Systems, Power, Anxiety, Dream
Posted on December 19, 2016
Before reading Donella Meadow’s ‘Thinking in Systems’, I didn’t recognize how everything we see, design, interact with are perceived as systems and can be put into simple formulas and explanations. It has unlocked and connected such an exciting, complex yet simple ways of seeing and understanding on many aspects and scales. As Meadow described, 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. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.”[1] This has brought me to recognize resemblance of how each design/creative process to system design. By understanding signs/signals from surrounding world, designer decodes and translates them into a system of intended expression/function. As designer, although personally, I can’t dance (in fact, I’m horribly bad at dancing), but in terms of creating, idea generating, it has always been essential to understand and feel the ‘flow’ of those information, to therefore adjust/interpret/synthesize and ‘perform’/design/publish accordingly.
On dealing with scales and flows, feedback loops to final output.
Or as Margaret Atwood described, “Storytelling [or Design/Creativity] is part of being human — you can’t separate it from being a human being. Whether you call it “professional storytelling” or not, everybody is telling a Story of My Life to themselves all the time. So how you tell a story, how many pieces you tell the story in … all of these things are old — it’s just that we think of new ways to distribute them [output/design]. I walk around in a state of wonder every day [input/inspiration].”
Our world is increasingly globalized and accelerated by technologies and innovations at an unprecedented speed. The internet has open-sourced and revolutionized how knowledge, culture, power is accessed and distributed, which in turn, formed emergences of not only new possibilities but also challenges to different landscapes of social, political, ecological both locally and globally.[2][3] These newly emerged interconnected complex issues are defined as “wicked problems” by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber.[4] Designers have been interacting with systems all along, inventing and reinventing, turning ideas into realities, from shaping objects to shaping experiences, environments and perceptions. However, are we conscious of what kind of power and responsibility we have on our shoulders, do we realize what we designed can be a doubled-edged blade? Are we prepared enough to make such decisions? As the scales of problems for designers have expanded, where should the boundaries be, can we prevent from doing more harm than good?
“Historically, designers’ ambitions have ranged from the quotidian to the autocratic, from the spoon to the city. Under the guise of urban renewal or the cliché of disruptive innovation, designers of all kinds—from architects and typographers to interface, product, and fashion designers—have played a role in the reconfiguration of ways of life, ecosystems, and moral philosophies. Although designers aim to work toward the betterment of society, it is and has been easy for them to overstep, indulge in temptation, succumb to the dark side of a moral dilemma, or simply err.” (Design and Violence)
“We live in a very different world now but we can reconnect with that spirit (of visionary designers of the 1960s, 1970s) and develop new methods appropriate for today’s world and once again begin to dream. But to do this, we need more pluralism in design, not of style but of ideology and values.”[5]
[1] Meadows, Donella H. (2008-12-03). Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Kindle Locations 195-198). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[2] Johnson, Steven (2012-09-11). Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner. Kindle Edition.
[3] Weber, Steven (2005-10-01). The Success of Open Source. Harvard University Press.
[4] Rittle, Horst; Webber, Melvin (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.
[5] Dunne, Anthony; Raby, Fiona (2013). Speculative Everything- Design, Fiction, And Social Dreaming.