Activating Change: A Designer’s Guide to Systems Thinking - Boxes and Arrows

1. Structural capabilities, not isolated fixes: Real transformation hinges on how the parts talk, decide, and adapt—not on dropping a shiny app, a policy mandate, or a pilot project into the mix. Sensing bandwidth, feedback latency, agency distribution, and norm plasticity are the pipes and circuits of systemic learning. 2. Learning order precedes ... See more

Taking on a holistic approach to design and systems’ thinking can help us understand how different elements relate to each other — and helps us remember that the world is an interconnected web. Everything we design is part of a whole that has a wider social and ecological impact.

Systems-emergence solutions are nonlinear and decentralized; change requires finding places to experiment within subsystems to shake them up and cause ripple effects (Boulton et al., 2015). Systems-emergence work does not attempt to describe the characteristics of a healthy system, but it often does describe the outcomes the system should be able t... See more