System Thinking for Service Design Inspirations
As a designer with a master degree in Product-Service System Design I was always interested in systems thinking and its applications to my professional practice. At Oblo, where I work as a service designer, we always try to integrate it in our way of doing service design by mixing ethnography, visual storytelling and participatory design.
This year I was lucky to attend Interaction18 conference and got very much moved by the fact that half of keynote speeches were about the various aspects of systems thinking in design. And so I wanted to share some interesting insights from the talk that can help us in the practice.
Ancestral Thinking
While opening the conference one of the pioneers and founding fathers of Interaction Design field — Alan Cooper — have pointed attention to the emerging problems in the technological development and how we could try to address them to avoid repeating dramatic consequences.
Trying to find a single point of failure or origin of malice only works on simple systems, but all the tech products we build are complex systems and their networked environment is yet another level of complex system.
“System failure is an intrinsic feature of systems” — John Gall in General Systemantics.
System problems are by nature distributed ones and their solutions should be distributed too. In order to help we have to understand our personal role in the process. Cooper’s proposal how to do it — try to be a good ancestor, who has to leave the world in a better state than they found it in. When you think like a good ancestor you’re forced to think about the whole system and its further development also after you. Systems fail and will continue to fail and only constant vigilance can keep the system working in a positive direction — you can’t ignore systems, you have to ask questions about systems:
1. What assumptions are we making, when we design a new thing?
2. What externalities are we creating? Consider that there are no real externalities in our ecosystem.
3. Which are the external forces affecting system, which leverages do they have?
4. What time scale are we using? What is the lifespan of our actions and products? Our social systems bias us towards a present-ist focus and mindset. Ask yourself instead how will it be used in 10 years, in 30, when you die what will happen to its users.
5. What is impact of the system — who else is affected by it?
6. Which consent does a system require?
7. Who benefits from it?
8. How can system be misused and by whom?
In general it is all about understanding the long term consequences and our own agency in the complex system behavior in order to leverage all the possibility to improve it together.
Watch the full talk here.
More-than-human Centred Design
Anab Jain is a co-founder of Superflux exploring the role of speculative future narrative in the choices we make today regarding technology, politics and general society development.
In her talk she has focused on the more-than-human centred approach to design, approach in which we understand the reality about our position in the world deeply entangled in relationships with other species.
INTERDEPENDENCE is an important concept, underlining how different participants, human/nonhuman, are emotionally, ecologically or morally interdependent on each other.
Even a human body cannot function without a system of multiple microorganisms inhabiting it. We are also more than individual societies, as people we have relationships with environments and ecosystems and have tools to shape the world. Nonhuman and human can become collaborators and can form new kinds of interaction.
We are already living amidst other kinds of nonhuman entities: increasingly autonomous things and systems that we are building and it is becoming obvious how these computers, tools, machines, that we have created in order to master the world, are remastering us, our politics, the way we relate to each other and the world around us. They are becoming autonomous to the point of making decisions on our behalf and we are not even anymore capable of understanding them.
“It becomes increasingly obvious that human agency cannot ever be seen in isolation from the systems with which humans are in constant and constitutive interactions”- N. Katherine Hayles
We’re entering time when we can no longer live in the illusion of isolation.
Watch the full talk here.
Circular System Design
As UNEP Champion of the Earth Leyla Acaroglu has focused on the sustainability of the systems. She was talking about the possibilities that as designers we have to affect the ever-growing ecological catastrophe by implementing circular approach in our practice.
Future is not made up yet, while design is a silent social scripter — we design the world and it designs us. All today’s problems were yesterday’s solutions created by someone.
Living on the finite planet with finite resources we cannot pretend that our actions have no consequences, there is no way to keep the models we create linear.
Reminding the Cooper’s idea of leaving the world in a better state Leyla brought up the definition of sustainability:
Sustainability — meeting the needs of current generations without negatively impacting the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Nowadays we’ve created a lot of externalities which actually are failures in the systems, what we need to do is to optimize and engineer our creative practices to circularize those externalities. The way to do that is systems thinking — understanding the complexity of the world around us, we have to stop the systems ignorance and open our eyes to recognise them.
As soon as we see the systems, we also see how they all relate to each other just as Anab was mentioning:
We are all in the interconnected dynamic relationships with all systems that support our life.
Not looking at interconnected bigger picture means we make decisions in isolation and shift burdens to other places.
Watch the full talk here.
Take-aways
Some common topics among various speakers’ ideas that can help to review some tools we are using for work:
- Belief that the future is not defined and we have creative powers to change it.
- Necessity to spend more time thinking things through, examining the problem well rather than jumping to the superficial solution just to get an easy reward.
- Understanding the need of thinking of systems if we want to solve the emerging problems brought by the developing complexity.
- Concepts of externalities, interconnectedness, understanding of the finite nature of resources (which in fact is simply seeing the system clearly) and of false illusion of linearity of growth and instead the need to substitute it with circularity.
- Expanding the horizon — seeing trees and the forest, being able to switch between the scales and work to improve the bigger system within the limits of individual agency.
As with Oblo we accepted the challenge to lead the workshop on systems thinking for service design we reflected on these talks as well as other inspirations, and we looked back at how we have been embedding system thinking in our own projects to extract principles and tools that could be re-used. Stay tuned for more updates and don’t forget to register for the workshop and for the talk where we will explain better connections between systems thinking and service design!
