Systemic Design Toolkit by Stefanos Monastiridis
An interview with a Toolbox creator
What’s your toolbox all about? Why does it exist? What problems is it aiming to help solve?
The Systemic Design Toolkit is meant to support collaborative work in the domain of Systemic Design.
Systemic Design is a relatively new methodology that brings together methods from systems and design thinking in order to tackle complex organizational and social problems.
The toolkit exists because the body of knowledge required to practice Systemic Design is quite immense and typically addressed to academia. We needed a way to make this knowledge more accessible and operational.
Toolboxes by themselves don’t solve problems. People do. Toolboxes are there to support them in the process. When dealing with complex challenges, people from different domains need to collaborate, create a common understanding of the challenge, co-create a vision for the future together and find ways to get there.
We hope that our toolkit will provide a visual language for such a process, a grammar if you will, that enables constructive conversations.
Who developed it? What was the team that you put together?
Kristel Van Ael, our design director and Namahn partner was the one who initially saw the need for it and took the initiative. Myself and our colleague Sabrina Tarquini got involved initially as MSc students during our internship. We both dedicated our theses to trying out some of the initial versions of the tools and providing feedback. Philippe Vandenbroeck, systems thinker and consultant with ShiftN, was also there at the early stages of development, providing valuable theoretical insights.
When the toolkit was mature enough, we presented it to Peter Jones of OCAD University and Alex Ryan of MaRS in Canada. They both saw interest and joined the team as lead developers. Other people involved are Koen Peters as co-creator, Wout Helsmoortel, Joannes Vandermeulen and Peter Vermaercke in the roles of project management, business development and photo- and videography respectively.
Lots of toolboxes draw on other tools and methods, what inspiration did you bring in?
A lot of the tools have direct links to academic work in the domains of systems thinking, cybernetics, sociotechnical transition and panarchy theories, to name a few. Other tools are inspired by our work as designers at Namahn in the fields of interaction, user experience, service design, safety-critical system and now also systemic design. We also have been incorporating tools from participatory design methods such as Design Games or diegetic prototyping and foresight techniques.
Generally, we do a lot of reading on various subjects and disciplines and whenever we come across some interesting theory, we give it a go and make a tool out of it. We then test the new tool in a real context and if it works well, we incorporate in the toolkit. You can even find some quantum mechanics principles in there, hidden behind our colourful Paradox Cards.
How do you practically use the toolbox in your work? And how do others use it?
We use the toolkit when the challenges set by our clients are too broad to be addressed by the fields of interaction or service design. In those cases, we either use the tools as posters during workshops with stakeholders and users or behind the scenes, as guidelines to design the engagement with other people during the design process.
The tools might guide us to what sort of questions we need to ask during field studies, inspire us to design an intervention model or even build a board game to be played by policymakers and citizens. Apart from that, Kristel Van Ael and Peter Jones both use the toolkit in their design courses in UAntwerp and OCAD respectively. Alex Ryan, VP of MaRS solutions Lab started to use the toolkit as well to tackle societal challenges.
What do you think is next for the toolbox? Do you have plans to update or change it?
We are currently preparing a set of video tutorials to support the use of the already published tools and increase their uptake.
At the same time, we are also creating new tools but they have to be first tested in project work before we decide to include them in the toolkit and update it.
Finally, we are also working on a professional training program in which we will teach more advanced Systemic Design methods
What’s your opinion on the idea of toolboxes in general? At this point, everyone seems to have their own! When are they useful and not useful?
I am both sceptical and optimistic about the toolbox trend. I am optimistic because the existence of different toolboxes means that there are people out there that are willing to share their knowledge and even make an effort to make their knowledge usable and accessible. This is the kind of world I would like to live in, I am personally very much against gated, patented, trademarked, proprietary knowledge.
However, at the same time, I do remain sceptical because toolboxes are not the answer to everything, while it is fairly easy to believe so. Using any toolbox requires some critical thinking and self-awareness. We must always remember that tools don’t make the master.
Using our Systemic Design toolkit does not make anyone a Systemic Designer — even we are reluctant to use that title. Every time we download or buy a toolkit we should ask ourselves: why is this toolkit out there? What is it based on? What is the research behind it?
Tools and toolkits are not forms to fill in or quizzes to complete with your peers or your clients. Toolboxes pose questions meant to provoke thinking and conversation. Regardless of the toolbox we are using, let’s not forget to think and let’s remember that as a society, if we are to really solve any of our numerous and major issues we must learn to think together.
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The Systemic Design Toolkit is available as a free download at https://www.systemicdesigntoolkit.org/
Thanks to Stefanos Monastiridis for the interview, and to the Systemic Design Toolkit team for their awesome toolbox. Check out ToolboxToolbox.com for more where this came from 🛠
