Intermezzo- De-methodising public systemic design?
Art intermezzo: As the Spirit Moves Me — by artist Wami Aluko. This visual story explores the relationship between dance, spirituality and freedom for black women. It draws inspiration from traditional Yoruba religious practices, from Nigeria and the diaspora, where dance is considered a significant ritual in connecting with the metaphysical realm.
Soundtrack intermezzo: Bonobo — Between the Lines (ft. Bajka, 2013)
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 blog 4 we introduced “intersystemic design” as an emerging public systemic design practice that enables public servants to work with complexity in between complex adaptive systems, in between different systemic views (see blog 3), in between governments, Ministries and governance structures and even in between ourselves, to ultimately shift and rebalance how systemic dynamics or “shapes” show up in ourselves, in our work, in our societies, in our economies and in our ecologies.
In the next blogs (5–9) we will share how we can work “intersystemically” in public design scenarios and practices. But before we head into the “tactics” part, we pause and reflect with an “intermezzo” blog on “de-methodising” our design practices when designing with complex situations within a public (inter)systemic context. Should we de-methodise design practices when working in between systems (especially at a policy level)? And if so, why is that challenging in a public service context? What are the alternatives?
A note on “methodology” in relation to “change”
It’s easy to notice how our current public service context responds positively to “unrisky” design processes, “unthreatening” design artefacts, and “easy” step-by-step design methods (research, iterate, prototype, design, deliver!). It accepts research plans, budgets, metrics, working groups and committees, no questions asked. It responds with curiosity and enthusiasm to the “innocence” of flipcharts, sticky notes, white boards, toolkits, systems maps and “design playbooks”. Our public service context responds much more invisibly in reverse to processes and items that it deems “foreign”, “uncertain”, “vague” or “unknown”, for example when introducing a non-linear “systemic policy design” process, or using a “medicine wheel” to guide our policymaking or diverting design power to communities in “radical participatory design”.
This tendency is problematic in “complex contexts” (see blog 2 to read more about “complex contexts”). Complexity requires us to be intentionally vague to enable us to embrace uncertainty and to experiment, while a public service context requires us to be intentionally clear to enable a sense of “certainty” to uphold central public service values such as transparency and accountability. Complexity also requires us to see ourselves as “interconnected” beings in relationship to one another in between everything and everyone else, while our public service context separates everything and everyone out into individual roles (citizen, non-citizen, public servant, director, executive director, assistant deputy minister, deputy minister, minister) and individual spaces (cubicles, excel sheets, Ministries, branches, divisions, jurisdictions). It even splits up time into fiscal years and election cycles (see blog 2: A Complex Matter).
Complexity requires us to “de-methodise” while bureaucracy requires us to “methodise”. Are complexity and bureaucracy incompatible companions?
Complexity requires us to “de-methodise” while bureaucracy requires us to “methodise”. Are complexity and bureaucracy incompatible companions?
In leaving this question unanswered it is much “safer” for elected officials to introduce new ways of working like public systemic design in the government margins, in separate “innovation teams” that allow for “experimentation”. However this is a challenging place for initiatives to survive since the fringes, as opposed to the “centre”, often do not enable the development of an “intersystemic” birds-eye view, nor do the fringes involve enough “heat” or power play to “shapeshift” dominant views and systems. The more radical ideas and innovation initiatives are then easily left to die, along with the flipcharts and sticky-notes.
How to then work within these tensions as a public servant doing the public service “work”, such as supporting to shift laws, regulations and policies to positively influence the big challenges of our times, all the way to shifting our own thought patterns and behaviours as public servants?
In his latest book “Designing Complexity: the methodology and practice of systems oriented design” (2022) Birger Sevaldson points out the value of “praxeology” over “methodology” in systemic design:
“Praxeology is the knowledge, experience, adaptability, and competence to operate in real world contexts. Unlike methodology, praxeology does not prescribe principles of actions; rather it suggests how to act through building rich libraries of actions. (..) It is not prescriptive, but suggestive. It is offered, rather than prescribed. Compared to a methodology, it is not describing procedures that are repeatable. Instead, it describes heuristics, experiences, and problematiques in the practice.”
Praxeoloy is a useful practice that has been put to use throughout this blog series: the “water”, “mining” and “river catchment” stories provide us with deep insights and ideas into how design is being practised in complex public policy contexts. In our public intersystemic design work – in between human-created systems and the laws of the natural world - it is worthwhile to visit a few more thoughts about “change”, and the place of “methods” within.
1. Change is always happening
Change is always happening. Unexpected events will always occur. Our bodies, our environments and our world are not the same as they were a few seconds ago. “If everything is interconnected, then everything is constantly impacted by everything else, which leaves no room for a permanent state. At all.” writes author and philosopher Francis Laleman (2022). If we really want to acknowledge interconnectedness and relatedness as we say we do, then we need to learn how to better suppress the urge to thwart, manipulate, bend, suppress, or worse ignore, the feedback that our contexts are continuously giving us. We need to learn to come to see and respect complexity where it is at. Change can thus not be “scaled” in the Western sense of the word: what happens in one place, might not happen in the same way in another place.
One of our intersystemic design practitioners in Aotearoa | New Zealand in this blog series thought collective reflects on this aspect of “change” from an Indigenous knowledge perspective:
“In human-centred design thinking you prototype and then you look to go to scale, which is that big goal. But during the pandemic, in our social little bubbles, we understood our communities as if they were the scales on a fish. That it is not always about going to scale. It’s about how we can best connect the bubbles of connectivity, like how the scales on a fish connect. When you look closely you can see how the scales on a fish achieve two things. One is it helps to protect the fish, the community, but it also enables the fish to move quickly through the water. So when we started to reframe what scaling is to us, or what “going to scale” means, and how we start to look at that from our diverse community, their scales, we arrived on a different way of thinking of where to activate “change”: in between systems to find leverage points, how systems are connected to physical places, and how our Whānau, our families and communities fit within.”
2. Shifts do not happen in isolation
“Methods” imply a false focus on the assumed ability of individual people to kickstart change, to control input, output, problems, solutions, actions, reactions. It implies a certain linearity based on the ancient Greek notion of logos: take the steps, draw the circles and diagrams, follow the arrows, and we will get to the desired destination. This notion causes us to overly focus on “the system” that is supposedly in need of changing, while we could also be looking at shifting the interactions between ourselves, in between systems, within the world that surrounds us instead. We need to tune into how our environments and relationships are continuously giving us “feedback” to our actions, often without us noticing. But when we follow a “method” it gets easier to bypass the “feedback” since we are guided by the next step, arrow or phase of the “method”.
It also means that we need to accept that change does not come from a purely methodological place. Change does not come solely from individual, expert “systemic designers” who study, teach or practise systemic or intersystemic design. More often than not people who practise “systemic design” might have never heard of this practice nor would they call it that (such as our architect storyteller in blog 8, forthcoming). They are artists, designers, filmmakers or political adversaries who naturally practise systemic design by “naturally holding tensions in complex spaces”, as thinker and author Nora Bateson points out. A good example of a “natural” intersystemic design approach without calling it (inter)systemic design prior to a new initiative emerging is the “Right Relations Collaborative” in British Columbia, Canada | Turtle Island. The Right Relations Collaborative originated in between philanthropy, community and government spaces and is flipping traditional grant-making approaches upside down by having philantropic funders apply to an Indigenous “Aunties Council”. The Aunties decide what gets funded in their local communities.
“Funders have to share their “money story”: how they earned the wealth, what harms were created through that wealth accumulation, and how they’re working to redress those harms. They also have to share what relationships they have, if any, with the Indigenous nations whose territories they work on.” — Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack), a Secwepemc and Nuxalk community organiser, in: The Future of Good
The “in-between” initiatives typically do not get the initial support from existing systems in terms of time, space or financial resources since they are initially not recognised as something “of value”. This blog series — written in our own time, outside of our (government, academia) jobs- is an example of this phenomenon as well. It is an “art” to recognise and steward such initiatives and it is the designing public servant who can support “in-between/inter systemic” gems by nurturing and protecting their unique dynamics from the powerful systemic status quo.
3. We are the change
In reflecting on change within “systems” Francis Laleman (2022) writes:
“Being of meaning is that you are no longer making the best of the system, and you are no longer changing the system, you are the change of the system”.
If system dynamics act themselves out through us, and “shapeshift” our human actions — like racism, colonialism and capitalism together “shapeshifted” the behaviour of hospital personnel from “caring” to “not caring” in the story of Indigenous man Brian Sinclair who died after 36 hours in a hospital emergency room (see blog 4) – then we can be the change, and reverse the “shapeshifting” that happens within ourselves by recognising how this systemic “theatre” is played out through us.
- We can stop and check in with a person slumped over a public bench and check if they are breathing, and ask if they are in need of something
- We can befriend someone who is seemingly very different from ourselves and start learning
- We can stop buying plastic disposable toothbrushes from oil-hungry toothbrush companies
- We can create space in public policy design processes to pause, reflect, experiment and collaborate with actors situated within the context in which a new public policy or service will play out
For the reasons above we think that in order for “intersystemic design” to flourish in a public sector context, or any complex context, it should remain a free, un-expertised, decentralised, way of working or thinking that anyone can enter and leave at all times. As systemic design practitioner and scholar Emma Blomkamp (2021) writes:
“Recognising that systemic design is an emerging, pluralistic practice, it would be inappropriate to propose a fixed methodology.”
But … presenting “public systemic design” as an unbounded, un-expertised way of working is not very attractive in a government context and will likely not gain traction or risks getting expelled if it shows up in this “loose” form. Is there an “in-between” approach? We think there might be ways.
Intersystemic design should remain a free, un-expertised, decentralised, way of working or thinking that anyone can enter and leave at all times
Introducing design “code” to “hack” in between systemic design spaces
The “praxeology” of Birger Sevaldson suggests deep learning from systemic design practices between designers who are flexible and adaptable, designing custom approaches per situation and to constantly deconstruct “methods” as ways to practise systems-oriented design. For “intersystemic” design we could add the ethos of “hacking” as another valuable practice for learning to design intersystemically. In “Prophets at a Tangent: How art shapes social imagination” (2023), Geoff Mulgan writes:
“Hacking suggests an ethos for linking creativity and imagination, offering an approach that fiddles, adjusts, deconstructs, and reconstructs things that are already lying around: bricolage rather than grand design. (..) Hacking in its modern sense emerged at MIT in the 1950s and 1960s and promoted work done for curiosity rather than reward; a belief in sharing and openness; and faith in decentralisation and bettering the world. It can be applied to almost anything.”
Within the practices of “praxeology” and “hacking” the word “code” comes to mind. Code can be used for understanding complexity in both a mathematical and technological (square) sense through numbers as well as an ancestral (circular) way through stories without having to prescribe a rigid intersystemic design “methodology”.
Our mātauranga Māori design thinker and system navigator reflects on the word “code” from an Indigenous knowledge perspective:
“One of the things that demonstrates how wise our tūpuna [ancestors] were, they’ve left us a coding of unlocking that knowledge in waiata [song], in karakia [ritual chants], in pūrākau [ancestral legends, stories] and if you like there’s a Da Vinci Code, they left in that. The knowledge and things that were framed as myths, actually were navigation or coordinates and stories which are being used today to reaffirm and recapture that knowledge.”
“Code” is also relatable in “Western”, more “square” understanding of systems, such as in (computer) science and mathematics. Modern philosophy or science (not even quantum physics) can not wholly explain human life or consciousness, nor can it explain the nature and origin of life, matter, the environment, the universe, and reality. The introduction of category theory (1996), described as the “mathematics of mathematics”, opens up new doors to understand innovation and emergence. French mathematician Mathias BEJEAN attempts to explain innovation through a fictional character (“Eno, the sad innovator”) and mathematical theory in his book “Innovation beyond Fiction” and comes to a similar conclusion as scholar Geoff Mulgan:
“Successful innovation hinges on having everyone involved in the process share a space of conceptual exploration. This philosophical aspect of the innovation process is about collective imagination, a notion that customary styles of thought have great difficulty dealing with.”
“Code” thus invites people to build and weave with the concepts themselves within their own contexts. Therefore we will use the word “code” when making suggestions for intersystemic “hacks” that could help shapeshift public service contexts. In our upcoming blogs we will introduce shapeshifting “codes” for “light”, “deep” and “far+wide” public design scenarios, and suggest at least 3 hacks that can be applied in each code (blogs 5, 7, 9, forthcoming).
Yet words like “code”, “hacking”, “shapeshifting” and “praxeology” are still not very accessible or accepted in a public service context when the goal is to open up a broader public service audience to work with “complexity”. What else can we think of to make intersystemic design more widely accessible and accepted as a viable approach for public policy and service design, especially in a government context that will always naturally gravitate towards “stability” over uncertainty?
Introducing intersystemic design cycles for public policy making
Why is the realm of policy making an interesting field for intersystemic design, in comparison to the realm of law and regulations?
Law, regulation, and policy are three distinct but related concepts that are often (unknowingly or unintentionally) used interchangeably. Laws are formal rules created by a governing body, regulations are rules or standards created by regulatory bodies to enforce laws, and policies are guidelines or principles established by organizations or governments to guide decision-making and behaviour. Policies can serve as the basis for the development of laws and regulations and vice versa. Strong policy contains a clear set of goals and strategies for the government and the public to work towards a shared vision and set of outcomes. An example of a government policy is: policy that aims to reduce carbon emissions to “net zero” in order to address climate change.
It is the field of policy-making that is most interesting as a playing field for intersystemic design, since it is a value-led, political process that requires understanding of interrelated issues, people and places, as well as cross-sectoral and cross-community collaboration and “contestation” to come to collective agreements. Will the “net zero” policy focus on introducing innovative technology, or will it also focus on economic “de-growth” and lowering consumerism in a post-capitalist world?
The need for a new policy often arises from its context: an opportunity, idea or threat emerges (for example via media coverage). This is typically a moment for change and therefore it lends itself well for an “intersystemic” policy design approach.
Typical policy-making processes are experienced and perceived as linear: take step 1,2,3 (input) to get to x, y, z (output) to then “monitor / evaluate” outcomes.
What could this process look like if we were to actually acknowledge complexity? We propose a more cyclical, collaborative and open “intersystemic” design “life cycle” approach. In “intersystemic” design processes we can roughly recognise 5 intersystemic design “life” cycles that run their own natural, cyclical path in a policy context before moving toward designing sets of services in a more traditional “service design” cycle. The “endpoint” (end of natural growth, death) of each intersystemic policy design cycle is recognised as a “shifted” reality, as a situation that feels and looks “different”. This state is agreed upon in the collective, before moving on to the next “cycle”. All policy cycles are held together by a recurring “glue”: feedback, learning and reflection (see below). However, everyone is free to leave cycles, and everyone is welcomed to enter cycles. Sometimes the entire process “dies” before it reaches cycle 5, and that’s ok. It simply means the policy or set of services did not “resonate” enough with the context it was placed in to become viable.
To visually support this idea, we propose to see these 5 cycles as design “swirls” that can hold complexity in the centre, as opposed to a linear “design squiggle” that is typically used in service design processes. Each “swirl” expands over time and place, and intends to include all living and non-living beings.
Intersystemic policy design cycle 1: Relating & power sharing
This design “cycle” brings together a group of people that is reflective of the intersystemic complexity of a situation that is in need of shifting and rebalancing: citizens, government leaders, community leaders, academia, philanthropy/NGOs, designers/artists, developers, and people who have knowledge on facilitating systemic processes. The group may enter a deliberate, intentional dialogic process of “viewrelating” (see blog 4) in which our systemic views are uncovered and acknowledged, in order to access a “squircular” design space where our systemic views are neither completely “separate” nor completely “whole” (see blog 3), regardless of people’s cultural or political views.
During this cycle power positions, cultural views, harm and healing have to be deliberately discussed, and the policy collective has to form an agreement on how “power” will be shared and used, by whom, and how by deciding what kind of decision-making process will be followed (ie. deep democracy), which decision-making tool (for example: Loomio) could be used to come to collective agreements. This process can take weeks, months or even years, depending on how far apart people’s views are, how much healing needs to happen, how well this process is guided, and how willing people are to step into new design views and spaces.
The end of this policy design cycle can be recognised as reaching a state of “trust” and a feeling of “empathy” for each other as collaborators. This cycle requires integrity as a leading principle.
Intersystemic policy design cycle 2: Imagining & investigating
In her talk on “Long/Deep Time” at the Systemic Innovation Festival (2022) anthropologist Ella Saltmarshe quotes musician Brian Eno:
“How can we become re-enchanted by the amazing improbability of life on earth?.”
Inviting people into imagination practices, storytelling “in-between” spaces and “future dreaming” exercises where “probability” and “agency” are intentionally activated is a very different design starting point than researching stories that originate in the systemic human-created “problem” space in which people who are often already “marginalised”, who were brought into “deficit” or have become “imbalanced” by those systems have no or very little agency.
Processes of imagination invite us to go far, wide and deep, and let us dream and talk about what a more desired, positive “state” could be in which we articulate what living a good life means. An investigation might start here: which conditions would help create this imagined future, which conditions are conducive to generate “life”? And also: which (systemic) conditions are currently hampering more balanced lives?
The end of this policy design cycle can be recognised as agreeing to a “north star” that acts as a guiding future reference point to which the collective wants to move closer to.
Intersystemic policy design cycle 3: Bounding
Reasoning back from our state of “imagination” we eventually will have to make decisions on what to design, what to “do” and how to find the “edges” of our designs.
Designs that inhibit and carry the richness that gets created in cycle 1 and 2, have a much higher probability of being able to meet “complexity” where it is at, and therefore it is more likely that they will be able to interact with “complexity” at an “intersystemic” level. Designs that invite us to question more deeply the sum of things we previously externalised (ie. planetary boundaries, the effects of colonialism), and designs that invite us to internalise as much as we possibly can of what and who was previously externalised, disconnected or misplaced (in a law, policy, program, service, website) are designs that carry the ability to transcend the status quo and “shapeshift” interconnected systems and our own behaviours within towards a different set of outcomes (see blog 4):
- 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
These designs are typically bounded “collectively” across places, spaces, time horizons and differing views. Decision-making processes can take time, but if it was properly agreed upon how decision-making was going to happen in policy design cycle 1, then decisions could also be made fairly quickly.
The end of this policy design cycle is recognized by the “collective” feeling of resonation and agreement over the design decisions that were made.
Designs that invite us to question more deeply the sum of things we previously externalised, and designs that invite us to internalise as much as we possibly can of what and who was previously externalised, disconnected or misplaced (in a policy, program, service, website) are designs that carry the ability to transcend the status quo and “shapeshift” interconnected systems and our own behaviours within towards a different set of outcomes.
Intersystemic policy design cycle 4: Public Prototyping
“Bounded” design ideas have to stand the test of “public prototyping”. In public prototyping processes a broader context gets a chance to interact with and add feedback to the service ideas and prototypes that were formed during cycle 1, 2 and 3. Some “bounded” designs might die, some might grow. Here we are not talking about testing a singular “end-to-end” service. We are looking to test a “suite of services” in an “ecosystem of services” as defined by the collective of cycle 1. How would a new policy or regulation interact with existing services or policies? This can be done digitally (for example, testing out how a new service such as Park Prescriptions interacts with existing healthcare services), but we can also think of travelling “art” installations, or simulated, real-life “service experiences”.
In this phase the “design of the service” is tested just as much as the design of our “collaborations”. Did we miss anything or anyone? Did we exclude ideas, views, services? Public prototyping can also serve as a provocation, such as: “Parque EcoAlberto”, which simulated an illegal border crossing from Mexico to the USA as a “walk in the dark”.
In this step it can be helpful to introduce a “council” of non-human personas, such as a toad, an old tree, a mountain or lake, an ancestor and a future grandchild. Can we imagine how they would respond to the new ideas?
The end of this intersystemic policy design cycle is reached when public prototyping does not yield anymore conflicting or surprising insights and everything and everyone “resonates”.
Intersystemic policy design cycle 5: Relational service ecosystem design
Design cycle 5 focuses on better understanding and building up the contextual ecosystem in which the new set of public services would live. How would the new services interact with the existing policy and service context, in between all the “forces” that interact with it? Which existing public services or policies need to be “sunsetted”? This cycle would include deep design research, both with people providing services, as well as citizens. This is also very much a new, developing field. Here are some ideas of how this could be done:
- The Life Cycle Experience work by the Federal Government in the USA, which defined 5 major life experiences (such as approaching retirement, facing a financial shock and recovering from a disaster), and spoke to over 500 citizens to better understand how to connect services in between over 40 different government agencies across different states
- Dr. Josina Vink — Service Ecosystem Design, with examples in Health Services
- Cornelius Rachieru or CorneliUX: Corneliux Drawing a “rich picture” of the “system”, grouping and evaluating primary service clusters
After this cycle, a more “traditional” service design approach could be applied to design, prototype, build, maintain and continuously improve the sets of end-to-end, or “beginning-to-beginning” services.
Intersystemic policy design cycle “glue”: continuous learning and reflexive practices
Natural and planned moments of “reflection” that better allow for learning, feedback and adaptation when designing and applying policy, service, program or website design are crucial.
“Collective, distributed innovation work aimed at shifting a given complex context towards a more desirable future state is further supported by reflexive processes that stimulate mutual learning.”, writes Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer (2022). Reflexivity can be defined as an “ongoing scrutiny of the choices that are made when identifying and integrating diverse values, priorities, worldviews, expertise, and knowledge.” (Merritt Polk, 2015, in: M. Van der Bijl Brouwer, 2022).
The practice of structured, reoccurring reflexive personal and group practices, such as journaling, story telling and evaluative dialogue during innovation processes can support liberating structures (such as power imbalances) in innovation processes.
Reflexivity also plays a role at the institutional level. Josina Vink (2021) demonstrates how service design methods such as journey mapping and systems mapping are reflexive tools that increase people’s awareness of how institutional structures influence and shape both people’s actions as well as the institutions they inhibit, such as within governments. Josina Vink mentions three core processes in which service design can play a “reflexive” role beyond merely producing an “end-to-end-service”:
- revealing hidden (social) structures
- noticing structural conflict
- appreciating the possibility of structural change.
Intersystemic Service Design Teams
This is an attempt to visualise what an “intersystemic” public service might look like: an interconnected public service transformation team that is anchored in place, that is distributed design capacity and that has properly integrated and compensated community members (engagement = time = money), compared to the reality so often found in “Ministry land”: separate teams with concentred design capacity and improperly compensated community members who are asked to “step-in” when information needs to be extracted.
The challenge lies in resisting the “system” in “absorbing” people and communities into its dominant ways of thinking, doing & acting, but to truely make space for inter-being, inter-systems work with dual (“squircular”— blog 3) knowledge frameworks that leave space for diversity & innovation.
What’s Next
In blogs 5 to 9 we will introduce intersystemic “shapeshifting” design scenarios and accompanying “praxeology” 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, systemic design protocols or “codes” if you will to creatively “hack” human-created systems. Stay tuned!
Further watching, reading, listening
- Book: “The Quest for Complex Policy: Exploring the Tensions Between Simplification and Complexification in Public Policymaking”—(free PDF) — PhD dissertatation by scholar Hans Bil-Joosse (EUR University)
- Book: “The uncontrollability of the world” by Hartmut Rosa (2020)
- Podcast with Hartmut Rosa “Special episode: Hartmut Rosa, resonance and the sociology of the good life”, about his book “Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World” (2019)
- Podcast “A People’s Guide to Capitalism” with Hadas Thier.
“In this Conversation, Hadas Thier will help us break down capitalism into its most fundamental components — and not in an overly technical way, but in a manner that situates it within historical and modern day events and processes — and which hopefully provides you with a pretty comprehensive and compelling explanation as to why we’re all feeling so exploited, alienated, and imprisoned in this oppressive and life-denying set of operating principles and beliefs we know as capitalism.”
- Blog: “The future of experience design is connected, not centered” by Jen Briselli
- Blog: “Relationships first — the nonlinear way of addressing great challenges” by Peter Brownell
- Report: “11 things policymakers need to improve outcomes for citizens” — a report by UK GDS “In 2020, the UK government’s policymaking and innovative policy design communities worked together to understand how policymakers might be supported to deliver more meaningful outcomes for citizens.” (tip: Kulbir Bachher, thanks!)
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)
