A holistic approach to create sustainable solutions
First let me tell you a little story about my childhood. I grew up in Istanbul, a complex and large city, where I used to play with the street cats. There are a lot of street cats in Istanbul, looked after by locals and particularly by the kids. Every Friday the bins were collected but if they weren’t collected the cats liked to play in the rubbish and get dirty, which meant I too got very dirty by playing with them and as a result got in trouble at home.
I needed to find a solution
With the help of my primary school teacher, we wrote a letter to the council. We didn’t hear anything for a long time but eventually, one Friday, I noticed there was now a lid on the bins. Problem solved!
This is how modern life works. You have a problem with a service, you report it and the service provider solves the problem.
Unfortunately, this created a new problem. The bins still didn’t get collected on time and the lid trapped the smell, making it worse. My problem of dirty street cats has been solved but in fixing that it created another, more environmental, problem.
This is a childhood memory that I often refer back to in my work. Why do these services not respond to problems holistically rather than solving one piece at a time and creating other problems?
Over the years I moved to different places (some of them where the bins got collected on time!) and I’ve spent my career in user experience or HCI, working at companies like the BBC and in creative agencies, some more data driven and some more service design. Eventually I ended up with Brilliant Basics, a design and innovation studio by Infosys where I have found myself working in innovation for the last 4 years.
While I’m working on the complex issues I’m always thinking, are we tackling the problems in the way we really want to tackle them? How can we get businesses to look at this problem more holistically and what are the consequences of not doing it this way? What’s the cost?
The way we started practicing design evolved over time and it all comes back to the cats in rubbish story. This brings us to
System Design
System design is an emerging design discipline, a human-centred design that uses design thinking which is everything we do in our typical UX projects as well as system thinking in order to tackle more system and data driven complex problems. It’s tapping into the emergent technological landscape and using new technologies to create something more robust and durable.
It challenges where you’re looking in system design, you widen that field of looking at the other parameters and the other elements that could be part of this problem or are somehow related to this problem.
Let’s use the iceberg
Think about how users interact with the system and where system design fits in the bigger picture. We design the UI and we design the interaction and this is what the user sees in a system but at the same time there is more happening. We want to design smarter interactions, other integrations and processes that we might need to be changing and more research into the challenge we are solving. Basically, that creates a whole lot of entire system components and sets how far we go into this, which is something we’ll call system boundaries. Where you stop is based on how you scope your project so the limit is endless and you can go as far as environmental and climate change but at the same time you can narrow it to that specific service.
Okay, so what is the difference? How do I apply this and what are the core differences that we can identify when you think design thinking versus systems thinking?
Systems thinking is very strategic. We know how to pull lots of different things together; we trained for this as a UX community. While design thinking is focusing on a very user-centric ‘solve that user problem’, it’s very solution oriented and you can build your KPIs based on how amazing the experience is overall but then it’s a very linear process. Our industry has matured on Discovery, Describe, Design and Deliver so it follows this for investigation bubbles and then delivers a really good robust solution but when you merge with systems thinking at a high level the type of activities is really all about looking at the system as a whole. So it’s systems focus and more than just what customers want, it’s also who are the other people in the system, what do they really want and how can they work better? It’s nailing down layer by layer what is the problem and what is causing it.
System design is not a linear process, so you might be searching part of a system while doing something else because of the complexity of the systems and there won’t be one single solution that fits and fixes everything
I hope you’re following!
Why do we need system design? Can’t this be solved with design thinking?
Okay, so what is the difference? How do I apply this and what are the core differences that we can identify when you think design thinking versus systems thinking?
Systems thinking is very strategic. We know how to pull lots of different things together; we trained for this as a UX community. While design thinking is focusing on a very user-centric ‘solve that user problem’, it’s very solution oriented and you can build your KPIs based on how amazing the experience is overall but then it’s a very linear process. Our industry has matured on Discovery, Describe, Design and Deliver so it follows this for investigation bubbles and then delivers a really good robust solution but when you merge with systems thinking at a high level the type of activities is really all about looking at the system as a whole. So it’s systems focus and more than just what customers want, it’s also who are the other people in the system, what do they really want and how can they work better? It’s nailing down layer by layer what is the problem and what is causing it.
System design is not a linear process, so you might be searching part of a system while doing something else because of the complexity of the systems and there won’t be one single solution that fits and fixes everything
I hope you’re following!
Why do we need system design? Can’t this be solved with design thinking?
The challenge we are witnessing, particularly now when everyone is working from home, is that everything is connected and with this connection level and digitisation it’s created a mass of interconnected systems. For us to design a service we need to understand these interconnections between different systems and how they integrate and offer new services. At the same time there is a need for new business models because we can’t operate with the way business models were designed years ago. We need a new and advanced shift on how business operates and this is where strategic parts come in as well.
Why system design?
No problem exists on its own. If a business is facing a challenge and you investigate it there’s always an underlying issue and root cause to why that issue happened. Sometimes these causes are big, sometimes it’s workable. For us to understand why this problem is happening, not only where in the system but how other pieces in that system and different elements and stakeholders unite, is a link to that problem because each contributes to it.
Systems are complex with multiple cause-effect relationships and interconnected pieces. We need to understand systems to create a solution that will become part of the system.
We experience systems every day. How these systems behave also shapes our interactions and behaviours.
If you ask an architect to design an extension for your house they will want to make it look and feel nice to please you as a customer but they will also have to consider weather conditions, structure, material and how it fits with the neighbourhood.
How do we innovate with system design?
In a new area in a completely different problem is innovation itself. Think about a simple health app. In actuality, it’s not so simple, it connects your weighing scale, your heart monitor, maybe a smart fridge. It detects variables while you’re doing certain activities. It delivers an ecosystem of connectivity where you design it in a way to fulfil user needs. At the same time, your GP might want to know how you’re doing health-wise, so this could be the innovation we’re talking about.
The other example where we can apply this as a complex environment is supply chains. These are the business models and processes that were created over many years and the system has becomes very chunky, it’s really hard to meet the demands of customers, the demands of current technologies and also the services that people or even stakeholders expect. When we look at this problem, we really go in depth into details of the supply chain and who’s responsible for the environmental cost.
Every year we manufacture around 80 billion garment items and the dye process results in water pollution. Even a simple white t shirt uses about 2.8 hundred litres of water. We send a lot of clothes or garments to landfill and some brands would rather destroy their collections than donate them because they have patents on the fabric, for example.
It’s a big challenge
System design helps us to create the problem map to see these problems between manufacturers and suppliers, to understand the pain point from their sides and the customer expectation from brands to be more sustainable, or to tell them how they make the garments or if they have ethical practices in place from land to shop.
System design allows you to zoom in to see a problem but then zoom out to see the entire ecosystem. It enables experimentation and it’s useful for complex problems. It’s useful for sustainability and environmental considerations and it builds transparency and smart use of data.
Today’s businesses is all about how we can make our processes more efficient, more transparent so that they can see where the systems are not behaving as expected or not efficiently enough and it creates new business models and new ways of doing things, which is what I think our industry and our current society is hungry for.
I think as an industry we have an opportunity. We’ve been teaching people how to use technology, creating really nice interactions and seeing how they engage. We have done a lot of undoing of what the industrial era created but I think now we are on the edge of teaching technology how to interact with us and our environment. As design community, we are responsible for delivering and designing that because I don’t think we can undo the harm that data and AI creates in our society. System design doesn’t replace any of the existing design practice; it’s a practice that actually helps us to tackle complex problems.
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