Systemic Design

Systemic design brings social-centered design to complex, multi-stakeholder service systems (Learning for Sustainability, 2016).

Systemic design is an approach that integrates systems thinking and human-centred, and social-centred design in response to highly complex social, economic and environmental problems. Systemic design is a living framework to use the two schools of thinking and suites of multidisciplinary methods together.

Systems thinking is often seen as complimentary or pre-cursor approaches for design, providing scope and focus. Increased complexity in our worlds, like globalization, climate change, exponential technology, have made it very challenging for designers. Systems thinking can provide the scaffoldings to help designers design responsibly for positive impact, and avoid unintended consequences.

Systemic design enables us to make sense of more complexity & more perspectives, faster.

Drawing by Yunsun Chung, RSD4.

Systems thinking and design thinking are complementary.

For a more in-depth explanation, see What Is Systemic Design.

Systemic Design provides a framework to integrate systems thinking and design. Source: Systemic Design Toolkit (2018) https://www.systemicdesigntoolkit.org/methodology last accessed 2019-09-04

For tools and resources on systemic design visit the Systemic Design Toolkit. The toolkit will help you understand why your challenge is hard to tackle, explore interventions to start the transformation and define and implement your transition plan.

Follow the Rabbit: A Field Guide to Systemic Design by Roya Damabi from the Government of Alberta CoLab is another great resource for systemic design.

The Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) symposium series is helping to drive research and knowledge mobilization, with published proceedings in the scientific design research journal FORMakademisk.