2014-03-20
Post-meeting artifacts
See the photo set at https://www.flickr.com/photos/daviding/sets/72157642879813595/.
March 20 was the fourteenth meeting for Systems Thinking Ontario. The registration was on Eventbrite.
The location this time was the Auditorium, room 190 -- just down the hall from the Lambert Lounge where we usually meet.
Theme: Systems Thinking and Strategic Design
The emerging practice of systemic design (or system-oriented design) has been developed at OCAD University and Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) over the last several years. Strategic Foresight and Innovation students in the Systemic Design course have produced a number of large-scale system maps for representing innovations in complex social system problems, adapting AHO’s Gigamapping process. These are densely articulated rich pictures of systemic relationships in wicked problem domains, including urban ecologies, regional transportation, healthcare problem areas, and education. Gigamaps embody visual narratives of a social system and the value co-creation within it, including stakeholders, organizational structures, process dynamics, and unintended functions. Unlike the highly-abstract system models of system dynamics, or the process flows of service mapping, Gigamaps are a designed artifact encompassing the findings and concrete problems discovered in field research, synthesized as visual narratives that portray the functions of social system and the salient relationships in the problem area.
Suggested pre-reading:
Birger Sevaldson, "GIGA-Mapping: Visualisation for Complexity and Systems Thinking Design", Nordic Design Research Conference, 2011.
- Abstract: Designers and design is facing ever growing challenges from an increasingly complex world. Making design matter means to cope with these challenges and to be able to enter new important design fields where design can play a crucial role. To achieve this we need to become better at coping with super-complexity. Systems Oriented Design is a new version of systems thinking and systems practice that is developed from within design thinking and design practice. It is systems thinking and systems practice tailored by and for designers. It draws from designerly ways of dealing with super-complexity derived from supreme existing design practices as well as refers to established perspectives in modern systems thinking, especially Soft Systems Methodology, Critical Systems Thinking and Systems Architecting. Further on it is based on design skills like visual thinking and visualisation in processes and for communication purposes. Most central are the emerging techniques of GIGA-mapping. GIGA-mapping is super extensive mapping across multiple layers and scales, investigating relations between seemingly separated categories and so implementing boundary critique to the conception and framing of systems. In this paper we will present the concept of GIGA-mapping and systematize and exemplify its different variations.
- Download a PDF version of the article from the Nordic Design Conference 2011 at http://ocs.sfu.ca/nordes/index.php/nordes/2011/paper/view/409.
Participants should not feel limited to this suggested pre-reading, but should recognize that other attendees may have not read, or are reading differently, that article.