Half-day (or full-day) sessions with a professional agenda are convened in-person. Continuity is maintained through the affiliation with the sLab at OCAD University.
What are the aims of the Techniques Workshop series?
Technique workshops are activities convened for the purpose of improving praxis, i.e. “putting theory into practice”. Systems praxis “includes the appreciation of systems by recognizing the quality, value, magnitude, or significance of, e.g., things or people as they contribute to system behaviors that lead to desirable outcomes” (Singer, Sillitto, Bendz, et. al. 2012).
Systemic Design includes practices of analyses modelling, yet is more than that. Design and systems both “have something to contribute to each other, and relating the two will (or at least should) result in novel perspectives, processes, ideas and even theories” (Sevaldson, 2019). The organic meshing of systems perspectives with design “is not based on theory and reasoning alone; rather, it relies heavily on the development of a variety of practices”. “We understand systemic design as processes that induce change on four levels: the design (a) of change, (b) as change, (c) for change and (d) into change”.
Who are the participants of Techniques Workshops?
Techniques Workshops are designed as intensive, small-scale events maximizing participation by attendees. All participants are considered to be contributors towards Creative Commons work. Observers may more appropriately learn about progress on techniques after they have been published.
The event organizers may choose to announce a Techniques Workshop selectively, or choose to personally individuals for their expertise and/or subject matter knowledge.
Who are the hosts of Technique Workshops?
sLab may be able to book meeting space at OCADU, based on availability. A partner organization way find an external sponsor, with an interest in a research question or topic.
A Technique Workshop may be self-funded by participants, or sponsored by an interested organization.
Which roles staff Technique Workshops?
Lead organizer: Confirms topics and venues. Formally announces events.
Facilitators: Plan program. Greet attendees. Guide program
Researchers: Encourage academic rigour. Suggest scholarly approach.
Attendees: Participations are invited, one-by-one, by the organizing committee.
Which topics are of interest for Technique Workshops?
Topics should be well-scoped, on the expectation of completion within a half-day or full-day. A theme may be carried over for multiple workshop meetings.
How might we approach Techniques Workshops?
A Systemic Design Methodology, derived from a theory of systemic operational design and modified by reflective practice, has six main activities: inquiring, framing, formulating, generating, reflecting, and facilitating (Ryan, 2014).
- Inquiring reaches outside the existing knowledge base of the team to bring external references into the design studio. This can include stakeholder ethnography, literature surveys, questioning subject matter experts, and field trips. Non-traditional data sources might include art, poetry, myths, microblogging, alongside empirical data, statistical analysis, models, and peer reviewed articles.
- Framing includes “selecting, organising, interpreting, and making sense of a complex reality so as to provide guideposts for knowing, analysing, persuading, and acting” (Schön & Rein, 1994). A shared frame can be constructed through iterative cycles of discourse about the problematic situation, mapping the problematic situation, frame reflection , and reframing by choosing to shift the perspective for the systemic design inquiry.
- Formulating shifts the focus of designing from understanding what is, to prescribing what ought to be. Questions of what ought to be engage our values. As a normative activity, formulating should declare a reference system of values that the team seeks to enhance by acting within the situation. This should not be limited to the values of the team, but explicitly includes the values and interests of stakeholders.
- Generating takes artifacts produced by the team and injects them into the world outside the studio. This generative act is intended to improve the situation for stakeholders, and also to stimulate learning for the team and for stakeholders.
- Facilitation regulates how the team moves between each of the other activities, as well as managing the process by which each individual activity is performed. Facilitation is defined broadly to include setting and policing norms for participant behavior, selecting the number and size of sub-groups for each activity, deciding which systemic design
- Reflecting is an action that teams achieve a deeper understanding of what they have done, and how what they were thinking led them to act in one particular way and not in others. Reflection enables reframing, reformulating, and learning from generative actions.
This methodology is “nonlinear and iterative in application”, with “a logic that connects these activities into a coherent learning system”.
Another approach to systemic design is through exploratory prototyping (Vitaller del Olmo, Morelli, De Götzen, Simeone, 2024). A generic agenda of the design experiments with the design activities performed for a complex urban system was described.
- Opening: Facilitators introduce the topic and the context of their research.
- Introduction to the brief: Participants are introduced to the brief and the challenges to be addressed
- Rounds of exploratory prototyping: Teams of participants are given materials and instructions to represent the targeted system in several rounds of exploratory prototyping targeting the material infrastructure, the socio-technical factors, the environmental factors, economic and political elements; the human and other-than-human actors, and the flows and interactions between them
- Envisioning solutions: Participants generate prototypes of potential solutions that lead to their targeted vision for the system
- Plenary discussion: Round of presentations followed by reflections on the use of exploratory prototyping for complex systems.
Three experiments with this focusing on the role played by prototyping led to 5 findings: (i) the complexity of systems was acknowledged and appreciated; (ii) interrelatedness was recognized; (iii) systems boundaries were framed and reframed; (iv) visions were established and/or shifted; (v) relationships between stakeholders received attention; and (vi) multifaceted strategies to enable change were enabled.
References
Ryan, Alex. 2014. “A Framework for Systemic Design.” FORMakademisk 7 (4). https://doi.org/10.7577/formakademisk.787
Schön, Donald A., and Martin Rein. 1994. Frame Reflection : Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies. New York : BasicBooks. http://archive.org/details/framereflectiont00dona .
Sevaldson, Birger. 2019. “What Is Systemic Design? Practices beyond Analyses and Modelling.” Paper presented at Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD8) 2019 Symposium, Chicago, USA. https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/3233/
Singer, Janet, Hillary Sillitto, Johan Bendz, et al. 2012. “The Systems Praxis Framework.” In Proceedings of the Sixteenth IFSR Conversation, edited by Gary S. Metcalf and Gerhard Chroust. SEA-Publications, SEA-SR-32. International Federation for Systems Research. http://archive-ifsr.org/publications/conversations/
Vitaller del Olmo, Maria, Nicola Morelli, Amalia De Götzen, and Luca Simeone. 2024. “Activating Key Principles of Systemic Design through Exploratory Prototyping.” DRS Biennial Conference Series, June 23. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2024/researchpapers/213 .