Systemic design: examples of evolving and current practice
At the beginning of December, The Point People together with the Design Council hosted an event on systemic design. We had 120 people sign up in less than 24 hours and a large waitlist. There is interest and intrigue. What is systemic design and why is it important?
This is a long read and like the event, full of rich information which we try and distil down at points throughout.
- I start with an intro to why we convened the event and why design is good at working in systems.
- Jennie Winhall talks about designing for a new system: inversing patterns, developing new norms and connecting a community of change, giving employment as an example
- Cassie Robinson writes about transitioning to a new system: building the field, creating new narratives and creating clusters of what a new field could look like, from her work with the Catalyst (which supports the civic sector adapt to a new world)
- Alistair Parvin, Ilishio Lovejoy and Nick Stanhope provide three talks to highlight elements of systemic design: finding the root of the problem, providing information as feedback and knowing your role, from their experiences in planning, fashion and children’s services
Introduction and why we convened the event.
There are a few definitions and writings around about systemic design, design for systems, systems transformation, transition design etc. But if we start with what we’re trying to address… The issues that we are facing at the moment are complex, messy and interconnected. We need to dig deep to find the root causes, which can be things that are said, and unsaid — like unequal power or the way we think about an issue. There is no one fix. Things are interconnected, so we do one thing over here and it pops up over there. And sometimes we need to design a new system entirely rather than just patching up or improving the current one.
We believe that design can hold some of the answers here. And people in the systems change world have increasingly been using design methods in order to bring about desired change.
But this is an emerging practice. It might be simply the intersection between design and systems theory. But it might be something a bit different. So we are conducting a loose enquiry into how this has and is evolving — and doing this by listening to designers who have been working systemically. And because we know people are interested in working in this way, we are sharing this as we go. We can’t entirely define it right now, but we can share some elements. And we want to do this so that designers can explain to their colleagues/clients what it is, start working in this way, and therefore develop their own practices to add into the mix, influenced by other designers or other professions too.
We started off by saying that designers work in systems already. Systems are made up of different elements that are connected together. A system can be biological (forest), social (a neighbourhood), organisational (the health system) or technological (air traffic control or a computer system).
Some aspects of design means that it lends itself well to working with complex systems:
- Synthesis — whether it is designing a house, an engine or a public service, design is a task of discovering how elements can come together into a coherent whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
- Reflexivity — designers discover how to move forward with a design problem by making a move (drawing something, modelling something, taking a new action), seeing how that move then changes the situation and using that new understanding of both problem and opportunity to make the next move. It is reflection in action: what Donald Schön calls ‘back-talk’ between the situation and the designer.
- Creation — designing is also about the act of bringing something new into being: sensing the potential and then realising it. This matters to system innovation because it is one way in which we understand not just how things are but how things could be. And because design is visual, we can also paint a picture of what is possible, so that others can see its potential too.
Designing for a new system: inversing patterns, developing new norms and connecting a community of change
Jennie Winhall spoke about how to design for a new system (rather than making improvements within the current system). She says that when it comes to social systems, a new system forms through a change in one or more of four things: purpose, power, relationships and resources.
She gave examples of three different approaches to changing systems:
Inversing the pattern: At Participle, they wanted to create a 21st century welfare system. In order to do this, they looked at common patterns of activity across public services. Most deliver a service, rather than supporting people to help themselves. They work with individuals rather than with family units. They are limited to public finance rather than the resources inherent in relationships and communities. This adds up to a welfare system that is burdened by demand, rather than strengthened by participation. All of these services display the same dysfunctional patterns because they are based on the same underlying system logic: the same system ‘principles’ underpin each service. By flipping these principles around, Participle was able to design new employment, ageing and health services across the country that demonstrated a very different welfare system — in which people create their own solutions.
Changing dominant norms: At the Rockwool Foundation, they created Nextwork, a new employment system which connects young people and companies together in networks that build young people’s working identity. It takes a very different approach to the current job centre system. One of the challenges of introducing a new approach into the very dominant norms of an existing operating system is that the system has what Rowan Conway calls a kind of immune response: it rejects the new activity. To be successful the staff have to be highly skilled in navigating between the old and the new. That meant the design team scaling up the system nationally had to develop new ‘transitional’ tools. First they created a service blueprint showing staff how the new service works and trained them on delivering it. But it was a disaster — people couldn’t understand the purpose behind their new actions. So they threw away the blueprint. Instead they worked with theatre techniques to train staff in improvisation based on three core system principles. This has been much more successful: staff understand the purpose of acting in a new way, operate from a different set of core beliefs and are confident in developing further activities based on those three principles. This principle-based approach is a way to change the mindsets, behaviours and norms of dominant systems.
Connecting together a new ecosystem of innovation: ALT/Now, with the RSA and Mastercard’s Centre for Inclusive Growth have designed a programme to develop a new safety-net for 21st century work. Our current system of unemployment benefits, employer-delivered training, pension contributions and unions doesn’t work in a future increasingly made up of people in flexible, independent work, moving from employer to employer, or gig to gig. So we need to redraw this landscape. The team brought together a cohort of entrepreneurs to create a new system of innovations to support people working in today’s gig economy. One innovation alone is not going to change the whole system, you need lots of interventions — new ways of brokering jobs, smoothing income, new insurance models, new types of unions and new models for ongoing learning. These discrete innovations can have much greater power if they see themselves as part of the new ecosystem: they can amplify each others’ efforts and define a new market that benefits them all. The success of each venture depends on the success of the emerging system. Several ventures have already collaborated to form a safety-net for workers in the care sector. That’s the power of process of collective creation — and bringing them together into a community of change.
Transitioning to a new system: building the field, creating new narratives and creating clusters of what a new field could look like
Cassie Robinson spoke about her experience of designing the The Catalyst — which was originally set up as a way of building the digital capabilities for 40,000 charities and civil society organisation, but is now working to support the sector as a whole to continually adapt, become more accountable to communities and work together better for those it serves. It is operating at three different levels simultaneously drawing on the Berkana Two Loop Model and is funded by a mixture of Government and philanthropic funding.
Field-building
The first area of work that the Catalyst is undertaking is field-building and demonstrating early value in the overall concept. The activities happening here are responding to the sector’s immediate needs and through ensuring some of Catalyst’s initial activity happens in the present frame, they’re able to build goodwill and legitimacy. The work includes things like Open Backlog, a mechanism to reduce duplication of effort across the sector and encourage reuse, and the development of patterns and standards that enable and fast track more common approaches and shared infrastructure going forward. This part of Catalyts’s work is being done with a range of partners, who are funded through Catalyst. There are currently 30 different projects underway, all using Catalyst assets to visibly mark themselves as being part of the Catalyst transition work.
Networks and narratives
The second area of work that Catalyst is doing is a range of activities linked to networks and narratives. Another part of building goodwill and legitimacy is to shine a light on other people and organisations that are doing work that aligns with Catalyst’s mission. Deepening the network, connecting more of the system to itself and bringing coherence to it helps the ecology of people and organisations feel part of something that’s bigger than any of them individually. This is being done through commissioning content from the wider network and setting up a Catalyst “News Room” which Catalyst projects also use to create and share content. Alongside this, Catalyst projects are published on Ochre, a bespoke platform that shows the status of all the work that’s happening across Catalyst’s 30 (and growing) projects — an important part of transition work is to reflect the system back to itself, sharing progress, doing collective sensemaking and demonstrating momentum. This view of the system (held by someone in a ‘field-building’ role) means that different dynamics are revealed, and gaps and opportunities are made visible. It also requires an ongoing orchestration of connecting micro narratives (of the projects) with the macro narrative (of the whole of Catalyst’s ambition and mission).
The other aspect of this work is what Cassie calls “systems readiness” — using the sensemaking and intelligence being gathered across all of the Catalyst’s projects to understand what conditions need creating for the new system to emerge — a renewed civil society. In Catalyst’s case this has initially meant understanding what relationship dynamics need changing, what policies, regulation and decision making mechanisms are no longer fit for purpose, and the different ways that resources and value need to flow.
Redrawing the boundaries so a new system can emerge
If the field-building work was happening in isolation, and the narrative and network function was also only focussed on mapping and making visible the present, then Catalyst would simply be optimising the existing system (civil society). In this third area of work Catalyst is using a model called Clusters, which focus on the potential and creation of the future rather than the problems of what needs fixing in the present. Each Cluster (there are initially 8 across the UK) has been formed with the intent to explore the possibility space, making strong demonstrations and designing organisations to be in new relationships with each other, for example bringing together civil society organisations who would not normally work together, but who are trying to deliver similar outcomes in a particular place, or around a similar function (e.g. helplines) or to reimagine a particular service (e.g. childrens care). Here the narrative work shows how by drawing new boundaries around collections of organisations reframes the purpose of the system.
Three talks to highlight elements of systemic design: finding the root of the problem, providing information as feedback and knowing your role
Alastair Parvin’s leads an organisation called Open Systems Lab. He spoke about their mission to change the planning system. He argued that all systems have an operating model. They can be quite clear, (like postcodes or grid references), but sometimes more opaque (like time or our historical understanding of land rights). But you can’t change a system unless you find it, and disrupt it. He likens it to ‘following the white rabbit down the hole’. He showed his maps of the system, starting at the relationship between rising house prices and the undersupply of homes, and then expanding out to increasing debt or lack of investment in construction innovation. So far, so normal (the top left image below). But then he flipped the map on its axis and looked at how lots of these causes and effects were all based on similar social values, knowledge models and methods of production. Such as manual paper based design methods, the way we think about money or — in red in the bottom left image below — freehold land ownership. You can then see how this underlying issue connects to so many elements of the system. So if you change that…you impact on many of the causes and effects.
Ilishio Lovejoy is a policy manager for Fashion Revolution. In the fashion industry, one could argue that design is part of the problem — designers are designing clothes for a fast-fashion, consumer market which has a harmful impact on workers’ wellbeing in developing countries and environmental sustainability. Fashion Revolution was set up to challenge that. One of their main campaigns is the Transparency Index, providing more information to consumers about which retailers are more ethical, as well as campaigns where clothes have large tags to show the provenance of their manufacture. They have designed a number of different initiatives, using different levers for change, and inspire or work with others as part of a movement, including Spindye (which removes the environmentally damaging dying process) or Rent the Runway (shifting behaviours away from owning and towards renting clothes).
Nick Stanhope is the Chief Executive of Shift, which is a service and product innovation charity working a lot around children’s services. He talked about the need for everyone to find their own role. He described a common situation where many charities, and design agencies who support charities, are in effect competing with each other for funding to provide services that help support their own mission. Which means that the incentive is for everyone to ‘talk up’ their own work as the most important (and trying to get more of it), rather than seeing their work as a piece of a larger whole that needs to exist alongside other initiatives, which will also require funding. Working in this way — as an innovation ecosystem or as a set of field catalysts mentioned by Jennie and Cassie earlier — also requires building relationships and making connections between organisations. This ‘invisible’ connective tissue needs designing. And a change of mindset, so that we don’t individually think we can ‘move a system’, but that we are ‘in service of a system’. He called for us to all be clear about our ‘role’ in the system, to be clear about the contribution we make, but how we have to work alongside others.
There are so many types of practice and elements to what they are doing, and there are different ways and words for describing what they are doing. But if we had to summarise the rich tips and discussions, we would say — that in order to design for today’s big challenges, designers need to:
- Design deeply — Understand the wider context in which a person or idea sits, tackling the root cause of an issue — which might be things that are said or not said, patterns of behaviour or mindsets that frame the way we see opportunities.
- Design hopefully — Imagine entirely new systems, and creating a clear narrative or vision that allows lots of people to design things that move us towards it.
- Design disruptively — Creating something (and it can be small) that changes a behaviour, an interaction or a relationship — for example a new norm or a piece of information — and that can have a wider ripple effect.
- Design collaboratively — Bring together a portfolio of innovations at different places across the system, and connecting to others striving for the same goal, working intentionally as an ecosystem rather than alone, with each knowing how to play their right role.
We hope the event inspired designers to consider how they can shift their practice to design more systemically — deeply, collaboratively, hopefully and disruptively. And to experiment with other methods (reaching out to other professions) and add to these practices. Please get in touch to share your work with us as we continue our enquiry.
