We Are Not ‘System Designers’ (and Other Random Thoughts On the Scales of Design)
If you’ve been following the polarizing conversations within the experience design realm over the past 20+ years, you’ve no doubt noticed our discipline’s tendency to over-label everything , and our mind-numbing ability to switch en masse to the latest eminent-sounding job title that’s presently in fashion.
Not long ago, early adopters, who initially labelled themselves usability engineers, information architects, interaction designers, UI designers, HCI professionals etc., found a home under the umbrella of (user) experience design, or UX. Soon after, the rapid proliferation of UX through the corporate world prompted the overnight jump from those working as web designers to the now established moniker of ‘UX designers’. While doing so mainly in title, many of those web (UX) designers still lacked any of the basic concepts rooted in the initial subdisciplines originally mixed into experience design, which created the first wave of mislabelled ‘UX professionals’ in the marketplace. In the last 5–10 years, a few other shifts happened: a large percentage of UX designers became product designers, signalling specialization towards building digital and physical products, while another sizeable group with backgrounds in cognitive psychology, ethnography, anthropology, data science, etc. chose a path entirely dedicated to pursuing generative and evaluative research, becoming (UX) researchers. Other small subsets of UX professionals shifted their focus to emergent subdisciplines like content strategy and UX writing. Those of us interested in more strategic design endeavours and the idea of designing ‘at scale’ joined forces with design-minded folks focused from other domains like policy and urbanism, and entered the field of Service Design.
This is roughly where we are now. I purposely left out those who shifted their attention exclusively to design leadership or leadership coaching, as I consider them more or less an entirely different speciation track for the now ‘traditional’ career path.
Over the past couple of years, there’s been another undercurrent gaining significant traction in the world of UX, originally as a competency within someone’s primary job title . Many UX professionals are now labelling themselves as system-level thinkers, some going as far as calling themselves ‘system designers’.
For someone like me, who has been fascinated for a number of years by the overlap between systems thinking methods and the more familiar research and design methods ingrained in mainstream approaches related to human centered design and design thinking, this feels a bit like a homecoming. But it also feels disingenuous. The nature of the system-level conversation in UX circles tends to be rooted by two sets of sources. The first is design lore, like Eliel Saarinen famous quote “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” or Charles and Ray Eames’ famous “Powers of Ten" short film from 1977. The second, includes basic theoretical concepts from a handful of popular systems thinking books written by well-known authors like Russell Ackoff, Peter Senge and Donnella Meadows. While these books portray the academic aspect of systems thinking as seen from the perspective of business and economics, they also have major blind spots when it comes to drawing any parallels directly relevant to the practice of experience design.
Familiarity with these concepts, while foundational, barely scratches the surface. To make a design analogy, it’s the equivalent of equating UX competency with reading Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think”, Don Norman’s “Design for Everyday Things”, and being able to recite a famous design quote, like Nolan Bushnell’s “The ultimate inspiration is the deadline”. You might have acquired the vocabulary, but you’re likely ill-equipped to facilitate anything close to quality work in the space. Systems thinking approaches within today’s mature systems dynamics practices are already rooted in established systems analysis methods, systems mapping approaches, and intervention models, in domains like finance, healthcare, ecology, urbanism, sustainability, etc. Grokking those methods and the theory behind them is a good start towards creating hybrid approaches between systems thinking and design thinking. They’re both messy and complex. They require research to understand how the underlying structures operate. They create a spectrum of models ranging from individual to societal ones. They require advanced analysis, synthesis, abductive reasoning and big picture/wicked problem-solving skills. But until practiced, competency in all of these realms is only a linguistic illusion. Think of how long it took before you considered yourself a passable designer. Now think about whether you’ve given system-level methods anywhere close to the same level of attention, practice, and critical discourse.
Which brings me to back to ‘systems designers’. Someone out there chose to go beyond articulating that systems thinking is an integral part of their core service design competencies, and decided it was a good idea to promote it as part of their job title. It worked for product designers, it originally worked for service designers, it must work for ‘system-level designers’ as well, right?
As it turns out, a “system designer” job title makes very little sense when considering any generally passable rendition of a ‘scale’ of design (I do realize the word ‘scale’ is not ideal, but then again I find other substitutions like ‘resolution’, ‘zoom level’ or ‘spectrum’ even more problematic when teaching these concepts). The image above represents the design scale I use in my workshops, ranging from a microscopic view of design (foundational) to a telescopic view (global/societal).
The field of product design, and those falling in the category of “product designers”, actually span multiple design scales. Product designers could work at any combination of foundational , artifact/interaction, feature, product or even up to service level. That doesn’t mean we see a lot of UX professionals calling themselves “feature designers” because their main focus is feature work. And make no mistake, they make up the majority working within the product designer umbrella term. The same applies to service designers. We do the bulk of our work at the service, system or even global levels, but that doesn’t mean that we should alter that loose duality by breaking it down into more precise terms. Having ‘system designer’ and ‘global/societal designer’ titles pop up everywhere will only weaken our ongoing argument for service design.
Furthermore, I firmly believe systems cannot be designed. At least not in the classic sense of the word we use at every other level below it. You can intervene in, influence, analyze, visualize or map systems, but generally they are too big to be ‘designed’ by a single entity, let alone a single individual. How do you ‘design’ societal systems like poverty? Or justice? Or finance? Or ecology?
If you believe that assembling a design system in the UX sense of the word makes you a systems thinker, I tend to disagree with that as well. A system is characterized from having multiple facets that are revealed by looking at it from different perspectives. A Design System is typically a single perspective endeavour (that of a digital designer), and is reductionist in nature (as in, components are literally the sum of their parts), as opposed to the holistic nature of systems in general. Furthermore, there’s no abductive reasoning required to create a design system, a staple of any intervention model at the system level. And while this particular point has been hotly debated on design twitter, it remains to be seen how design systems will evolve going forward, and whether that will validate or invalidate their inclusion as legitimate system-level deliverables.
And if you’re a designer looking for competency at the systems scale, beside practicing some of the systems thinking methods you’ll find in that realm, I would also point you to the Future of Skills Report (PDF) done by Pearson Education, NESTA, and Oxford Martin for UK in 2018, listing the skills that will be most in demand up to 2030. System-level skills feature explicitly and prominently at no. 6 (Systems Evaluation) and no. 9 (Systems Analysis), as well as implicitly as part of no. 8, Complex Problem Solving. Needless to say, “Systems Design” is nowhere to be found.
Others point to Wikipedia’s entry for “Systems Design” as proof that you can actually design systems. That’s a red herring, as the version of “systems design” referenced there is much closer to what we mean by “software design”. Within those “systems”, the closest thing to a designer’s mindset (in the experience design sense of the word) actually applies to work typically performed by Systems Analysts.
In summary, how can designers help with analyzing, evaluating, mapping, describing or visualizing systems? As the “Scales of Design” graphic above pointed to earlier, there are a lot of tried and true systems thinking-inspired methods like system maps, causal loop diagrams, stock & flow diagrams, etc. There are also a growing number of design-infused methods like ecosystem maps, gigamaps, and journey map atlases. There have also been standalone toolkits created at the intersection of design thinking and systems thinking, like systems oriented design and systemic design. The service ecosystem mapping method I teach and use with clients builds on the work done by many others ahead of me. Its purpose is to facilitate understanding, at scale, by visualizing of the relevant actors and services within an ecosystem’s boundary, superimposed by various ‘lenses’ or data layers that may inform the problem that we’re trying to solve.
And if these existing approaches don’t work for your particular context, don’t be afraid to build your own. Both at the service and system level, designers have barely begun to scratch the surface. Just don’t call yourself a ‘system designer’, please.
