Systems, on the other hand, are comprised of elements, relations, connections, and flows that together demonstrate macro-level behaviors. It is the instantiation of an instrumental objective enabled by the subtle reconfiguration of a set of physical or processual affordances. The design artifact forecloses possibilities-though not in a pejorative sense. Even service design, with its complex constellation of actors, behaviors, scripts, and spaces circumscribe a bounded set of possibilities, with the service blueprint serving as the template. An artifact condenses and freezes a set of relations into a state of being, utilizing scripted physical cues to choreograph a user’s behaviors towards a set of predetermined, target actions. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, in their famous essay on the blind spots of modern planning, see this quandary as defining what they term “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973).ĭesigning for systems is, in fact, radically different than designing artifacts. For example, one of the most assured ways to increase traffic congestion is to add more lanes for cars-as this only incentivizes more people to commute, worsening the problem. Counter-intuitively, intentional fixes to dysfunctional systems often produce results that would are worse than doing nothing. While we may speak about redesigning public education or food systems or politics, it is simply impossible for designers or other actors alone to influence in any deterministic way the complex systems they see misbehaving. As with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, our presence as system-boundary-makers ineluctably redraws the system according to our own, distorting sightlines. Second, to constitute a system we must stand at some Archimedean point outside of it, and yet there is no such standpoint that allows us to fully grasp a system that does not, in some way, include us (as the shaper of that system). As Meadows writes, “There is no single, legitimate boundary to draw around a system” (Meadows, 2008, p. Systems are constructs or assays that actors devise to shape reality in particular ways and for particular ends. Two points are central here: first, there are no systems per se. A system does not exist until we claim that it is one. We might all agree that textbooks are a part of the education system, for instance, but would we all agree that a nutritious breakfast is? Or domestic disharmony? Put differently, the ontological status of a system is always provisional and motivated. The system-maker must constitute boundaries and edges and insides and outsides and elements and nodes and connections in order to circumscribe the contours of a system. What is included, what is not, and who is doing the deciding all imply a politics of boundary and set determination that is little different from the cartographer’s drawing of territorial borderlines. To constitute a system one must make exclusions and draw boundaries. This means that systems are political, first and foremost. This is their second bedeviling characteristic. That system we must intuit from a point outside of the raindrop. A droplet of rain does not communicate that it plays a central role in thermal regulation of climate or in the transpiration necessary to make plants grow. This is, perhaps, the most bedeviling characteristic of systems: the purpose cannot necessarily be derived from the elements. In her formulation, a system is not simply a random gathering of parts (like snowflakes on the sidewalk) in its unfolding its structure must demonstrate some higher level of order or purpose. She writes, “A system is a set of things-people, cells, molecules, or whatever-interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time” (Meadows, 2008, p. In her foundational book Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows illustrates for us the basic building blocks of systems. Instead, we are now starting to see these problems themselves as the symptoms of dysfunctional, larger macro-systems that are themselves shaping the problem space. The profession of design is undergoing a paradigmatic shift away from the design of artifacts as solutions to problems. Journal of Futures Studies, March 2019, 23(3): 119–128Į S S A Y Anticipating Future System States
#Donella meadows thinking in systems diagream pdf#
* Web Text version of each JFS paper here is for easy reading purpose only, for the valid and published context of each article, please refer to the PDF version.
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