The, the time is an important one within the development of systemic design.
So there, I think there are some choices that need to be made,
and the first 10 events in this series have established systemic designers,
um, in the world.
But when something like this begins to go become a mainstream endeavor,
when you can sort of introduce yourself in the,
in a lift as a systemic designer, um, uh, there's a lot of risks.
So there's a risk that what's special about it can become lost,
can become lost in just, you know, the rest of the world. Um,
a risk of embedding blind spots that we are blind to because we, you know, the,
the implicit values and assumptions in the foundations of what it is that,
um, just get extended and we forget to question them.
And I think we've got questions that are about, um, uh,
we have important questions for us right now about the next steps in developing
this. And I want to go to, um,
oh, that's the reveal. Um,
so I'm just call doing a call back to this diagram,
which I saw at the first time I came to an R S D, which was, um,
R S D four, and I think it was first presented in R S D two and, um,
maybe it's been around before then. Um,
I'd love to know kind of when Berger first did this. Um,
and there's lots of ways you can maybe do a different diagram.
You can critique this and so on.
And all diagrams are just slices through things,
but I'm just gonna work with this one a little bit. Um,
so Berger's title for this in his slides in RSD two are the
field of possibilities in systemic design.
And I think one of the really beautiful things about, uh, this,
and especially how Bier wrote about this in 2017,
um, is he positioned system systems oriented design.
So the practice that he develops is just one of the possibilities.
So there's a kind of field you have kind of design on one side,
you have systems on the other,
and he puts this kind of blurry red spot for roughly where systems oriented
design is, is one practice.
And there's an idea that systemic design could be a plural field with many
practices and different ways of doing things rather than just one thing.
And I think that plurality is really, um, important and interesting in,
in being critical of everything we do.
But we could also say that most of the stuff that, you know,
we see at R S D is fairly near that red spot, right?
We're kind of plural, but we're still kind of in that zone.
And I'm always attracted to the edges. So I, I'm from a,
a discipline called cybernetics, which is about, um,
exploring the edges between things.
And you can think of this as a field and there's a lot of other space on the,
on the graph. Um,
so have we explored the full range of what that pluralism could be,
um, design on the left. Um,
so there's a lot of other modalities of design that are maybe not captured by
design thinking, design practice, research through design.
There's other kinds of things, right? And other connections,
maybe things beyond design that are forms of creative practice too,
that are relevant. Um, we could think to connections, to art practice,
to engineering.
And in the same way the system side systems is as a field is more than just
systems thinking. So systems thinking, um,
in a way is the kind of presentable, neat, um,
uh, known kind of methodological area that you can kind of present in a kind of
government circle.
And they've heard of it and it really makes sense to start with this because
it's kind of known. It has some acceptance. Um,
and if what you're trying to do as Alex Ryan put it, um,
at a previous R s d, if we're,
if systemic design is trying to move upstream from designs traditional areas to
questions like policy and, um, sociotechnical systems that are,
um, governance, If you're trying to move into that realm,
it makes a lot of start sense to start with, um, uh,
with kind of systems thinking as a framework.
But there's also many other things that systems connects to as a field.
So it connects to the counterculture, connects to, um, ecology,
connects to the long, now, connects to embodied cognition,
biology of cognition to art practices, to family therapy, um,
to all kinds of things that are, I think still re very relevant to, um,
designing and also to, um, design challenges.
One of the most noticeable parts of systemic design, um,
has been giga mapping or different forms of mapping.
And this is often talked about as
visualizing complexity. Um,
but I think the most important thing in it is, um,
an integration of what's called boundary critique.
So if we take the basic systems idea that everything is connected,
um, but we can't engage with everything at once,
then there's an idea that all our engagements are partial and we're always
making boundary judgements about what we include and what we don't.
The question who is,
and who should be included is at the heart of e every systemic design process.
Um, and I'm sure you will encounter that in different ways in your work,
But I think we can also apply that question to systemic design itself,
also to R S D who and what is included in systemic
design and who and what should be.
And here I'm thinking partly of something Margaret Mead did, um,
with the systems and cybernetics communities in the sixties,
which was to ask them to take their ideas seriously enough to apply them to
their own practices. So their own events, their own organizations.
So Berger's, Gibb, giga mapping approach
has beautiful part which is about, um,
mapping out beyond the horizon, um,
of the project until you get to things you know,
you don't need to deal with right now. Right?
So moving beyond the scope and then, you know,
you can make a proper critical judgment of what to include and when.
So just to play with the diagram a little bit, if we kind of start to imagine,
well, that was maybe a field, what's beyond that field? And I,
I would like to encourage us to kind of think about maybe the other
possibilities that surround it that could be included. Um,
and maybe that should be included. So what are the, so the,
the questions leave you with is, um,
what are the possibilities and practices of systemic design? Uh,
what should they be? When is systemic design? When is it,
uh, when is it a good idea? When is it just, uh, when is it possible?
When is it practical? When is it radical? Um,
I think these are questions that are, um, hard to ask, but good to,
um, good to answer.