excuse my saying so — a fool.”

This is where systemic design “light” gets hard. In this linear scenario there exists a “hand-off” between the information we curate in inter-systemic design processes and deciding with which designs to move forward with. In this “light” scenario public service “decision-makers” (Director, Executive Director and up) are typically not part of or subject to the systemic design process, often under the cultural excuse of “no time” or “not my job”. Equally the “knowledge makers/holders/keepers”, the folks who produced the knowledge throughout this scenario, are not part of the decision-making process.

This creates an interesting challenge, as one of our systemic design practitioners in our blog writing collective reflects:

“Usual design decision processes such as “dotmocracy”, where we vote with our feet, hand and hearts as to which prototypes should move forward into development, don’t work in formal bureaucratic settings. And the community isn’t always “right” about everything either. So who then holds the challenge? Who does it belong to? Who decides on what to act on?”

Since in this scenario the designs of decision-making structures are mostly left untouched, the risk of widening power disparity (instead of addressing it) is ever-looming. One way to try and overcome this is to try and immerse people “higher up” in the design research experiences by coming along on “fieldwork” days to generate more empathy, engagement and trust.

“Light” design outcomes

Light systemic “hacks” are meant to create more “symbiosis”, just like we see in natural processes. They can lead to widening views and approaches, and they can lead to creating public services that are at least a tad bit more “relational” than if they were created in the most traditional ways “unsystemic” ways (top-down consulting, service design).

However systemic design “light” only scratches the surface of any kind of complex situation (see blog 6 for a full story on systemic design “light”). Working in this scenario is incredibly hard, and can lead to feelings of burn-out and disappointment with the designing public servant about power disparity and lack of “impact”. It feels like working against the grain, churned by dominant views in dominating systems.

But don’t be fooled, this scenario can hold many “light” seeds within. It can give people an idea for what intersystemic “shapeshifting” design could look like and what it can accomplish. It could create useful artefacts that help people to start different kinds of conversations, such as conversations about the systems maps and design research insights, and it sets people up for future collaborations. It could help shift from a “light” design scenario, to a deeper, more collaborative design scenario when designing public services, in which the design entry points shift, and thus the systemic outcomes.

Visual 7& 8: Most public service design scenarios still hover mostly in between “current” / “light” design scenarios, while there is more and more interest to move into “deeper” design scenarios. Through expanding our contextual awareness of the complexity we operate in, we can expand our horizons and create opportunities for different design entry points and invite different kinds of design behaviours, such as relating, collaborating and learning (see visual 7). Marlieke Kieboom (2023) — CC-BY-4.0

It’s also good for paving the way for a “deep” intersystemic design. This systemic design story from a systemic design firm can attest to how those “seeds” can pop up later as “mini-plants”:

“Two years ago we helped a city to reshape their parking policy, especially for people with a disability. What made this project possible in the first place was a pretty forward thinking public sector leader in the city who let us do what we needed to do. So we did a lot of research with people with disabilities to better understand their challenges. We followed them around the city, we including pictures in our reports to decision makers to help them understand people’s stories. We also took the bylaw officers along in our research. Then we also designed a few prototypes with a design firm to show how certain solutions could work. It was challenging to be creative because existing bylaws dictate how enforcement happens.”
“But once we presented and delivered the work, it became dead silent. One year went by, two years went by. And just yesterday we heard that they finally made some actual changes. So we asked: what was driving the work behind the scenes? And you know what they said? A feeling of embarrassment! They felt embarrassed that some of the buttons and screens were just not working for people with disabilities. Another thing they mentioned was the process. It was refreshing and exciting for people to work this way, to have different kinds of data also. It just opened up a whole bunch of insights. So the [systemic design] journey and value is in that process.”

What’s next

In this blog we reflected on a “light” intersystemic design scenario. Our next blog (blog 6) contains the reflections of two public servants who practiced “light” systemic design in a public service context when working in a very complex policy situation: how to design relationally to end opioid overdose deaths and “shapeshift” towards societal well-being and caring? What were their experiences? How did they work? What can we learn? Blog 7 about the “collaborative public servant” will speak about a “deep” intersystemic design scenario, while blog 8 will contain a story with a “deep” design practitioner.

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.

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* “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)