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Embedding Systemic Design Practices in an Experienced International Development Design Studio
Get PDFButterfly Works (BW) is a social design studio based in Amsterdam, working mainly in international development for over 20 years. This project aimed to equip the team at Butterfly Works with a design methodology that allows them to navigate and work with complex problems and position them as practitioners and facilitators of systemic change. The process started by analysing their current practice with a systemic design perspective to identify how they are tacitly adopting this approach and find ways to complement it with new approaches. A framework was synthesised based on the systemic design principles from the literature and used as a lens to investigate their approach to an ongoing project that served as a case study. Practices that followed the principles and challenges related to them were identified. Understanding relationships, navigating systems, experimental prototyping and long-term strategies were the challenges from that case that inspired the creation of strategies based on the systemic design principles to address them. The strategies were validated in a hypothetical future project to see how the team envisioned their use. The validated strategies were synthesised and integrated into BW’s current design methodology. The result was an eight-phase methodology, previously five-phase, with several activities and recommendations for using new tools and methods
Expanding Style Horizons: Slow, local and collective care as an intervention to fast fashion cycles
Get PDFFashion brands and clothing manufacturers rely on a global supply of extractive and linear materials. This economic model leads to exponential growth in waste across every supply chain stage. A growing trend to reduce textile waste from overconsumption is based on a capitalist model of exponential economic growth meant to keep people wanting more. Research on sustainable fashion focusing on alternative futures through small and local making practices explores how engagement with clothing deepens our attachment, illustrating the vitality of practice to reshape the disposable nature of fashion. To shift away from fast fashion, the collective efforts of everyday citizens demonstrate how social forces can have a significant impact. This paper explores an ongoing research project on prolonging garment and textile usage by engaging with surplus textiles and hand stitching. As a developing method for future research, the aim is to imagine a useful future for garments, stitch by stitch. While narrowly focusing on the slow stitch, there are connections to the larger problem space
How do we Deliberate about our Health? An investigation into the decision aid as a service system inflection point
Get PDFPatients’ medical decision-making represents a critical inflection point within healthcare systems. To help contextualise this deliberative process, clinicians, medical centres, and other researchers produce material artefacts—known as decision aids—that serve to shape outcomes in the system. This presentation will summarise findings from an analysis of the Cochrane Inventory and Mayo Clinic archive of decision aids and extrapolates two models: a model of the complexity of systems that surround clinician and patient at various points in the medical system and a model of the clinicianpatient conversation, as depicted in the decision aids themselves
Citizen Voice in Decision-Making: Exploring the power of dialogue in Toronto’s public spaces
No full textPublic spaces are the lifeblood of a community, offering opportunities for socialization and community activities, facilitating the flow of movement across the city, and inspiring a sense of place and belonging. UNESCO (2017) refers to public space as “an area or place that is open and accessible to all peoples, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, or socio-economic level”. It is this fundamental communal aspect that sets public spaces apart and makes them a vital part of the city.
Citizens stand to benefit the most from public spaces as extensions of their own living rooms outside the home. However, citizens possess little power to influence the planning and design processes.
The system map aims to visualise the complex realities of the stakeholder and influences that are involved in Toronto’s public spaces. This map explores how citizen dialogue can influence the social future of city streets and public spaces. The map takes the viewer on a journey that informs the influences the current system borrows from the past, observes the present situation, power dynamics and the actors who wield this power, and still envisions a better tomorrow. This system of urban spaces and city streets is layered and nuanced, with many factors, histories, and challenges, and there are many systemic barriers and delays that stand in the way of change.
It offers small-scale innovations which have the power to grow and eventually become embedded into the culture and processes of the overall system. It is our firm belief that individuals and small groups of people with the right tools can be the leverage points themselves for systemic change in their streets, neighbourhoods, communities, and cities.
Citizen dialogue is a powerful tool for the human-centred design, strategy, and planning of public spaces and will greatly influence the social future of a city’s human capital and quality of life. Cities are at the heart of many challenges we face today, but the solutions to these problems also lie at the heart of the cities
Is Innovation Innovating? Towards regenerative sense-making and value-creation
Get PDFSustainability discourses in industry, settings have motivated companies and a new generation of innovators to align with climate change mitigating measures. As climate change is increasingly disrupting the systems that uphold consumption and production patterns, the dominant paradigm for value-creation and innovation culture falls short of interrogating their impact on the social and ecological systems on which they depend. I am exploring how design may examine assumptions of innovative thinking and value-creation for fostering an ethical practice of regenerative culture. If innovation is design, how can it adapt design justice principles to evolve into respecting planetary boundaries yet speak to human comforts? Through the metaphor of the dandelion latte, I explore how radical design principles may be applied to create references for planet-centered systems of provisioning. Research through mapping facilitates the process of designing from a complex, pluralistic and caring perspective. The project lies within the theoretical context of design justice, meta-design, systems theory, and regenerative design. This builds predominately on work by Mathilda Tham, Dulmini Perera, Pamela Mang, Tony Fry, Tobias Hahn, and Maja Tampa. It aims to invite critique and engagement for stimulating the legitimization of economies of care
Mapping Future Oriented Design Practices
Get PDFEmerging technologies spur collective imagination about futures that are yet to come. Visions of these futures highlight promises and perils of emerging technologies poised to change society radically. In addition to emerging technologies, precarity as the 21st-century condition informs how futures are made. This joins the broader call for a care movement to respond to precarity. While there is a growing body of work building on care ethics in the field of design, the application of such theoretical concepts has been limited. I draw on data from an ethnographic field study of emerging design practices in the Silicon Valley research and development division of a multi-national technology company for investigating emerging future-oriented design practices. The case studies highlight the increasing prominence of future thinking and systems thinking, which reflects the increasing complexity of challenges the company aims to address while showcasing the lack of capacity to think with/through/for care. I argue that cultivating care as a core component of future-oriented design practices can increase accountability and responsibility. Building on feminist care ethics, I propose that designers embrace what I term vital futures: futures that are preoccupied with repairing, maintaining, and continuing our world so we can live in it as well as possible
Reducing Healthcare Waste Through Systemic Design
Get PDFThe healthcare sector produces substantial amounts of clinical and non-clinical waste, which creates a significant financial cost and environmental footprint to safely dispose of and manage the waste, in addition to sustainability implications for producing, transporting and using healthcare products. This participatory research project is a multi-partner collaboration between a university and three healthcare organisations to explore possibilities and identify new practices to reduce healthcare waste for improved sustainability. The multi-disciplinary research team includes design, materials science, waste, sustainability and healthcare professionals, therefore providing a range of perspectives. A mixed methods approach will use focus groups with healthcare staff and analysis of procurement data to identify highly consumed items and those with a high level of waste, as well as explore the systemic challenges causing the waste. For instance, waste resulting from over-packaging, pre-packaged items containing unnecessary components, systemic inefficiencies and poor waste management practices. Inventories will be conducted of shortlisted items to describe their lifecycle, weight, associated packaging and composition. This evaluation will include a detailed analysis of materials to identify the types of plastic and makeup of composite materials and to better understand their function, recyclability, and reusability. Recommendations for sustainable alternatives and systemic redesign will be fed back to the three participating healthcare organisations in a follow-up workshop. This work-in-progress presentation to the RSD11 conference will share key findings from the design component of the project as a report of the ongoing research. The research team will be responsive to comments received during the conference presentation to further enhance the analysis of how systemic design can contribute to reducing healthcare waste
Relics and Resources: Representing complexity in service and systemic design
Get PDFThis paper explores designerly tools for visualising insights, generative creativity and mirroring complexity. As designers are increasingly facilitating complex and wicked problems, making sense of and communicating large amounts of insights becomes a challenge (Kolko, 2010; Talgorn & Hendriks, 2021). We focus on the potential and importance of such tools for designers, as well as highlighting potential pitfalls for design as designers’ good intentions meet the demands and complexities of “the real world”. We address the issue of representation through discussions of the expert power of designers and the power of design tools, as well as organisational and wider system components. We believe that a key challenge is developing and applying approaches to design based on non-representational foundations. In the last part of the paper, we explore some existing approaches and potential directions for research and practice. Here, we highlight non-human lenses that acknowledge more than human agency and narrative and reflexive approaches that might acknowledge bias and a multiplicity of presents and futures. Further, we briefly explore the topic of transdisciplinary action as well as organisational and industrial transformation to address what we call a “resource/relic dichotomy.” While we do not claim to have many answers as of now, we raise some key questions we believe will be of importance for system and service design practice and research
The Hip Hop Xpress Double Dutch Boom Bus
Get PDFRemixing the university and co-designing futures with Black youth in the United States
The Hip Hop Xpress Double Dutch Boom Bus (the Xpress) travels across the United States to parks, schools, universities, and parking lots to connect generations, highlight Black cultural legacies, and invite young people to try new activities all inspired by Hip Hop and its antecedents. Dr Will Patterson uses the Xpress as a rolling laboratory to bring academic disciplines and methods to the street, wherever people gather. Often the Xpress delivers hands-on engagement via Dr Patterson’s Street College. In that context, Dr Patterson calls on young people to think about the Street Inquiry Design Cycle, human-centred design and inquiry from a Hip Hop perspective. The cycle has six phases—authenticate, investigate, ideate, illuminate, prototype, and evaluate. One Street College session features building boom boxes. Working in teams, the youth initiate their own research by first authenticating and investigating a challenge by studying and taking apart boom boxes. Following authentication and investigation, the youth ideate: brainstorming together and individually in their journals and orally. The students then use the design cycle to assemble boom box kits, try out different ways of solving problems, and evaluate the results.
The Xpress, a 21st-century Jesup Wagon, links academic research to historically excluded communities while also aiming to alter research trajectories with compelling questions and solutions from those outside the academy. The Xpress is not only an intervention in higher education but also, more broadly, nourishment for collective designs and improvisational responses to systemic social oppressions. Key features of the Xpress are its mobility, its internet connectivity, its links to Black cultural wealth, and its ‘wow factor,’ the stunning visual wrap that serves as an algorithm that moves crowds.
The Xpress team has remixed parts of the current land grant university where we are based, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with local young people, along with other institutions, organisations, businesses, and artists. We aim to redesign the academy to nurture Black youth. Systems of academic whitewashing have perpetuated disengagement and disbelief on the part of Black youth. The Xpress team works with these youth to co-design ways and means to create knowledge, increase opportunities, and transform higher education. This case study focuses on Street College, the Xpress bus and its design development in the context of systems of oppression in the United States
Towards Healthcare Sustainability: A developmental design approach
Get PDFWe report on systemic design methods and outcomes from a workshop and continuing design development for a research agenda to propose effective waste and environmental strategies in the healthcare industry. The recent interest in systems and expansion of systemic design research has produced new avenues for designers to contribute to complex sociotechnical problems in designerly ways. We posit an approach called developmental design, as in developmental evaluation, satisfying the requirements when a longer-term, high-impact design goal is necessary, and typical design outcomes cannot be produced within a normal schedule of design products, as in many strategic design contexts. Developmental design is pursued through learning iterations following an ongoing series of design and evaluation interventions. The goal of the current study was to contribute to managing design for critical sustainability issues within the complexity of healthcare as an industry. Three phases of design research are discussed in this programme. First, a virtual design workshop produced a problematic from the contributions of mixed-expertise designers, using a selected set of tools from the systemic design toolkit. Analysis and design interventions were developed by the authors. A current phase of the study is developing a synthesis map, translating research to a design artefact which projects the complexity of a wicked problem rather than distilling complexities to distinct action points. Thus, the artefact—the synthesis map—serves as a frame of reference for the third phase of research, which is research on targeted interventions which are contextually and temporally relevant to stakeholders in sustainable healthcare policy