Design Journeys through Complex Systems: Practice Tools for Systemic Design

$31.96
by Peter Jones

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Design Journeys for Complex Systems is a designer's handbook to learn systemic design tools to engage stakeholder groups in collaborative design to address complex societal systems. Systemic design uses systems thinking and service design to address large-scale societal contexts and complex socio-technical systems. These are contexts characterized by social and technological complexity, high uncertainty, and often problematic outcomes. Using a tour guide metaphor, the book trains people's mindsets and provides tools for dealing with hyper complexity, to enable understanding of systemic problems, and to build capacity to collaborate in teams to produce action proposals. The focus of the book is participatory design, "learning while traveling together." Design is seen as "system sensemaking" that reaches beyond mere systems thinking. The "practice tools" help teams reveal the complexity of their organizations and provides maps of that complexity. Reframing, iterating, mapping, and imagining are terms used. Hierarchies, feedback loops, networks, boundaries, and more--what I refer to as "systems processes"-- are explored and graphically displayed. A beautifully designed guide to systemic design by a couple of the most accomplished systemic designers out there. Lynn Rasmussen, author of Seeing: A Field Guide to the Patterns and Processes of Nature, Culture, and Consciousness Design Journeys is an important and timely book that contributes to a growing body of thought on design for positive systems-level change. A must read for anyone addressing complex problems in the 21st century. Terry Irwin, Professor & Director, Transition Design Institute School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University Designers are now starting to address issues within supercomplex systems that have multiple stakeholders, deep, difficult issues, conflicting requirements, political and policy issues, and a process that can last many years. Traditional design methods are not sufficient. In their book, Peter Jones and Kristel Van Ael provide a superb, well-structured, and documented set of methods and tools that set the standard for these new skills and methods. All designers involved in these essential societal issues and instructors in design classes that address these issues need this book. Don Norman Author of Design of Everyday Things Design Journeys provides a repertoire of collaborative practice tools for system solutions that we developed and tested in dozens of projects, as well as in teaching at our university courses. The book integrates theory and practices of the Systemic Design Toolkit for design cocreation, in a single handbook, designed to be like a tour guidebook for both Tourists and experienced Explorers.  The Journeys methodology anchors powerful system methods from the Toolkit with cases from the two authors' years of experience in systemic design projects and method development. Design Journeys  has been updated since the first run as well, not a second edition, but the more recent books printed have many small updates that clarify how to use the tools based on feedback. We found the experience to develop and define the text and tools to be a wonderful learning experience, and we are working on new material now because this has opened up new areas of practice. The tools guide systemic design practice across the contexts that we regularly tour with actual clients or research cases: Public sector (government), systems change (often non-profit or development programmes), and sociotechnical services (private sector, mixed). The journeys travel well in education, as the Toolkit is used in several graduate design programmes. In practice, governments are the most common systemic design sponsor, as they have the budgets and mandate to address problems at the aggregate system level and the access to multistakeholder groups. Corporations, even when leading large consortia, rarely fund efforts beyond their organisational boundary, and corporate cases are largely sociotechnical or complex service systems. Systems change projects have rapidly emerged from foundation-sponsored non-profit programmes, across many sectors, including the United Nations and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) programmes and innovation labs. There are translations in Japanese and a Korean in the works, as these tools are being used in complex service design there. Other languages are being explored, as well as extensions to the toolkit. Peter Jones (Author) Dr. Peter Jones is Distinguished Professor of Systemic Design at Tec de Monterrey, Mexico and a professor at Toronto's OCAD University.  Peter is a co-founder and vice-chair of the Systemic Design Association and is Editor in Chief of the new journal Contexts . Peter is the founder of the Circulate Health design studio in Canada and is Academic Director of the Flourishing Enterprise Institute.  Kristel Van Ael (Author) Kristel Van Ael is managing partner at Namahn, a human-cen

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