Adopting a systemic design perspective within a design thinking practice

Abstract

This graduation project was a collaboration between TU Delft and VanBerlo, a strategic and product design agency based in the Netherlands. The motivation of this project was to understand how the Design for Transitions team, a part of VanBerlo, can start to apply Systemic design within their design practice. This team addresses societal and transition challenges that often present multi stakeholder, fuzzy contexts. Systemic design and its applicability in dealing with complex, multi-stakeholder, open and fuzzy problems could offer value to the DfT teams approach. First, two explorative research questions were posed. One, was to find out how DfT conducts their design activities and what is their current design approach. This was established through interviews with DfT designers and by studying past projects. Alongside, a second exploration was conducted on the field of systemic design and a key practice in it: visualization. By studying scientific publications, exploring resources such as yearly conferences and events, theoretical knowledge on this field was established. Additionally, designers who are systemic design practitioners were interviewed to learn from their experience on how they applied this field into practice. The resulting outcome was a set of principles and practices that were evident in professional systemic design practice. By combining insights from the two streams of explorations, four opportunity areas were determined where DfT’s design process could benefit from systemic design. The opportunity areas were: Frame the brief as a complex systemic design challenge, study human insights in the form of relationships, conduct the synthesis of data and knowledge in relationships and lastly, apply visualization for sense making and sense sharing. These four opportunity areas outlined techniques, tools and methods that could be further explored. To establish the context in which these opportunity areas could be explored, two design challenges addressed by DfT were taken up. The resulting solutions were a set of tools and templates that were informed by the opportunity areas. These solutions were applied in the design process of each of the two challenges and an evaluation could be conducted with internal designers from DfT. The resulting insights were useful to learn what solutions worked and to determine the feasibility of systemic design overall for VanBerlo. In order to achieve the goal of the project, that is to help the DfT team apply systemic design into their practice, the revised tools and templates were gathered into a resource named The Systemic Design Toolbox. This toolbox introduced the very first steps for how DfT and the studio at large could begin to explore systemic design. Each tool is presented with a guide to illustrate what value the use of it offers, what outputs can be expected and instructions plus templates that support the use of the tool. Overall, the outcomes of this graduation were very well received by VanBerlo and indicate promise to become the path, in not only applying systemic design, but sensitizing the studio on the changing landscape of design and the need for adopting new skills as designers.