Systems Design

Narrative Paper
 Overview

This guide presents an overview to the paradigm of systems design.

This is the overall narrative as to what it is, the historical context it
exists within and why it is of such relevance to the design challenges
of today.
 What is Design?
From the design of our first-hand tools to the creation of
today's smart cities, design is one of the oldest and most
basic of human activities. Being so broad and all-pervasive
how can we begin to define it?

Herbert Simon once said, "Everyone designs who devises

a course of action aimed at changing existing situations
into preferred ones."

Design is an intention to create order in the world; the

purposeful organization of elements to achieve a desired
outcome.
 Design Process
Designing is the process we go through in conceiving an original or
improved solution to achieve a desired state, identifying the set of factors
and constraints within the given environment, and developing a model for
the arrangement of a set of elements to achieve this desired end state.
 Designs
The output of this process is the design, a model
for how the parts in a system are interrelated to
deliver the overall functionality of the entire
system. The parts to a chair are arranged in such
a way as to deliver the overall functionality of an
object of support; a space rocket is designed for
the propulsion required to deliver transportation
of people and objects to outer space.
 Thinking
Design is an intelligent process, thus how we approach
design and what we create is dependent upon our
understanding of the world and what we consider to be
desirable outcomes.

Our capacity to design things depends fully on our

awareness of how the world around us works. What we
once accepted as immutable and simply given by
"nature" we now can design at will - from the structure of
basic materials to whole landscapes.

Beyond being contingent upon our understanding of the

world, design is also relative to what humans desire and
value. We design for the things we value; as our values
change, how and what we design also changes.
 Design Paradigm

A design paradigm is an overarching

approach that is composed of our basic
assumptions and theories about how the
world works, what we value and want to
achieve, as well as a complementary set of
principles and methods with which to
approach the design process.
 As our understanding of the world
evolves and what we value changes, so
too does what we design and how we
design - our design paradigm.

For much of human history, our capacity

to design systems was very much

Evolution limited due to our limited scientific

knowledge; hand tools, buildings, and
bridges.

Of Design
 Modern Era
The explosion of scientific knowledge that started in the
early modern ear eventually worked its way through to
industry to create radical changes in our designed
environment. The development of modern engineering
gave rise to the age of machines of an ever-larger scale;
but more than this, new chemicals, new foods, fuels, and
technologies of communications.

With the rise of mass production, the expansion of

commerce and the market system came the need to
design mass-produced goods; what we now call industrial
design. Design became applied to shaping the form and
features of products that were to be manufactured
through techniques of mass production for a mass market.
 Product Design
As the Industrial Age with its focus on basic goods gave
way to consumerism during the mid-20th century, product
designers were employed to create endless products with
endless features to delight consumers.

As marketing and sales became ever more important in

the enterprise it was now all about pleasing the customer
and design started to become more focused on the end-
user.

The Industrial Age paradigm of designing the right

standardized mass-producible thing shifted to
ergonomics, interactive design, and eventually user-
centered design.
 Service Design
With a focus on customers came the realization that the end
product was not enough but what was needed were instead
processes; what we call services. Now it was not so much about
things and their lovely features but more about the value
delivered to the end-user within some overall service.

In the services economy, a new design methodology emerged,

design thinking. An approach that is more user-centered,
experience-focused, more agile and iterative, more holistic in
considerations of stakeholders, more collaborative as it cuts
across traditional domains.

Under the services paradigm design was no longer just about

products, now everything that people did was starting to
become open to design - healthcare services, education,
organizations.
 Today with the rise of information
technology the scale, scope, and complexity
of the systems we are challenged to design
is on a new level. Information technology
connects; it connects across silos and
domains to create ever-larger complex
systems.

The challenge for design today is how do

Complex Designed we build for this new world of connectivity

and networks rather than the previous silos
of a disconnected world.

Systems
 Complexity
Where once the challenge was largely for designers and
engineers to focus on technical challenges within a specific
domain, today as things become connected the challenge
shifts to one of designing for whole complex adaptive
systems of people, objects, devices, information, money,
natural resources. A world of the Internet of Things, smart
systems, and decentralized networks where all sorts of
things are talking to each other, acting, reacting, and
adapting to each other peer to peer.
 Examples
The smart city is but one example of a complex engineered system
that requires us to design for adaptive networks holistically. How
does the transport system work with the energy and water
network?
How do we get the city's lighting adapting to people's needs while
conserving energy? How do we create a seamless multimodal
urban transport network? How do we design healthcare systems
that integrate with the urban environment - to design for all
relevant factors from food and exercise to air quality? This is the
job of designers in the 21st century.

Beyond information technology, the complexity of the systems we

develop is being hugely increased by having to factor in many
more environmental considerations. We are no longer just building
for people but now have to consider impacts on the environment;
designing systems that take account of Co2 emissions, pollutants,
health factors, and quality of life. Designing linear systems is no
longer sufficed, we now have to think about material and energy
flows and how they can be reused to flow in circles.
 Increasing Scope

Our design world is now one; a simple product may activate

supply chains around the world in its creation and after its
usage may once again be dispersed back to the far corners of
the planet to influence ecosystems far and wide. The scale of
what we are designing is shifting from things to companies, to
whole supply chains and economic systems. Who we’re
designing for has expanded from a single user to vast
connected webs of people spanning the globe.

The complexity has increased hugely; when we ignore this

elephant in the room we get unintended consequences. We
create systems that by focusing on the end-user may make life
lovely and convenient for a few people, while at the other end
of those very same networks we make life arduous for the
many and destructive for ecosystems. In this context, we need
not just a new approach but also a new paradigm that helps
us to understand and design complex systems.
 Systems Thinking
When things become highly interconnected,
interdependent, and dynamic we need to change our
thinking to a systems paradigm to be successful.
Systems thinking is a way of responding to complexity
as it shifts our focus from looking at separate parts to
looking more at patterns of connections and the
whole context. The same is true for systems design, it
is a way of designing that should help us respond to
the complexity of the systems we have to deal with
today - to create simplicity on the other side of
complexity.
 Systems design is a holistic approach
to design that starts with a
consideration of how the parts
interrelate to form a functioning
whole. It is holistic in its attempt to
consider all relevant factors and
different dimensions of a system;
Systems social, technical, environmental,
economic, cultural, etc.

Design
 The Whole and the Parts
As the systems thinker, Dr. Russell Ackoff put it "a part is
never modified unless it makes the whole better... you
don't change the part because it makes the part better
without considering its impact on the whole, that is
systemic thinking."

"The architect is the profession that I think understands

systems best... what he does is produce an overall design
of the house, now he produces designs of the rooms to fit
into the design of the house... but he will never modify
the house to improve the quality of the rooms unless the
quality of the house is simultaneously improved and that
is fundamentally the principle.”
 Wholistic
Systems design is not designing the right product,
nor is it designing the right service or user
experience, beyond this, it is about designing the
right system within the whole context. It requires a
greater awareness of interaction, a greater degree
of intentionality as the designer must see shaping
the wider environment as part of their
responsibility.
 Working With Complexity
To master complexity we have to embrace it, let go of the
orderly predictable, bounded, and controllable and embrace
the open, dynamic, unpredictable. Implicit in our
understanding of design is the idea that we can control the
system we wish to design and that we are going to impose
order on it.

As designers and engineers, we love to specify detailed

outcomes. This was possible by focusing on relatively simple
systems that one organization could control and own, but
complex systems are not like this; they are open where
anyone can join or leave, like the internet, like cities, like
transport networks, social networks, financial markets, etc.
Our job is not to control and specify everything, but to more
create the conditions for the desired outcomes to emerge;
to learn to work with context, with connectivity and
protocols.
 Designing Networks
The key design pattern for dealing with complexity is
decentralization, we unbundle monolithic systems and convert
them into module units that can be aggregated on-demand
via networks. Whereas our traditional approach is very much
focused on designing things, complex systems design is about
connecting these things through intelligent networks that are
adaptive through their use of distributed data and analytics.

Here the challenge is no longer making things bigger and

faster but how to design the protocols and interactions so
that diverse components can work together towards
delivering the right functionality while accounting for social,
economic, and environmental impact. We do not seek to
design the system in all its detail, but focus instead on
configuring the context, the local interactions that may lead to
effective global coordination. Like birds flying in a flock
creating a complex formation out of only their local
interactions.
 Build Regenerative Systems
Rather than designing for more things we design for
adaptive networks. Rather than optimize for the end-user
we optimize for the whole. Rather than seek perfection
we seek resilience. Rather than designing things that
decay we build systems that evolve. Rather than lines we
build circles.
Creative Comments Attribution 4.0
A Si Design Hub Publication
www.systemsinnovation.network