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cleekleequlee · 9 months ago

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Systems mapping and the possibility of a bottom-up systemic design

With the conclusion of systems thinking/system mapping lectures with 3rd year Social and Service design undergraduate students, I have developed some thinking on systems mapping, systemic design and social design.

System mapping can be many things, from causal loop (rooted in systems dynamics) to stakeholder map and journey/process maps. In a broader sense, system mapping is the process and outcome of sense-making of what consists of a system (components) and how they are bind together (connections/relationships)

The prevailing systems mapping practice in systemic design somehow resembles consultancy work, particularly its participatory process of running workshops, doing interviews, engage stakeholders to reflect difference for negotiation/building concensus/co-visioning. Indebted to Checkland's interpretative methodology and rich picture approach, systemic designers highlight their ability to bring visual power to their system mapping process and artifact, thus reaching broader audience with better communicative power. This proposition for designers is shared by Birger Sevaldson and Peter Jones, the two major representatives of systemic design in Norway and Canada.

Comparatively speaking, the Oslo school of systemic design (led by Seveldson) tends to build "gigamaps" that contains information across levels and different perspectives. This gigamap, according to Sevaldson, serves as a "memory" of design research as well as enriches design space (display on the wall for example). It however requires significant amount of effort in collecting information and arranging in highly aesthetic layouts. The Canadian school of systemic design, led by Peter Jones and the practice of "synthesis maps", focuses more on the conceptual models and mechanisms of system, and borrows theory from different disciplines (e.g., economics and psychology) to build "archetypes". Peter Jones and colleagues have developed rich resources of templates and archetypes that can be used as starting points in client-designer context. However this more procedure-based process may also already confine what can be generated from dialogues and fieldworks.

Acknowledging designers' visual power, designers do have limited understanding and basic training in the broader socio-economic systems, compared to students trained in social science. For example, business students, despite their limited hands-on experience, do have a better sense how financial reporting works and why the reporting routine can generate influence in daily operation and decision making. Therefore while being attracted by the beautiful visuals of system maps by systemic designer, one may ask if it helps communication between people who may have already developed a certain language system or making an additional layer in between. A new perspective like visual thinking may help to see the ordinary with fresh eyes, but it may well better create useful interactions when the communication is between different communication systems, e.g., between public/consumer and management, or between broader stakeholders, e.g., local community, and government.

The above-mentioned systemic design (as a practice), in my view doesn't make a foundamental difference from consultancy work. However, I argue designers can also enter the system/system mapping with a completely different entry point, that is from the ground up. Entering from the "big, buzzing confusing of reality", the unspoken pattern of habitus. The abstraction of the world in the mind is highly structual and path dependent, while multiplicity of experience is infinite. Designers who do ethnographic type of fieldwork often struggle with simplifying and appropriating what they observe to pre-determined measurements and frameworks, yet I argue it is this messiness that bears the possibilities of viable new relationships. In the classroom I used work by Street Report World (IG @street_report_world) as visual research resource to illustrate how relationships can be abstracted from ground up and new relationships can be imagined. Without seeing the picture of pigeon and tramway track one would never imagine such a relationship exist. (While writing this sentence Maan Barua's Lively Cities comes in mind. I have tried to think the Hong Kong counterpart to his monkeys jumping between electric wire and "bombed" transmission station, but all I could think of is pigeon taking building structure as shelters. Human's imagination is certainly limited.) I tried to find precedents of such practice where ethnographic research is interpretated visually into more abstract terms but I couldn't find any. The only reference I can think of is the rather primitive endeavour by ethnographers to use diagrams (see Chapter 7, in Experimenting with Ethnography, edited by Ballestero & Winthereik, 2021). Designers have better skillsets to illustrate the emerging relationships that are already part of messy reality, but to make it significant and relevant to any societal level change, they need more training or external help in projecting it to the broader system. The other way to think of it is to look at the pattern that is shared across scale (thinking of fractal). While the existing structure may seem to be unshakable, the ground level view is often a mix of "logics" (Mol, 2008). To accurately map the competing or co-existent logics at micro-level prepares the alternative narrative for grander transformation. Isn't Foucault's genealogy of prison or sex following the same logic?

I am so grateful for the trust Social Design faculty puts on me for the opportunity to deliver this couple of lectures. The process of preparing for these lectures greatly refreshed my memory and enhanced my understanding. In a short conversation with Kam Fai after the lecture, we shared our feeling that Social Design as being taught and practiced in PolyU School of Design is quite different from social design in other places (e.g., in China or Italy/DESIS). One takeaway I had from diving into systemic design is that academia theorization is largely dependent on a good quantity of project being done, both in university-industry collaboration (sort of a client-designer situation) and in teaching, so that the topic could evolve and mature in real project situations. In Hong Kong, social design projects are funded in a different way (compared to, for example, the government-downgraded projects due to neoliberal austerity , as described in Julier & Kimbell (2019), or the government sponsored projects as for service design in nordic countries). It is my guess that the viability of social design / NGOs are related to the churches and its long tradition supporting the Chinese community since colonial time, as well as the government funding structure for supporting people living at / below poverty line (there is no 居委会 as the community governing body). With this developing understanding of the social context and the practice, can our Social Design become a school of thought itself, with its own methodologies and theory? To take it one step further, how can we imagine social design going beyond the Micro and think of its connection to societal change? (At the end of the day, I still cannot escape my economist grand "gaze"!)

7. The credit systemic design rightly gave to the soft systems approach of Checkland (Sevaldson, 2021) leads to interesting question of how systemic design, and design in general approaches change. Interestingly, I find a high degree of similarity of what systems thinking was trying to achieve in business management, through teaching in business schools and consultancy/"action-research" works, quite similar to many methods adopted by design. In 2019, Design Issues reposted a reflection by Fred Collopy titled "Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking", in which reads the following:

"Systems thinking, as written about and practiced by Russell Ackoff, C. West Churchman, Peter Checkland and others, contained within it many of the impulses that motivate the application of design ideas to strategy, organization, society, and management. Ideas such as engaging a broad set of stakeholders, moving beyond simple metrics and calculations, considering idealized options and using scenarios to explore them, shifting boundaries to reframe problems, iteration, the liberal use of diagrams and rich pictures, and tirelessly searching for a better set of alternatives were all there." (p. 98)

One with certain sensitivity to design research could easily identify the traces of participatory design / co-creation, foresight & futures, speculative design, frame innovation, etc, etc. While excited with the new ways of representation, as a discipline we should also ask ourselves: have we learnt from the fading of systems thinking in business? In which foundamental, epistemological or methodological ways design could breakthrough from what systems thinking cannot achieve? What design really has to offer, and what are those things?

In the same article, the author listed a few difficulties faced by systems thinking at the time:

"I have heard their objections to the arbitrariness of any particular system’s boundaries, to the impossibility of balancing the incommensurable objectives of a system’s many stakeholders, and to the difficulty in identifying clear measures of a system’s performance." (p. 98)

Similarly, critical systems thinker Michael Jackson in his critical review of the field after decades of development points out:

"SSM (Soft Systems Methodology), to radical change critics, merely facilitates a social process in which the essential elements of the status quo are reproduced – perhaps on a firmer footing since differences of opinion will have been temporarily smoothed over. In doing so, it supports the interests of the dominant group or groups in the social system. Checkland (1981, p. 283) does seem to take the point that the discussion/debate stage of SSM can be crucially inhibited by society’s structure but concludes rather weakly from this that “it is the nature of society that this will be so.” This says nothing about the degree of constraint on discussion imposed by particular social arrangements or about the possibility of changing the arrangements in order to facilitate communicative competence. The social environment in which the methodology has to operate nullifies, therefore, its attempts to bring about changes based on a genuine accommodation between different opinions and interests. The methodology is culpable in that it is prepared to accept for implementation changes emerging from false accommodations produced by distorted communication. " (p. 436)

This rather gloomy view resonates perfectly with Julier & Kimbell's reflection on social design (also in 2019) that "as currently configured", that is, without normative structure and integrated direction, and work mostly on virtual imagination of change, "social design practice is destined not to tackle the causes and consequences of inequalities, even while being enrolled in social change and policy development." Though Julier and Kimbell were writing in the context of social design conducted in client-designer situations or government agencies, the question does point to a problem that is applicable for design's growing ambition in addressing wider socio-technical-economic issues. Changing one language to another (visual) language is not going to change the power dynamic, nor make action easier, let along making consequences more preditable and manageable. The answer to the question of "how design solve the problem of virtualism, elitism and power dynamics" points to a fundamentally different methodology and even epistemology. That is where I believe the future of design research lies in.

Reference:

Chapter 7, Drawing as Analysis: Thinking in Images, Writing in Words, Rachel Douglas-Jones, in Experimenting with Ethnography, edited by Ballestero, A. and B. R. Winthereik, 2021. Duke University Press.

Barua, M. (2023). Lively cities : reconfiguring urban ecology. Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press.

Mol, A. (2008). The logic of care : health and the problem of patient choice. Abingdon ;, Routledge.

Julier, G. and L. Kimbell (2019). "Keeping the System Going: Social Design and the Reproduction of Inequalities in Neoliberal Times." Design Issues 35(4): 12-22.

Picture from Ding Ding 叮叮, Street Report No. 3, Cathy Hang, Temporary Press (it was great to have talked to Faz Bin Zohri, one of the initiators of the series in this year's Tai Kwun Booked bookfair!)

Sevaldson, B. (2021). Designing complexity : the methodology and practice of systems oriented design. Champaign, IL, Common Ground Research Networks.

Collopy, F. (2019). "Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking (06.07.09)." Design Issues 35(2): 97-100.

#Systemic design #social design #system mapping

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