Learning log 3 – reflection on systemic approach to a field trip to Mozambique – country/government level

For the last two weeks I was in a field trip to Mozambique for a CS course in the school of economics; therefore, my reflection for the learning log 3 and 4 will be related to the research made in the trip and its relations to the System Thinking approach.

Briefly contextualization about Mozambique:

Mozambique is located on the southeast coast of Africa, facing the Indic Ocean, in front of Madagascar Island. A country with tropical weather, full of very welcoming and sympathetic people, fruits, colors, birds, sea food and underdevelopment. While many of these characteristics came from natural causes, underdevelopment has a strong reason, far away from natural causes.

Mozambique is an ex-colony of Portugal, as many other countries, such as Brazil (where I’m from); However this country’s independence from Portugal happened recently, in 1975, after a 10 years’ war. Furthermore, just after the independence, the country entered in a socialist Government which was followed by around 20 years of civil war. The country found peace just in 1992 and democracy in 1995.

Nevertheless, the problem was not the model of government (socialism, capitalism or anything else), the problem was the lack of awareness of the consequence that modifications in a system would cause to the others; that is what I describe on the following topic:

But why is that a cause of underdevelopment?

During the colonial era Portugal had made, even though not much, some investments on infrastructure and services; but after the independence, the new Government decided that they should be the ones in charge of all the production and services (health, education, water & sanitation, agriculture, fishing, etc); for that, they incorporated all the private facilities (clinics, hospitals, schools, boats, harbors and so on) under their administration. Yes, if you was a doctor and had a clinic, you would no longer have it (neither your equipment); which resulted in a big exodus of people to other countries such as South Africa and Portugal.

Besides that, if the country had some infrastructure, the government couldn’t take care of everything and, even further, the civil war contributed to leave everything in bad conditions.

When democracy came in 1995 the country started from zero again, trying to rebuild and restructure everything for the third time. That is the main reason of underdevelopment: it is a new country (we could say that it is only 20 years old in the development path). However, another reason for underdevelopment is: how to overcome poverty and lack of infrastructure?

This has a more systemic reason than the above mentioned history: the government is still in charge of many services; but focusing on agriculture, which was one of the main areas of our research there, what we found is: There is no “private” land in Mozambique. You can’t own a piece of land, they are all owned by the Government. On one hand it is a good thing because there are no “land less” people; if you want a land to have a farm or to live on, you just need to fill a paper asking for the right of usage of that specific place you chose; however, on the other hand, as the country lacks infrastructure and investments, if you want to lend some money from a bank (there are only private banks for agriculture) to invest on machinery and other equipment to start your production, you do not have anything to present as guarantee; therefore you can’t lend money. For that reason, economic development of Mozambican society goes in a slow pace.

If we analyze the situation, there are two feasible solutions if we consider the relation between the agricultural production, the governmental and the bank systems. One is for the government to give ownership of the land to the citizens so that they can start doing things by their own, and stop their dependence on the governmental initiatives; and another would be either the creation of governmental agricultural banks, or lending systems which would take other ways of guarantee, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

What will happen? I don’t know... But it was really interesting to analyze and see the systemic relations and the systemic causes of underdevelopment in that country. 

Reflection on systemic approach exercise for "short-term improvements in transportation"

To start the first group work, on Tuesday, a systemic analysis had to be made on the current situation of transportation;  to be able to make this analysis, we realized that we needed to choose a specific region to scrutinize; therefore, for our proximity, we chose the Helsinki region.

In this study we mapped the key problems, actors, outcomes, related systems and possible high leverage points for short-term improvements in the transportation system; this wide view of the situation allowed us to get a bigger idea about the motivations that drives people to choose between different transportation methods and their interrelated results and effects on other systems. After this analysis, we decided to focus on “bicycle” and how to encourage it, but it became impossible to focus only in one issue while the transportation system consists of an integration of several different methods of moving around (bus, tram, train, car, walking). Having in mind the connectedness of the cycling activity and by being able to realize its pros and cons; we were able to perform a more balanced, less biased, approach to the given topic “short-term improvement in transportation”.

When we got to the second group work period, on Friday, and got back to the cycling topic; due to the systemic approach we have had, the first issue that came to discussion was “what about those who can not bike?”. And from that we started to change our focus; we decided to get back to those motivations we had mapped before. “How to diminish the usage of private cars” was the new topic because it appeared as a underlying problem. On that topic, we decided that integration between the different transportation systems would be a good idea to improve ecofriendly transportation but it wouldn’t be enough. Something more was needed...

Just integrating different ways of transportation would not make it more appealing so that people would choose them rather than private cars. Therefore, again with a systemic approach, we started to map all the related systems that could be easily integrated into public transportation vehicles; thinking on concepts such as having post boxes, ATMs, and other electronic machines that would save peoples time while going from one place to another. We are still developing this concept,  let’s see what happens...

I must say that bringing a systemic approach into practice is being really surprising because t makes us realize what the “real problem” behind an issue is and how we can tackle it in a way that it will continue working with the broader system after going through a change.

IBM Smart cities – a step sideward

IBM’s “Smart Planet” project is “a step forward in a backward moving model”; it is a step sideward.

First of all, the goal of the project, as shown in their website, is to increase the Planet’s efficiency by increasing value, reducing costs and reduce waste of products and services. This efficiency is achieved by a systemic approach; by identifying and organizing the connections between different sectors (transportation, health care, commerce, business and products & services). In this approach they pretend to predict consumer behavior in the above mentioned sectors in order to “map” the modus operandi of a society. Once they have mapped it, they can articulate an improvement on the model, which will be coordinated by a centralized power (such as the city hall).   

A say that it is “a step forward in a backward moving model” because at the same time that they are realizing the systemic way that our society work; they are not changing our failing societal models. What I mean is that, to achieve a balanced society as they want through their project, the improvement should be applied to every city so that the entire world is really connected. However, our present economic model relies on having underdeveloped communities: in order to have cheap products and services, we need to have cheap labor, low taxes, and cheap raw materials; therefore, it needs people working with unfair salaries and exploitation.

                Therefore the project aims in an incomplete systemic approach, in consider a city as a closed system, and, even if it consider the connection to other cities involved in the initiative, it does not takes into consideration the entire world as a system of systems.

                As we are having many initiatives to reach a sustainable society and, the scope of the IBM’s project does not aim on this goal; my question is: What is the adaptive capacity of their project? If their initiative is applied on a city, how can his city adapt to new models of societal settings without collapsing? Is their model, at all, adaptive?

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.

Waste Land Movie - must see

I saw this movie some weeks ago and I was waiting for some free time to talk about it here. It is a “must see” movie.

It is about a work that the Brazilian plastic artist Vik Muniz made with workers from the biggest trash city in the world. The first half of the movie I think it is something that everybody should see; it is about the “life of the trash”, it shows where the stuff that we careless throw in our trash can ends, it presents a different point of view of our material culture, which, I think, it’s very useful for designers.

They show the life of people who get their livelihood from the trash, how the live, what they find, and so on.

The other half is also very interesting; it concerns Vik’s art work with those people. It is more related to the Art world and how Art can change other people’s life.

So, if you are interested or not in Art and Design, you must see this movie!

Here is the link for the movie’s website: http://www.wastelandmovie.com/