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Chawalgatha: Creating awareness about the indigenous rice crops of India through communication design
Get PDFThis paper illustrates the communication design project, Chawalgatha, that attempts to showcase how indigenous knowledge plays a vital role in sustainability. The project encourages people for its significance in protecting, preserving and promoting them to address climate change. The study employs the qualitative research approach with one of the grassroots environmentalists from the region, Padma Shri Babulal Dahiya. The paper focuses on the practices from Central India’s Baghelkhand, where the wide varieties of rice are still available and practised on the field, which Dahiya has highlighted through his unique activism. Dahiya is known for his initiative to preserve rice and other food crops through his investigation of Bagheli folk literature. The research aims to create awareness of indigenous knowledge systems within environmental education and communication design discourse. It underscores the sustainable indigenous practices and folktales related to rice from India.
The paper first explains the need for the project and the methodology of understanding the context through narrative research. It then develops the design through product ideation and development. It constructs the visual language through the rooted pragmatics of the Gond art tradition from Central India, along with employing a papercraft technique to develop a unique visual design on ecological conservation
Facing Systemic Challenges with Epistemic Humility
Get PDFDesigners, systems thinkers, and change-makers must navigate a world they do not fully understand, with the looming potential for unintended consequences arising from their actions. Their work requires the incorporation of multiple and often conflicting viewpoints with and about a diverse range of stakeholders, tapping into the most reliable information available and considering long timelines. Even with the highest standards of praxis, strategies can be flawed, ineffective, and can even make the problem worse.
This presentation derives from a Major Research Project completed at OCAD University that sought to investigate how self-identified agents of change understood the ethical obligations and responsibilities relating to their work. Two lines of inquiry are inherent to this presentation—knowledge and uncertainty and epistemic ethics. Change initiatives will necessarily be based on what those charged with undertaking them know and believe. An introduction to how knowledge, or the lack thereof, can be classified is offered to ground this work within the larger epistemological context.
The ethical context of this work relates to an epistemological context as well, rather than a moral one. Epistemic humility is offered as an aspirational virtue that could be embraced by designers, innovators, and change agents as they conduct their work, and epistemic arrogance is described as a vice to be avoided
Portfolio Design Stencils: A conceptual and design architecture for accelerating social systems transformation
Get PDFSocial systems need new conceptual, learning, and action architectures to enact strategy, change theories, transformation, and impact programs in the face of escalating systemic complexity and cascading uncertainty. Instruments to manage emergent implications, discover new pathways and solutions, generate actionable intelligence and inform decision-making and commitment of resources to transformation over and in time.
CHÔRA has developed a new framework, practice, and toolkit for system transformation: Portfolio Design Stencils. The output of a stencil is a portfolio of strategic innovation and system transformation options that are activated to help social systems learn their way into change. Each portfolio is intent-led, structured, distributed, place-based, participatory, and dynamically manages a distributed range of interventions that support sustained and collaborative strategic learning, action, and decision-making. The stencil provides strategic and systemic designers with generative and evolutionary metamodels, processes, and tools to: engage with complex problems; coherently design, manage and learn from problem-solving actions over time; and accelerate impact in the social systems in which they operate.
The presentation will outline the methodology and provide cases of in-field applications of portfolio stencils to address complex, multifaceted, and multi-stakeholder issues such as urban transformation and sustainable tourism with government and development agencies
Social Design of Community Service Models with AIoT to Support Aging and Elders Well-Being -68
Get PDFAlong with the increase in average life expectancy, the world’s elderly population is expected to grow to 2.1 billion by 2050. Ageing marks a sensitive and vulnerable period of life, bringing loss of roles and functions and increased dependence on others, often reflected in a decline in quality of life. As everyone experiences ageing, the need to achieve a satisfactory old age for all in the future means that more research and a better systematic understanding of ageing and elder well-being are needed as changing demographics put growing pressure on public health and finance, and the provision of long-term care becomes increasingly inadequate.
In this study, we have systematically scoped three streams of literature, design, social studies and digital technology based on Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) methodological framework. With this RSD presentation, we will report on our ongoing work, scoping our research on three core elements: Aging and elder well-being, Community services and AIoT (Artificial intelligence and Internet of Things).
Our preliminary review revealed a cluster of ethnographic studies on ‘ageing in place’ in which community services appeared to be of interest. Several survey studies confirm that most elders prefer to receive care from their families rather than in institutions. In a cluster with a systemic lens, community services have been studied to become an increasingly important model of long-term care a few have demonstrated that community services are more effective in supporting elders’ interests and care preferences.
Within the digital technology stream, an emerging cluster of studies proposes Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (AIoT) as potential solutions to the challenges associated with an ageing society. AIoT integrated into elderly care expands the range of services and supports social well-being. Experimental studies with prototyped technologies are studied in relation to outcomes of improving the self-care experience of elders at home and how AIoT facilitates the development and sharing of their unique coping strategies, thereby maintaining their vitality and independence. However, the volume of the literature shows that only a few studies have included AIoT as part of community service.
Overall, our systemic review work in progress unpacks the relevant literature into different clusters and categories, including theoretical lenses, research methods, findings and outcomes. The initial charting of the studies indicates that despite the accumulation of previous research, the current body of knowledge on the interplay of ageing and elder well-being, community services, and AIoT is underdeveloped, with unresolved issues at multiple levels of the community care model, including policy, organisation, services and individuals
Systemic Relational Insights: A new hybrid intelligence approach to make sense of complex problems
Get PDFDesigning in the complexity and timescale of the global effort around “unsolvable” problems means working at different scales.
While developing local projects, it is not easy to make evident the relationship with global trends and patterns to enable reproducibility in other communities potentially benefiting from the same approach. Two possible reasons behind this are the difficulty in systematising data, expertise, community wisdom and existing scientific knowledge and enabling the epistemic conditions to make this happen. The design research community has for years been aware of how a new epistemology of design is needed, a new approach to design at a systemic scale that can hold together communities, territories, and non-human life (towards a “pluriversal” dimension) and the systemic agentivity of infrastructures in which we interact with intelligent devices, through a decentralised and decolonised vision in both methods and technologies. While various models and methodological approaches have been conceptualised, the current difficulty in bringing them to the level of practice can partly rely on the lack of functioning tools. Various experiments with citizen science approaches and the harnessing of collective intelligence through digital technologies, together with the rapid progress made in the field of artificial intelligence, suggest that it is possible to combine these approaches in order to implement tools that can bridge this gap.
The presentation reports the advances of ongoing research based on the hypothesis that it is possible to bring out new types of insights, useful to design within systemic contexts, elaborating heterogeneous information and knowledge flows (scientific, indigenous, or coming from environmental data), through the joint work of the communities themselves with interactive infrastructures based on artificial intelligence models. “Systemic relational insights” are forms of information that emerge from a relational analysis between multiple points of view and perspectives on the problems of a territory, capable of linking the specificities of these relations at a local scale with patterns measured at a global scale
Systems Thinking Perspective on Support for Transition and Acceptance of Identity of Chronic Health Disease Patient in Society
Get PDFCurrently, India is home to diabetes, and it has the second-largest diabetic population in the world. The term ‘health seeker’ is used instead of the patient since the health seeker is attributed to a person who is motivated to improve his physical and mental well-being (Bate, P. & Rober, G., 2007). Diabetes is a chronic disease that requires the health seeker to modify their lifestyle, which is a transition of their identity.
This transition from a healthy self to a chronic health disease health seeker is often challenged by societal forces and healthcare services. While the patient experiences are personal, the healthcare systems are abstract and impersonal. With the systems thinking approach, the questions we are trying to seek answers to are:
Where does the boundary of healthcare begin and end for a patient with chronic health disease?
What are the insensitivities faced by the health seeker while experiencing a chronic health condition such as diabetes?
What are the support systems that help health seekers in their journey of new medical identity across space and various life activities
Technological governance: Opportunities for systemic design
Get PDFHistorically, systemic design (SD) has drawn on methodological aspects of system thinking. However, this is challenged by technology—which is simultaneously today’s milieu and methodology. Given this, we need a new composite of foundations and practices before SD can provide effective technological or design governance. I also discuss a modern update to boundary framing and microservices as a bridge to enriched practice alongside key movements like Penrosean rents and Wintelism
Wearable Student Feedback Systems Map
No full textSince the university sector in the UK has expanded over the last 30 years, concerns relating to a loss of quality and the growing consumerism of higher education have led to an increase in student feedback processes (Harvey, 2011). It is now expected that universities will ask students for their expressed opinions, especially in relation to the student experience.
Recent empirical insights from Oxford Brookes University (OBU) student representatives and Brookes Union highlight a need to show students how representation and feedback systems work and how decisions are made in response. An initial audit of student feedback mechanisms revealed an absence of a systems map of feedback processes, making it difficult for our transient student population to gain a holistic understanding of the whole system and their ability to influence it.
Student feedback impacts university decision-making, but students mostly respond to our systems rather than help generate them. Heimans & Timms (2018) observed a power shift in our institutions, reminding us that young people today expect to shape and actively participate in their world. More partnership working with students is therefore needed to co-design their interactions with universities (Jisc, 2021)
Commoning by Design: Exploring commoning approaches for multispecies stakeholder cooperation in systemic design
Get PDFThis workshop builds on previous work that explores a commoning approach for systemic design, and specifically, how Ostrom’s eight Core Design principles (CDPs) could support relational design activities not only through alignment but by surfacing a plurality of voices and holding space for negotiating conflicting planetary stakeholder needs, motivations, and objectives.
We will begin the workshop by inviting design practitioners and researchers to reflect on their experiences of how (or if) current design practices create conditions for improved multispecies stakeholder cooperation. We will explore Ostrom’s CPDs in-depth, including recent research hypotheses on how they could help designers as a design heuristic for improved collaboration and more intentional group cooperation (Schaeper, 2022).
The workshop references recent work conducted by the workshop facilitators in UK healthcare quality improvement and a service design context where the theories of the commons and their applicability to co-design and transitioning existing systems from being dysfunctional to being regenerative were explored (Robert et al., 2021 and Schaeper, Kothari, Hamilton, 2022). The outcomes of the workshop will include reflections on current systemic design approaches and a proposed set of design tools that could help designers who wish to practice systemic design through the lens of an alternative economic perspective based on equity, inclusion, and participation
En-ROADS: Using the Climate Interactive Tool for Designing and Planning
Get PDFDesigners and planners are facing increasing challenges in creating a liveable environment in the face of global climate change. We are far behind the Paris Agreement’s ambitious goals of limiting global warming to 1.5C, which is in line with pre-industrial levels. Advances towards this require both looking to a future without fossil fuel while also being able to meet global energy demands.
This complex combination of situations requires tools that can assist in understanding the system dynamics of short and long efforts when making designs or planning spaces. The En-ROADS Climate Workshop helps build support for energy strategies by using an openly available cutting-edge simulation tool created by Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan.
In this 90-minute interactive workshop, participants learn why it is important to understand the interdependency of climate change and energy sources. Participants are introduced to the En-ROADS modelling tool, an easy-to-use, science-backed simulation that can inform real-world design strategies.
Through a series of interactions with the facilitator, participants have an opportunity to test various approaches using En-ROADS to see the impact of energy decisions on global temperature and other factors, including equity. The workshop is an opportunity to experience what it is like to create climate futures using engaging conversations that result in an experience that is hopeful, scientifically grounded, action-oriented, and eye-opening