third day – final thoughts

Final day of the course, dynamic systems, group presentations and discussions... The course was short, but intense and, at least for me, very useful.
In this last post I want to talk about the results I got from the course and relate them to the group presentations and my future expectations concerning sustainability and social design (my focus area).

First of all, this contact with the theory about system thinking allowed me to get a wider view our actions in the world and also how complex systems are organized, what leads them to collapse and how does it goes after collapsing.

If I can say one specific way that it really helped me, is the following: When Sustainable development started to became more wide spread, they said “think global, act local”. What means that we can’t, alone, change the entire world, but that, if each of us make our part, we can. But then, during the last years people started to talk about the “wicked problems” and saying that they are very complex, that they can’t be solved through only one solution, that for that, we should have many initiatives from many different sides to tackle it and so on; Hence, that is almost impossible to solve them. But now, with the vision of systemic thinking, especially with the concepts of “complex systems” and “levels”, I can see that, no matter how “wicked” a problem is, we can “break” it into smaller pieces so that we can find a level which is within our part. What means that, step by step, we can make the change.

I’m not going into systems theory in this post, but I must say that I’ll continue researching about that, especially because my area of interest in design is “social design” concerning initiatives to bring equality and development to the underprivileged population; and, therefore, been able to understand the system where a given community is located, how it works, which relations it has, the levels, the incomes and outcomes and so on and do forth is crucial to this kind of work.

One think that I learned in this course is that there is much more things to learn about, so, citing Socrates, I would say that, the more I know “I know that I know nothing”; and this keeps me interested in continue learning...

Thank you Gary for the course!  

Complex systems, chaos, hierarchy and panarchy

After the lecture and the articles “Confronting Economic Profit with Hierarchy Theory” by Allen et al. and “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological and Social Systems” by C. S. Holling and the video “Beyond Markets and States” by Ostrom, Elinor; I want to talk a bit about what I learned about complex systems. I hope I’m on the right way to understand System Thinking and how to look at the “change” that our society has to go through to create a “Sustainable community”.

“Complexity is different from Chaos” Elinor Ostrom

As the quotation (extracted from the video) says, “complexity” and “chaos” are completely different things; because “complexity” is, actually, organized. What it means is that we can analyze complexity by dividing it in smaller pieces. But there is a huge difference between “analyzing” complexity and “organizing” it, this leads us to de ideas of Hierarchy. And the results presented either on the video and on the articles, shows that polycentric systems can cope with complexity, what it means is that, when we have many self-organizing, small, pieces in a system, they can became more efficient (faster levels), but for that, communication between the different pieces is really important, so that it can create relations and evolve accordingly.  This also reminded me the “Small is beautiful” book from Schumacher (1970), when he talks about the small scale, where communication and maintenance is easier because you can understand more easily the entire system.

They also talk about the different levels in an Up-Down Hierarchy, and they say that the higher the level, the slower it is (also, the lower the level, the faster it is); because for higher levels, they must spend their energy not only with the role of “experimenting new things within the level” but also with the role of “conserve and stabilize conditions for the lower levels”. (Holling, C. S. op. cit. Simon)

This brings us to the idea of sustaining a system, of growing rigidity until the day it can’t be supported and then collapse. Hollings defines sustainability as “the goal of fostering adaptive capabilities and creating opportunities”; I’m not going through the theory about adaptive systems and so on because I want to enjoy this space to rise some questions:

They say that the adaptive cycle and the future of a system is controlled by the three following characteristics: wealth, controllability and adaptive capacity. Take the economic system for example, by making a relation with all innovative ideas about post-economic era (supported by Domenico de Mase, Tucker Viemeister, and many others), we can see that it is not adaptive to new ideas, that it is just always struggling to keep the old model (getting rigid) going on. Therefore, how long can a system sustain rigidity before collapse?

Continuing in this direction, concerning people who are creating new ideas to change the present society and its systems to a sustainable model (one where we could rise social equality, environmental resilience, and still keep economic issue), how this group should be seen; as the “novel entrants” - who saw (remember) the lessons and models from nature and how it works (equality, interaction, panarchy) – who are entering the rigid system to bring it to the “collapse/change” or as the “potential” of the adaptive cycle been created?

Just to conclude, having in mind the idea of “elements of prescription for facilitating constructive changes “ from Holling’s article, we as designers, should create tools to foment social flexibility, to “teach how to change”, so that our society can have more acceptance to changes. 

System Thinking in design

Through this first contact with System Thinking (ST) theory, I could realize the relations and importance that it has to the design methodology, especially when dealing with sustainability issues.

                Well, let’s go by parts: First, what does ST has do with design? The design process’ outcome (product or service) that I’ll call “result” here, will interact with outside factors, for example, an user, a place, and so on, therefore, a system. It means that this result has to fit in that specific system, it must be acceptable by its different parts and interact with them as good as possible. Therefore, by using ST during the design process we can identify the System where the result will act and which relation it will have within the different parts of that specific system. And by taking this approach, we can improve the design process, making it more conscious about the effect that it will make in a certain system. This can also work to make designers act in a more responsible way in terms of the environmental and social outcomes of their works.

                System thinking is especially important when dealing with sustainability issues through design, because these issues often called “wicked problems”, are multifaceted, what demands a more holistic approach and therefore, also more complex solutions, that can tackle the problem through its most different “sides”.  In this case ST and, especially System Inquiry approach is very useful to understand the entire range and complexity of a specific problem which a designer want’s to tackle.  

               

                What I also understood from the 1^st and 2^nd cluster of articles is that, in most of the times, a “system” is not something pre-defined, but, on the other way, it is defined by the person who is approaching it. It means that, as every system is somehow related and connected with other systems and, as each one is made of subsystems, the “size” of it varies according to the level of “zoom” that you use and which of its external relations you are taking in account. This “view” of the system is defined by the type of result that you want to achieve: by the scope and the range of information and complexity that the working group can deal with.