3132 research outputs found
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A Cybernetic Picnic
Get PDFWhat could be better than a picnic to kick off RSD 11? Come join us for a cybernetic picnic on the wonder.me platform, where we dream the dream of a dream in virtual lands.
Picnic blankets have been prepared for you. There is a blanket with otters, a Bali blanket, a West Coast blanket, an Ecology of Mind blanket, and more. Choose yours! Other people will join.
Be advised, entering the virtual lands is not entirely free. There is one obstruction. You have to bring with your virtual self two virtual cybernetic objects. To link to the Gregory Bateson focus at RSD 11, we suggest you bring ‘Batesonian cybernetic objects.’ Choose wisely
Boundary Critique: The work of Werner Ulrich
Get PDFSystemic design has primarily drawn on systems thinking methodologies. It is a niche area where soft systems methodology almost dominates practice today (Hossain et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2019).
Yet, systems thinking is more than methodology. Critique is an active surfacing and challenging of irresolvable tensions in philosophy, and boundary critique is its real-world counterpart – the life’s work of Werner Ulrich (1987; 1983).
In gist, boundary critique is a framework for reflective practice on four sets of tensions and boundaries (Ulrich, 2022; 1987; 1983; Ulrich & Reynolds, 2020). It also builds on Churchman’s (1971) own heuristics for application.
The use cases in the last five years have been in business and economics, coalition building, evaluation, and technology. In turn, this workshop is intended to help systemic designers apply boundary critique in their work
Design with Togetherness: Cooperation among relations, systems, processes
Get PDFThe online workshop proposal develops from the issues addressed within my PhD research. Starting from a reflection on the contemporary global upheavals, such as the propagation of individualistic practices, the proliferation of ecological disasters, and the lack of care for the Other and the Elsewhere, the idea is to question the responsibility of the designer. It seems necessary to redirect the future perspective for the discipline that sees in the design language the inclusion of keywords such as cooperation, care, mutualism, responsibility, and togetherness.
As a starting point, the organization of the online workshop provides a brief theoretical introduction in which a “minimum design glossary” is presented, useful to constitute a preliminary basis for the development of an eco-social perspective for the participants. It is an introductory step and a tentacular operation (Haraway, 2016) necessary to understand the complex challenges, or rather the missions, that await the designer and to develop a critical point of view essential for the design of an alternative to the status quo.
In defining the theme of the online workshop—and of the PhD research on which it lays the foundations—it was fundamental to draw on other languages to understand the complexity of reality (Morin, 2020) and to build an interdisciplinary glossary.
The theme is based on placing two keywords such as design and cooperation in critical dialogue, meaning “design” as culture and practice, highlighting its social mandate and ecological perspective (Maldonado, 2022; Papanek, 2019) and “cooperation” as a system of collective and immersive practices of “doing together.” According to the mutual aid paradigm proposed by Kropotkin, when hostile conditions occur, animal species do not develop competitive and individualistic attitudes, but it is cooperation, mutual aid, in fact, that is the driving force that allows the evolutionary process to develop in the biosphere.
Starting from this theoretical premise, the purpose of the online workshop is to question the participants about the relationship between design research and practice and the cooperative and tinkering approach: can it be a strategic tool for systemic design? What methods and tools will be needed, and will these require a greater contribution from the other disciplines with which design has always (or not yet) interacted?
The workshop is created as an interactive and rhizomatic space in which a hybrid learning-by-doing methodology might be adopted as a useful way to investigate in-depth new possibilities and practices of systemic design
From Discord to Effective Innovation Cycles: Mitigating project team hierarchies
Get PDFResearch has been done to understand how personality types and cognitive styles play into teamwork and interpersonal relationships on participatory innovation teams in organisations. While there is agreement that heterogeneous teams may have a higher potential for dominant cultural norms of success, there is also understanding that such teams tend to experience more’ conflict’. This is especially true when organisations resort to doubling down on dominant cognitive styles – often a risk migration strategy – to push past the tension and simply “get the job done” and allow dominant worldviews or cultural narratives to lead.
This perspective sees “conflict” as a barrier to implementation without understanding the importance of tension generated in diverse teams in co-creating value for economic, social, and planetary flourishing. Our work investigates how we might understand and mitigate the hierarchies on community-based social innovation design teams that prevent us from benefiting from the full complement of cognitive styles necessary for innovation and overcoming dominant “double down” productivity narratives.
The activity allows participants in immersive AR and VR spaces the ability to “walk-thru,” a co-creation methodology for social innovation in rural contexts, as implemented through an institution of applied learning in higher education. While many innovation frameworks—social or otherwise—are grounded by pre-determined outputs and outcomes, this methodology is centred on leveraging the tensions of plurality and the various diverse ways they think, understand, and see the world
Powers Of Ten: Mapping systems-level gaps using the SX Canvas
Get PDFThe emergence of global policies and restrictions throughout the pandemic has only maximised the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environment we live in and that we have experienced for decades; accelerating at the same time processes of cultural transformation and reinforcing the inequality gaps that have characterised developing countries, markedly conducted by neoliberal public policies.
Due to the multiplicity of critical scenarios that we face nowadays, it is essential for designers to accelerate the way we adopt and adapt thinking models and frameworks that allow us to visualise the interdependencies, causalities, and purposes presented within complex systems, to ideate potential interventions that enable systems-level changes.
The Systemic Experience Canvas is a tool that helps to visualise the quality of interactions between a system and the experience of its stakeholders. During this workshop, participants use the Systemic Experience (SX) Canvas, a generative tool based on the soft systems methodology and designed to constantly ‘zoom in & zoom out’ of a wicked problem alternating both user and system-centric perspectives to understand an issue. This workshop aims to offer practitioners an alternative method to easily integrate both macroscopic and microscopic perspectives into their projects. By using a framework that allows diverse stakeholders to discuss and confront their perception about a system and its embedded experiences, the SX Canvas represents an approachable option to generate system & user-centred visions and conversations while working with complex issues
Seeing Urban Food Futures in Brighton: A physical and virtual exploration in the city
Get PDFThe aim of the workshop is to introduce participants to parts of the city, its food movements and research we have been conducting for a number of years into how urban food growing and related spaces have the potential to improve a city’s environmental footprint and urban qualities.
Participants will join a physical walk-through Brighton with a map produced by Dr Mikey Tomkins, describing Brighton as a Garden of Edible Ideas. The map shows the potential to introduce urban agriculture as part of a networked Continuous Productive Urban Landscape. After the analogue walk, there’s an opportunity to explore and interact with one of the sites visited using virtual reality.
We have been testing this method as a pilot study with a small group of stakeholders in the city, including the local council and organisations promoting accessible and healthy food. Our interest is in gaining a better understanding of how these tools may enable food futures scenario building and the interplay between analogue and virtual methods within design research. Inherent to this work is the understanding of architecture and urban design as components within a complex socio-environmental system. The insights from participants will be welcomed as we seek to continue the evolution and impact of this work
A Social-Systemic Perspective on Behaviour Change: Co-design case study
Get PDFDesigning for social transformation is greatly entangled with behaviour change processes. Research shows that integrating insights about individual behaviour and social systemic dynamics can greatly enhance the effectiveness of behavioural interventions (Davis et al., 2015; Littlecott et al., 2019; Moore et al., 2019). This study reports on our experiences (e.g., synergies and challenges) when integrating insights on individual and social systemic determinants of behaviour during a two-year co-design project. The project focussed on improving Speech Language Therapy for children (2-6y) by enhancing collaboration between parents, children with a speech disorder, and Speech and Language Therapists. The aim of the project was to develop a behaviour change intervention to support therapists and parents to work collaboratively in speech and language therapy. To do so, we applied two complementing methods in a co-design setting. To integrate behavioural insights, we applied the individual-oriented Behaviour Change Wheel (Michie et al., 2014). Parallel, the generative Sociona Tool (Van Essen et al., 2020) was used to integrate a social-systemic perspective in the design process.
During the project, the design team reflected on the application of both methods and adjusted them to enhance their design performance. Preliminary findings shed light on 1) the potential synergy between a social systemic and an individual perspective in designing for behaviour change and 2) the obstacles to integrating two methods grounded in different paradigms in a co-design process
SOU SOU Workshop: Supporting rituals through ritual, friendship, and play
Get PDFThis workshop explores how we might support ourselves and others in transitions through ritual, friendship, and play, where relationships are the essential elements in any system change and the pleasure they provide in sustaining energy for ongoing transitions. Building on the concept of a “Sou Sou” – a group savings club – the presenters share their perspectives and journey through a workshop designed to be an immersive experience. Participants are invited into the world of the Sou Sou through a prototype experience of ritual design based on the presenters’ example as a case study. In keeping with the spirit of the ritual, the workshop will rely on storytelling as a key vehicle for communication and change.
Goals
Share the Sou Sou ritual design process with systemic designers looking to embark on a transition design journey with their team or a community of practice
Provide an opportunity for workshop participants to jointly reflect and build on the process with the presenters
Prototype elements of the Sou Sou ritual in real time with participants
Expected outcomes
Ritual design steps crafted by the presenters and what worked and what didn’t work over three iterative cycles to-date
A pattern of a ritual designed with the purpose of centring friendship, play and pleasure into a transition process
A sense of how they might create their own ritual that can create or amplify the conditions for easeful flow in the context of intentional change by ritualizing pleasure and friendship into the process
Agenda
We use a ritual-based scaffolding to guide this 90-minute session.
- Welcome and check-in
- Understand the context
- Prepare for immersion
- Orient to group interaction
- Move into and through interaction
- Release and reorient
- Return to the group
- Reflect and renew
- Wra
Designing Sustainable Innovation with ‘Inward Fractalization’
Get PDFThis activity will explore the concept of ‘inward fractalization’ as a means of designing sustainable innovation initiatives across a broad range of socio-technical ecosystems – to enable resilient organizations and sustainable economies. Building on the work of fractal innovation (Dyck, 2006), an approach to designing ecosystemic ‘endogenous depth’ is posited – which supports the creation of continuously sustainable value propositions. Here, hierarchical coherence and network connectivity are expanded by first a) decomposing, and then b) “fractalizing” the implicit cybernetic loops that stabilize the existing ecosystemic relationships. This approach creates additional dimensionality throughout the panarchy cycle (Gunderson, 2001) – which builds exergy (Dincer & Rosen, 2012) and enables adaptivity (Holling, 2001) while enhancing the overall ecosystemic resilience and sustainability of the associated innovation initiatives. The classical theories of economic growth tend to emphasize exogenous activity as the primary means of market-space expansion and value creation. To advance this model, the ‘inward fractalization’ enables the creation of internal or ‘endogenous depth’ – where innovation products and services can be viewed as systemic objects and building blocks of experience in inter-mediated and circular economies, enabled by design research (Buchanan, 2001) and argued to be better aligned with the emerging “processual” worldviews (Baskin & Bondarenko, 2018); where even states and countries can be considered as ‘fractal actors’ (Laïdi, 2002)
A Systemic Co-Design Iceberg: A systemic perspective in the ever-evolving practice of empathic co-design
Get PDFSocietal challenges have become increasingly pressing. They affect us all: citizens, designers, and researchers. Truly understanding and tackling them is difficult because no single stakeholder nor organization is responsible for them, and everything is connected, interwoven, and in a current state of change. Moreover, there is mutual interaction and entanglements between people, non-humans, and technology. Next, systemic challenges based on the relationships, interactions, and experiences between stakeholders and their environments are dynamic. They evolve. Subsequently, it is hard to see the playing field. This makes challenges orphaned and stakeholders unable or unwilling to make all kinds of important decisions. This ambiguity leads to a lot of uncertainty. Combined with blind spots, implicit world views, tacit mechanisms, and latent values, this hinders change and limits social innovation capacity. Which raises the question: how to gain agency to individually act as a stakeholder in these complex challenges in a way that adds up to the collective?
Nowadays, design and, more specifically, systemic co-design are increasingly seen as possible approaches. Since design can deal with uncertainty, it is optimistic and inquisitive in nature. Moreover, supported by abduction logic, design makes creative leaps that can lead to radical change. Even more, a co-design and empathic approach allow for inclusivity by identifying and sharing stakeholders’ differences and interests, as well as shared perspectives and ambitions. This enables the creation of new bonds—potential new value networks—and co-imagining alternative futures. Yet, to make this empathic co-design potential work, the design profession must shift along with our transforming world. Design, therefore, needs to adopt new methodological and flexible strategies that support stakeholders in adaptively and empathically responding to dynamic contexts and collaborations. The main question arises: how to create a systemic co-design culture, approach, and structure that opens up stakeholders to reveal implicit world views, values, and mechanisms that will support their agency and provides for more inclusive, radical, and shared opportunities for change.
In this paper, I hypothesize that this requires working beyond methods that connect empathic co-design with a systemic perspective. I, therefore, contribute two new concepts. First, I introduce using explicit ‘sphere of life’ mechanisms as an ingredient in design abduction. Second, I argue that an ‘iceberg’ consisting of systemic co-design elements might give guidance to multi-stakeholder coalitions in identifying individual and collective latent values. Together they can lead to multi-value creation and systemic change in inclusive value networks