Design Thinking & Systems Design - What's the Difference?

Systems design is a hot topic these days, with lots of people trying to make sense of it through reference to what they already know, e.g. service design and design thinking. I have seen quite a few attempts, some better than others so I wanted to write this post to try and clarify a little the difference. Let us first take a look at what design thinking is, its strengths and limitations are and how and why systems design can help us as we try to grapple with designing ever more complex services and systems.

Design thinking

If you have been involved in the design or innovation arena you will already know how successful design thinking has become over the past few decades. It is a design process that enables us to tackle complex problems. It combines deep end-user experience, iterative rapid prototyping, and multi-stakeholder feedback to guide us through the successive stages in our design processes.?

Design thinking, like complex systems, is interdisciplinary. It cuts across traditional domains by recognizing that everything in our world is designed. Thus, it takes design out of its comfort zone of building chairs and fancy coffee cups to apply it to all areas, from designing effective organizations to creating healthcare and financial services.

Design thinking has been very good for expanding people's conception of what design is - what is open to being designed - and at focusing on the end-user experience. It has also been somewhat standardized as a process in terms of the Double Diamond and a 5 step process which has helped to make it more accessible to the non-designer and thus make it scalable.

The essence of the design thinking approach is user-centered design or human-centered design which means that it starts with the end user's perspective, not the perspective of the product or organization. This has been an important innovation to building products and services that are actually needed, are actually usable and also sellable - and thus viable.

Design thinking is user-focused, this is good for designing services that are largely owned and operated by one organization and making them user-friendly. It helps us to get away from the mindless nonsensical things we can end up doing when we look at the world from the perspective of some large bureaucracy and its rules and processes.

The limitation of Design Thinking

Design thinking actually has limitations when it comes to dealing with more complex systems that span multiple users and organizations. Its strength in being user-centered becomes its weakness. We create systems that by focusing on the end-user may make life lovely and convenient for a few people, while at the other end of those very same supply chains we make life arduous for the many and destructive for ecosystems. In this context, we need not just a new approach but also a new paradigm that helps us to understand and design complex systems.?

The world is evolving beyond individual service processes into more complex service systems that span across different domains, the challenges are shifting up to more complex social and environmental factors. Our design world is now one; a simple product may activate supply chains around the world in its creation and after its usage may once again be dispersed back to the far corners of the planet to influence ecosystems far and wide. The scale of what we are designing is shifting from things to companies, to whole supply chains and economic systems. Who we’re designing for has expanded from a single user to vast connected webs of people spanning the globe.

When things become highly interconnected, interdependent, and dynamic we need to change our thinking to a systems paradigm to be successful. Systems thinking is a way of responding to complexity as it shifts our focus from looking at separate parts to looking more at patterns of connections and the whole context. The same is true for systems design, it is a way of designing that should help us respond to the complexity of the systems we have to deal with today, to create simplicity on the other side of complexity.?

What is Systems Design

Systems design is about the design of complex systems. Complex systems are systems that are composed of many parts that are highly interconnected, interdependent, dynamic, and whose parts are relatively autonomous often having adaptive capacity.

There are many examples of complex systems from flocks of birds to the human brain to all kinds of social organizations. Some examples of complex designed systems are the internet and cities, health care systems, electrical power grids, financial systems, logistics networks, and transportation networks as well as many types of service systems.

Complex systems design represents an alternative paradigm to our traditional design engineering approach. The paradigm of complex systems design is focused on the development of open systems that integrate diverse components through dynamic networks, with global functionality emerging from the bottom-up as elements interact, adapt, and evolve over time. This is in contrast to a more traditional approach, which is focused on the development of discrete, well-defined objects by breaking them down into individual components, and then coordinating these components within one top-down global design.

It is about Designing Systems

Systems design is a holistic approach to design that starts with a consideration of how the parts interrelate to form a functioning whole. It is holistic in its attempt to consider all relevant factors and different dimensions of a system; social, technical, environmental, economic, cultural, etc.

As the systems thinker, Dr. Russell Ackoff put it "a part is never modified unless it makes the whole better... you don't change the part because it makes the part better without considering its impact on the whole, that is systemic thinking."

"The architect is the profession that I think understands systems best... what he does is produce an overall design of the house, now he produces designs of the rooms to fit into the design of the house... but he will never modify the house to improve the quality of the rooms unless the quality of the house is simultaneously improved and that is fundamentally the principle.”

Systems design is not designing the right product, nor is it designing the right service or user experience, beyond this, it is about designing the right system within the whole context. It requires a greater awareness of interaction, a greater degree of intentionality as the designer must see shaping the wider environment as part of their responsibility.?

Here the challenge is no longer making things bigger and faster but how to design the protocols and interactions so that diverse components can work together towards delivering the right functionality while accounting for social, economic, and environmental impact. We do not seek to design the system in all its detail but focus instead on configuring the context, the local interactions that may lead to effective global coordination. Like birds flying in a flock creating a complex formation out of only their local interactions.?

Open Systems: Firstly, complex systems are open systems. In traditional design and engineering, we are dealing with things like chairs, bridges, and buildings. They have well-defined boundaries. We can fully control all the elements within these boundaries and fully design the system. This makes them orderly and predictable. With the design of complex systems, what we are dealing with instead are open systems. Think of electrical power grids, cities, or the internet itself, a massively modular, distributed system. It has no defined boundaries. People and devices couple and decouple from the system. It is not random, but this world of complex systems is not so orderly. It is to use the catchy phrase “edge of chaos.” No one is in control and no one fully understands or can fully design these open systems.

Connectivity: Whereas our traditional approach is very much focused on components, that is to say, designing things, complex systems design is about connecting these things together, and networks are the platforms through which we connect things into systems that deliver functionality. Instead of focusing on the properties of things, that is, how to make them bigger, faster, and better, the primary focus here is on how to design the protocols and interactions so that diverse components can work together. Think about smart power grids. What we are designing here is a network through which multiple diverse components – meters, power generators, and different electrical devices – can communicate and inter-operate through a standardized set of protocols.

Self-Organization: What we are used to designing are monolithic technologies. They are coordinated by one master plan that is imposed on all elements in a top-down fashion. One monolithic design constraints all the components within the system. This is how we make buildings, cars, and airplanes, and it works well until the components of the system are autonomous. When we try to apply this approach to design something like whole cities, the results can be disastrous, a massive waste of resources, hugely alienating, and disengaging environments. In these complex systems, the real capacity to act, to deploy capability, lies on the local level. Think of social networks. A social network without its users is essentially nothing. It is, at the end of the day, the users who really create the value of the system. Trying to control the network will likely end in overburdening it with system-level constraints. Users will become disengaged and simply opt-out. In complex engineered systems, global functionality emerges from the self-organization of elements on the local level. Therefore, we do not seek to design the system in all its details but focus instead on configuring the context and the local interactions that may lead to effective global coordination.

Adaptation & Evolution: In classical design and engineering, the components of the system are specifically held static so as to coordinate the system as a whole. This requires prediction of the environment in which the system will operate, the conditions it will face, and the tasks it will be required to perform. In complex engineered systems, the components have a high degree of autonomy, whether we are talking about websites on the internet, or where people chose to build their houses or invest their money. The elements are adapting to their local environment, and thus the state of the system is a product of the evolutionary process that results from this. Their capacity for adaptation and evolution allows for these systems to operate in more complex and volatile environments, where complete knowledge of the system and its environment is impossible.

Summary

So to sum up the difference in one line I would say design thinking is a design approach that aims to optimize the end-user while systems design is about optimizing for the whole system. But ultimately the hope would be that we can see systems design as part of the never-ending evolution of design beyond service design and user-centered design to expand the scope of factors we are considering - so as to help us better understand and design complex systems rather than individual products and services

Some useful links:

Systems Design Film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZqHl4WDDrQ

System Design key Principles:

https://www.systemsinnovation.io/post/systems-design-principles

Systems Design Paradigm:

https://www.systemsinnovation.io/post/systems-design-paradigm

Systems Design Course:?

https://www.systemsinnovation.io/systems-design