Systemic design

A systemic stance means approaching a project in its entirety, taking into account and realizing both interactions and consequences of an innovation, a product or a service. The goal is not only to focus on users and their experience, but to consider the user and their environment as a whole: to think out a system where each interaction triggers externalities.

Why is it an ethical matter?

Design being a discipline that takes place ahead of most phases of a project, it is often responsible for the creation of new services and products. And in a perpetually evolving world with complex interdependencies, well-intentioned processes can have nefarious and unsuspected consequences. Though no discipline can claim to precisely foresee what is to come, systemic design aims to pick up on weak signals that can make it easier to anticipate negative externalities and redirect the project towards a more positive outcome.

What is systemic design?

A systemic approach implies stepping away from linear thinking to strive to comprehend a system in its entirety while considering its components, relationships and patterns at play. This is what Donella Meadows describes in Thinking in Systems, A Primer (2009):

"So, what is a system? A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time."

When paired with design work, a systemic approach offers a holistic understanding of the context, the issue, to work towards a long-term transformation of our existing models.

Systemic design introduces a new paradigm combining concepts from systemic thinking and design thinking (La Roque, M et al., 2020a, Sciences du Design (French)). With it, we can go beyond an anthropocentric vision of the world and better understand all the components of a system by mapping those components, then examining the relations between them and identifying potentially problematic areas. The goal is therefore to highlight those points of intervention and rethink, create and transform existing systems on a wider scale.

The 7 steps of systemic design (Jones et al., 2018):
  1. Framing the system; setting the boundaries of your system in space and time
    and identifying the hypothetical parts and relationships.
  2. Listening to the system; Listening to the experiences of people and discovering
    how the interactions lead to the system’s behavior. Verifying the initial
    hypotheses.
  3. Understanding the system; Seeing how the variables and interactions influence
    the dynamics and emergent behavior. Identifying the leverage points to work
    with.
  4. Defining the desired future; Helping the stakeholders articulate the common
    desired future and the intended value creation.
  5. Exploring the possibility space; Exploring the most effective design interventions with potential for system change. Defining variations for implementation
    in different contexts.
  6. Designing the invention model; Defining and planning how your organization
    and ecosystem should (re-)organize to deliver the intended value.
  7. Fostering the transition; Defining how the interventions will mature, grow
    and finally be adopted in the system.

Where to begin?

We are making some resources available to help you initiate a systemic process.

Systemic design: the basics (video)

In this recorded webinar, Le Laptop and Designers Ethiques go over the basics of systemic design in detail, including: the mindset to adopt, explanations on foundational concepts (such as the system itself), and ways to implement the approach through case studies.

Webinar from May 6, 2020, 1h55, hosted on YouTube

Watch the video on YouTube (French)

Matrix for the analysis of externalities

Since 2018, Designers Ethiques has been studying the implications of systemic design and the modalities of its implementation. As an interdisciplinary approach which decenters the user and requires a lot of perspective, systemic thinking can be difficult to apply in most projects.

This is why Designers Ethiques suggests this matrix to make it easier to compile and analyze a service's externalities.

Experience feedback on real-world cases

Systemic design can appear challenging to implement on a regular basis, which is why we are sharing feedback from real and practical projects from clients. Learn more about our methodology and learning processes below.

Learn more

Other resources at your disposal:

Learn

Implement

Contact

  • Mellie Laroque: mellie@designersethiques.org