A Service Designer and Communication designer,
a Systemic Thinker, and a Curious Explorer.
Visualizing Systems
Why?
Communication in participatory systemic design projects is one of my subjects of interest due to its crucial role in accelerating project participants' active engagement with the project. Building trust with the participants has an essential role in social impact projects. Without trusting the social impact workers, the project community would resist the change as a natural human response. However, as designers, we are not verbally equipped to convey the complexities of a system and the rationale behind some decisions. Unintentionally we have a lack of transparency when intervening in a systemic change that affects communities which leads to distrust in the project and resistance to change. Furthermore, nowadays, we know that we need to co-design desired changes by collaborating with the affected community; otherwise, the project's positive effects, at best, would be limited, but, more importantly, our work would be unethical. However, when collaborating with participants coming from diverse backgrounds and expertise, which are not familiar with design terminology, it is vital to have a shared lexicon and/or understanding of the target systemic problem. This makes effective communication a critical subject in social impact work.
But what if, as designers, we had the tools to communicate the intricate complexities of a systemic problem faster through multiple modes of communication instead of spending hours of valuable project time just to build the foundation?
How I imagine systems
I have been exploring diagraming as one of the fastest and most accessible modes of communication. In doing so, I was inspired by Shamse, an Islamic pattern commonly seen in mosques, Islamic book designs, Persian handcrafts and etc. In Sufism Islamic belief, Shamse is the symbol of the multiplicity of all beings while being unified. In other words, it shows how interconnected elements of existence work together to make the cosmos we are a part of. To me, it is a good counterpart of fractals in nature. Fractals refer to complex and self-similar patterns that reappear at different scales and are a product of an ongoing feedback loop (Brown, 2016). Finding fractals is critical in finding leverage points in a system and turning a presumably broad and ambitious research question into feasible design projects.
Shamse, a symbol of interconnectedness of elements in the universe, as a system diagram
This visualization also correlates with this famous quote:
The whole (system) is greater than the sum of its parts.
Aristotle
Shamse is made up of concentric stars, and the central piece repeats itself at a larger scale. I have visualized individuals in a community as the middle star to show their connection to the community and their belonging system.
An Individual in a community
The small pieces each represent an individual and together they form a bigger star, their community.
A community in a system
The communities expand to form the biggest star, a system. To me, it looks like a system is greater than the sum of it parts because as the star expands it gets more and more beautiful, just like our universe.
A system made up of fractals
While explaining fractals to the participants was time-consuming during the Circular Food Innovation Lab project, using these designs was very helpful in clarifying the interconnectedness of systems and how small changes affect the entire system.
Lily presenting our prototypes as fractals using my system visualization in a CFIL co-creation session
Nature is also a system within a system within a system, and so on. I visualize it as a never-ending concentric Shamse.
Systems within systems
I intend to continue my system visualization exploration. So, don't be shy to drop by again!