SV: Betraying the Planet: systems oriented design

[Birger Sevaldson]

Ken says we need to generate ideas and solutions on a systems level and i totally agree.
I have been developing ideas for systems oriented design for the last few years.
The idea is that to contribute to the ever more complex and challenging lives we live we need to think further, deeper and wider than what we do today. Thinking about the far reaching concequenses of our actions and how our actions interplay with a complex field of forces at play is called systems thinking. Systems thinking has been developed further the last years and the modern soft approaches fit very well for designers.
In fact i think designers and architects are especially well suited to become great systems thinkers in practice because:
1: Designers have a synthesizing mindset and are used to deal with complex, fuzzy and ill-defined tasks.
2: Designers have great visualization skills for
     a) The visualization of complex information through diagramming and mapping
     b) The designer’s visualization capacity is very central in developing visions for new innovative solutions.
3: Research by Design: The designers are investigating complex issues through visualization and the development of new solutions through design. Thinking, understanding and designing are integrated.
4: The designer’s visualization capacities are very useful in the development of scenarios to test the robustness and resilience of the suggested systems interventions.
5: Design in general embraces many different perspectives, spanning from approaches related to natural sciences, engineering and material technologies, social and inclusive approaches, marked and cultural based perspectives to artistic interpretations. This makes the designers at large and sometimes as individuals especially well suited to cross between, and balance the soft systems thinking with harder systems approaches.
6. Systems awareness crosses borders and disciplines just as the ultimate systems theory, Ecology, involves many different sciences. Design is by its nature a discipline-crossing activity both when it comes to who one collaborates with and in its variations. Systems thinking is neutral in its nature but it results in the involvement in all aspects a design can be exposed to, from economy to culture.

I look at this not as yet another Methodology but as skills to be trained and i researched this through some semesters here at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. I have introduced a series of concepts to train systems oriented design as a skill. In fact i believe designers are ampongst the best systems thinkers around.

Somebody (a designer) once said: if you want to save the world go and work on a soup kitchen. Luckily i forgot who said this and i think only the most backwards people in design still think this way. We are in a really good possition to do something that makes a change. We are involved and in direct grips with  the industrial production lines. We have the needed skills. So if we cant make a difference (besides polticians) who can?

Systems oriented design is an exciting, creative, innovative and super interresting turn to design.
But it takes a reconfiguring of design education as Ken mentiones. We need to educate even much more advanced designers who are able to involve in super complex matters.

Forgive my rather raw text here, i am working with publications to share my experiences and concepts ASAP. For now i am looking for people who are interrested in similar ways of approaching these crucial issues.
I already collaborate with people in Sweden but it would be nice to look into more options for exchange of experiences.

Best
Birger Sevaldson
PhD
Professor



________________________________________
Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [PHD-DESIGN@...] på vegne av Sukanta Majumdar [sukantamajumdar@...]
Sendt: 1. juli 2009 13:47
Til: PHD-DESIGN@...
Emne: Re: Betraying the Planet

Dear Prof. Ken,

One request...
Do you have the documents of your University project for Sustainability pusposes?
Is it possible to see them?

Thanks,

Sukanta
India


-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Friedman <KenFriedman@...>
To: PHD-DESIGN@...
Sent: Wed, Jul 1, 2009 4:42 pm
Subject: Re: Betraying the Planet



Dear Gavin,

One of the challenges implicit in your comment is that we know what it is that
we are supposed to do.

And then comes the next question: who is it that is supposed to do the doing?

Just this morning, I was at a meeting where the university is working its way
through our response to the challenge of sustainability ... it always amazes me
that there are as many steps as there are to get even a medium sized
organization -- a university -- to orchestrate its efforts on these issues.

On another list, GK VanPatter wrote on this issue in relation to design schools:

"While many graduate design education programs that have embraced
'sustainability' as a theme in designing, most merely treat the theme as content
(WHAT), rather than as a lens through which to engage all kinds of problems and
opportunities, generating ideas and solutions at a systems level (HOW)."

This is another way of examining your comment (and Jan's). To use sustainability
as a lens through which to engage all kinds of problems and opportunities,
generating ideas and solutions at a systems level requires a mapping and
remodeling of nearly everything we do in graduate design education, and to get
there, we much map and model the undergraduate foundations on which we build
graduate education. We have a working group doing just this.

What we already know is that this entails many changes both to education, and to
practice, and even to the way we run our staff structures and our building. To
remodel the undergraduate curriculum from conception to accrediting the new
programs will take us at least three years. Getting everything in place and
tuned will take five to six years. The changes to graduate will run
concurrently, but they cannot run independently. From the time I put
sustainability on the faculty agenda as one of our three cornerstones to the day
that we achieve the goal that GK has stated so well means a time span of seven
to eight years, involving everything from thinking and planning to changing, to
gainin
g approval and accreditation at all levels of the university and the
government, to acquiring and allocating resources, to implementing the program,
testing it, checking it, changing what doesn't work and improving what does.
Perhaps we can trim a year or two off that.

But the notion that we can "just do it" only works in footwear adds.

Now that's just a single organization -- a thousand or so academic and
administrative staff, twenty thousand or so students. Consider the steps it
takes to get an industry to do something -- the design industry, as exemplified
through the efforts of The Designers Accord, working to reorient firms,
practices, and the practices of clients.

The Designers Accord does have a fairly workable program, and this means rapid
progress in some dimensions while permitting easy scalability. But it does not
yet ensure results.

The "just do something" ethos was the motivating factor behind Earth Day, back
in 1969 or so, and the notion that ecology festivals and individual action were
all it would take. The challenge is rebuilding cities, societies, and economies
around the actions required for long-term transformation.

I'm not saying do nothing. I am, in contrast, proposing that it is vital to
think through and create commitment for genuine action leading to significant
results.

Since this requires consensus and commitment across a wide spectrum of actors,
voters, stakeholders, politicians, business leaders, shareholder bodies, banks,
governments, government agencies, intergovernmental organizations, and more, I
still can't see Paul Krugman's article as distraction or endless discussion.

Let's be fair here, too. We've each got to ask what we're willing to do to make
things happen. I've made serious commitments to these issues -- within a range
of available resources. To do more requires consensus among many other actors,
and I find Krugman's article and other articles like it exactly the tool I need
to create that consensus and to generate the commitment we require.
 In fact, it
was a great help to me today in persuading a few key colleagues that
sustainability was more than another word for risk management.

Again, I agree with Ranjan, and Jan, and with you, that we must be active. I'm
simply unwilling to treat a responsible contribution to a major public forum as
endless discussion. Unless, of course, you think that Prof. Krugman would do
more good for the world by discussing price elasticity, foreign exchange rates,
or one of the other topics on which he is well qualified to lecture and to
write. My favorite, of course, would be the economics of increasing returns and
Krugman's critique of Brian Arthur's work.

Look, I don't mean to seem grumpy here -- well, perhaps I DO mean to seem a
little grumpy. Are you really saying that it would be better for Krugman NOT to
use his column in the New York Times to further the public debate on this topic?
Even though a bill has passed the House of Representatives, it has not yet
passed the Senate. Until it passes the Senate, it is not law. Where do you think
Senate votes come from, if voters do not demand Senatorial action, a demand that
is always the product of public debate. If American voters fail to push their
Senators on this bill, it will fail.

So I'd prefer to thank Paul Krugman for keeping this discussion alive, while
doing what I can on the ground to do my part at one university.

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

--

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009 19:08:08 +1000, Gavin Melles <GMelles@...>
wrote:

>I think the message about distraction means enough endless discussion just do
something

[Charles Burnette]

Birger, Jan, Ken, Guy, and colleagues

Richard Farson, PhD has written a wise and visionary new book on the  
appropriate role of design in addressing many of the problems  
confronting society today.

Farson, R 2008: The Power of Design: A Force for Transforming  
Everything. Ostberg/ Greenway Also see www.greenway.us/power

He may be the only psychologist to have been the founding dean of  a  
design school, President of the Aspen Design conference and a board  
member of the American Institute of Architects among his many  
activities. He understands us, the issues we often fail to confront  
and the opportunities/responsibilities before us. He has written about  
them very well.

Charles Burnette, PhD
charlesburnette@...

[Gavin Melles]

A critical dimension of systems thinking s d non linear dynamics is understanding how local individual action, such as I described previously, produces system like effects some people attribute to something else. Nigel Gilbert writes well about this stuff. So knowledge of how such things work might be useful but until someone does something and a collective does similar things systems are still rhetorical not real. I suspect we're talking about similar things  
-----Original Message-----
From: Birger Sevaldson <Birger.Sevaldson@...>
To: Sevaldson, Birger <Birger.Sevaldson@...>
To:  <PHD-DESIGN@...>

Sent: 2/07/2009 1:53:40 AM
Subject: SV: Betraying the Planet: systems oriented design

Ken says we need to generate ideas and solutions on a systems level and i totally agree.
I have been developing ideas for systems oriented design for the last few years.
The idea is that to contribute to the ever more complex and challenging lives we live we need to think further, deeper and wider than what we do today. Thinking about the far reaching concequenses of our actions and how our actions interplay with a complex field of forces at play is called systems thinking. Systems thinking has been developed further the last years and the modern soft approaches fit very well for designers.
In fact i think designers and architects are especially well suited to become great systems thinkers in practice because:
1: Designers have a synthesizing mindset and are used to deal with complex, fuzzy and ill-defined tasks.
2: Designers have great visualization skills for
     a) The visualization of complex information through diagramming and mapping
     b) The designer’s visualization capacity is very central in developing visions for new innovative solutions.
3: Research by Design: The designers are investigating complex issues through visualization and the development of new solutions through design. Thinking, understanding and designing are integrated.
4: The designer’s visualization capacities are very useful in the development of scenarios to test the robustness and resilience of the suggested systems interventions.
5: Design in general embraces many different perspectives, spanning from approaches related to natural sciences, engineering and material technologies, social and inclusive approaches, marked and cultural based perspectives to artistic interpretations. This makes the designers at large and sometimes as individuals especially well suited to cross between, and balance the soft systems thinking with harder systems approaches.
6. Systems awareness crosses borders and disciplines just as the ultimate systems theory, Ecology, involves many different sciences. Design is by its nature a discipline-crossing activity both when it comes to who one collaborates with and in its variations. Systems thinking is neutral in its nature but it results in the involvement in all aspects a design can be exposed to, from economy to culture.

I look at this not as yet another Methodology but as skills to be trained and i researched this through some semesters here at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. I have introduced a series of concepts to train systems oriented design as a skill. In fact i believe designers are ampongst the best systems thinkers around.

Somebody (a designer) once said: if you want to save the world go and work on a soup kitchen. Luckily i forgot who said this and i think only the most backwards people in design still think this way. We are in a really good possition to do something that makes a change. We are involved and in direct grips with  the industrial production lines. We have the needed skills. So if we cant make a difference (besides polticians) who can?

Systems oriented design is an exciting, creative, innovative and super interresting turn to design.
But it takes a reconfiguring of design education as Ken mentiones. We need to educate even much more advanced designers who are able to involve in super complex matters.

Forgive my rather raw text here, i am working with publications to share my experiences and concepts ASAP. For now i am looking for people who are interrested in similar ways of approaching these crucial issues.
I already collaborate with people in Sweden but it would be nice to look into more options for exchange of experiences.

Best
Birger Sevaldson
PhD
Professor



________________________________________
Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [PHD-DESIGN@...] på vegne av Sukanta Majumdar [sukantamajumdar@...]
Sendt: 1. juli 2009 13:47
Til: PHD-DESIGN@...
Emne: Re: Betraying the Planet

Dear Prof. Ken,

One request...
Do you have the documents of your University project for Sustainability pusposes?
Is it possible to see them?

Thanks,

Sukanta
India


-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Friedman <KenFriedman@...>
To: PHD-DESIGN@...
Sent: Wed, Jul 1, 2009 4:42 pm
Subject: Re: Betraying the Planet



Dear Gavin,

One of the challenges implicit in your comment is that we know what it is that
we are supposed to do.

And then comes the next question: who is it that is supposed to do the doing?

Just this morning, I was at a meeting where the university is working its way
through our response to the challenge of sustainability ... it always amazes me
that there are as many steps as there are to get even a medium sized
organization -- a university -- to orchestrate its efforts on these issues.

On another list, GK VanPatter wrote on this issue in relation to design schools:

"While many graduate design education programs that have embraced
'sustainability' as a theme in designing, most merely treat the theme as content
(WHAT), rather than as a lens through which to engage all kinds of problems and
opportunities, generating ideas and solutions at a systems level (HOW)."

This is another way of examining your comment (and Jan's). To use sustainability
as a lens through which to engage all kinds of problems and opportunities,
generating ideas and solutions at a systems level requires a mapping and
remodeling of nearly everything we do in graduate design education, and to get
there, we much map and model the undergraduate foundations on which we build
graduate education. We have a working group doing just this.

What we already know is that this entails many changes both to education, and to
practice, and even to the way we run our staff structures and our building. To
remodel the undergraduate curriculum from conception to accrediting the new
programs will take us at least three years. Getting everything in place and
tuned will take five to six years. The changes to graduate will run
concurrently, but they cannot run independently. From the time I put
sustainability on the faculty agenda as one of our three cornerstones to the day
that we achieve the goal that GK has stated so well means a time span of seven
to eight years, involving everything from thinking and planning to changing, to
gainin
g approval and accreditation at all levels of the university and the
government, to acquiring and allocating resources, to implementing the program,
testing it, checking it, changing what doesn't work and improving what does.
Perhaps we can trim a year or two off that.

But the notion that we can "just do it" only works in footwear adds.

Now that's just a single organization -- a thousand or so academic and
administrative staff, twenty thousand or so students. Consider the steps it
takes to get an industry to do something -- the design industry, as exemplified
through the efforts of The Designers Accord, working to reorient firms,
practices, and the practices of clients.

The Designers Accord does have a fairly workable program, and this means rapid
progress in some dimensions while permitting easy scalability. But it does not
yet ensure results.

The "just do something" ethos was the motivating factor behind Earth Day, back
in 1969 or so, and the notion that ecology festivals and individual action were
all it would take. The challenge is rebuilding cities, societies, and economies
around the actions required for long-term transformation.

I'm not saying do nothing. I am, in contrast, proposing that it is vital to
think through and create commitment for genuine action leading to significant
results.

Since this requires consensus and commitment across a wide spectrum of actors,
voters, stakeholders, politicians, business leaders, shareholder bodies, banks,
governments, government agencies, intergovernmental organizations, and more, I
still can't see Paul Krugman's article as distraction or endless discussion.

Let's be fair here, too. We've each got to ask what we're willing to do to make
things happen. I've made serious commitments to these issues -- within a range
of available resources. To do more requires consensus among many other actors,
and I find Krugman's article and other articles like it exactly the tool I need
to create that consensus and to generate the commitment we require.
 In fact, it
was a great help to me today in persuading a few key colleagues that
sustainability was more than another word for risk management.

Again, I agree with Ranjan, and Jan, and with you, that we must be active. I'm
simply unwilling to treat a responsible contribution to a major public forum as
endless discussion. Unless, of course, you think that Prof. Krugman would do
more good for the world by discussing price elasticity, foreign exchange rates,
or one of the other topics on which he is well qualified to lecture and to
write. My favorite, of course, would be the economics of increasing returns and
Krugman's critique of Brian Arthur's work.

Look, I don't mean to seem grumpy here -- well, perhaps I DO mean to seem a
little grumpy. Are you really saying that it would be better for Krugman NOT to
use his column in the New York Times to further the public debate on this topic?
Even though a bill has passed the House of Representatives, it has not yet
passed the Senate. Until it passes the Senate, it is not law. Where do you think
Senate votes come from, if voters do not demand Senatorial action, a demand that
is always the product of public debate. If American voters fail to push their
Senators on this bill, it will fail.

So I'd prefer to thank Paul Krugman for keeping this discussion alive, while
doing what I can on the ground to do my part at one university.

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

--

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009 19:08:08 +1000, Gavin Melles <GMelles@...>
wrote:

>I think the message about distraction means enough endless discussion just do
something

[Matthew Watkins-2]

I can understand and sympathise with all views here. However despite all these good intentions by authors (as there are countless numbers of good books on the subject,) very little seems to change. My PhD is in Sustainable product design but I do wonder whether there is a need of yet another thesis and a couple of papers. The environmental debate has been in the public eye since the 1960's and in reading Green design by Paul Burral a month ago I was dishearten to see that it was published in 1991. Not much has changed in 18 years yet, when he wrote it, he stated in the preface that the 1990's would be decade of the environment and although it did come up on the radar in the 1990's, very little has actually happened. As Gavin said something actually needs to be done.


-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:PHD-DESIGN@...] On Behalf Of Gavin Melles
Sent: 01 July 2009 13:23
Subject: Re: Betraying the Planet

Hi ken
I cannot disagre with the principles of consensus through informing that you note. I can also appreciate the frustration behind jab and others remarks. Consider how long the media has been reporting the tragedy of Zimbabwe with no significant action taken by the world to remove a corrupt dictator. How long have we been hearing and denying climate change as a discussion not an action piece. I say this recognixing my own lack of response but cycling to work, having one car, installing rainwater tanks, planting vegetables not flowers, these things we could do. I'm a little too left to believe too much in top down systems action prefering the agglutinating force of local revolution. I hope both global and local solutions work but out my money on the second
-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Friedman <KenFriedman@...>
To: Friedman, Ken <KenFriedman@...>
To:  <PHD-DESIGN@...>

Sent: 1/07/2009 9:12:25 PM
Subject: Re: Betraying the Planet

Dear Gavin,

One of the challenges implicit in your comment is that we know what it is that we are supposed to do.

And then comes the next question: who is it that is supposed to do the doing?

Just this morning, I was at a meeting where the university is working its way through our response to the challenge of sustainability ... it always amazes me that there are as many steps as there are to get even a medium sized organization -- a university -- to orchestrate its efforts on these issues.

On another list, GK VanPatter wrote on this issue in relation to design schools:

"While many graduate design education programs that have embraced 'sustainability' as a theme in designing, most merely treat the theme as content (WHAT), rather than as a lens through which to engage all kinds of problems and opportunities, generating ideas and solutions at a systems level (HOW)."

This is another way of examining your comment (and Jan's). To use sustainability as a lens through which to engage all kinds of problems and opportunities, generating ideas and solutions at a systems level requires a mapping and remodeling of nearly everything we do in graduate design education, and to get there, we much map and model the undergraduate foundations on which we build graduate education. We have a working group doing just this.

What we already know is that this entails many changes both to education, and to practice, and even to the way we run our staff structures and our building. To remodel the undergraduate curriculum from conception to accrediting the new programs will take us at least three years. Getting everything in place and tuned will take five to six years. The changes to graduate will run concurrently, but they cannot run independently. From the time I put sustainability on the faculty agenda as one of our three cornerstones to the day that we achieve the goal that GK has stated so well means a time span of seven to eight years, involving everything from thinking and planning to changing, to gaining approval and accreditation at all levels of the university and the government, to acquiring and allocating resources, to implementing the program, testing it, checking it, changing what doesn't work and improving what does. Perhaps we can trim a year or two off that.

But the notion that we can "just do it" only works in footwear adds.

Now that's just a single organization -- a thousand or so academic and administrative staff, twenty thousand or so students. Consider the steps it takes to get an industry to do something -- the design industry, as exemplified through the efforts of The Designers Accord, working to reorient firms, practices, and the practices of clients.

The Designers Accord does have a fairly workable program, and this means rapid progress in some dimensions while permitting easy scalability. But it does not yet ensure results.

The "just do something" ethos was the motivating factor behind Earth Day, back in 1969 or so, and the notion that ecology festivals and individual action were all it would take. The challenge is rebuilding cities, societies, and economies around the actions required for long-term transformation.

I'm not saying do nothing. I am, in contrast, proposing that it is vital to think through and create commitment for genuine action leading to significant results.

Since this requires consensus and commitment across a wide spectrum of actors, voters, stakeholders, politicians, business leaders, shareholder bodies, banks, governments, government agencies, intergovernmental organizations, and more, I still can't see Paul Krugman's article as distraction or endless discussion.

Let's be fair here, too. We've each got to ask what we're willing to do to make things happen. I've made serious commitments to these issues -- within a range of available resources. To do more requires consensus among many other actors, and I find Krugman's article and other articles like it exactly the tool I need to create that consensus and to generate the commitment we require. In fact, it was a great help to me today in persuading a few key colleagues that sustainability was more than another word for risk management.

Again, I agree with Ranjan, and Jan, and with you, that we must be active. I'm simply unwilling to treat a responsible contribution to a major public forum as endless discussion. Unless, of course, you think that Prof. Krugman would do more good for the world by discussing price elasticity, foreign exchange rates, or one of the other topics on which he is well qualified to lecture and to write. My favorite, of course, would be the economics of increasing returns and Krugman's critique of Brian Arthur's work.

Look, I don't mean to seem grumpy here -- well, perhaps I DO mean to seem a little grumpy. Are you really saying that it would be better for Krugman NOT to use his column in the New York Times to further the public debate on this topic? Even though a bill has passed the House of Representatives, it has not yet passed the Senate. Until it passes the Senate, it is not law. Where do you think Senate votes come from, if voters do not demand Senatorial action, a demand that is always the product of public debate. If American voters fail to push their Senators on this bill, it will fail.

So I'd prefer to thank Paul Krugman for keeping this discussion alive, while doing what I can on the ground to do my part at one university.

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

--

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009 19:08:08 +1000, Gavin Melles <GMelles@...> wrote:

>I think the message about distraction means enough endless discussion just do something

[Terence Love-2]

Hi Berger,
Thanks for your post.  I agree with you on the importance of introducing the
skills of complex systems thinking in design education.
I'm not sure I agree with you though that designers are unusually  good or
well suited to understanding or designing complex systems - particularly
designers trained in Art and design environments. We humans don't have
brains that can easily understand situations with more than one feedback
loop. This applies to designers as much as non-designers.
A simple test:
Ken has $1.10 and buys two items. The first item costs $1 more. How much is
the second item?
My guess is most readers of this list thought 10 cents.
This is a simple uncluttered single  feedback loop problem.
The answer is $1.05 and 5 cents.
To test if one can easily understand a  double feedback loop situation try
http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/Bathtub.pdf which also shows that MIT
students were poor at this task.
Intuition, visualizing and feeling ones way round a solutions doesn't help
when we don't understand the behaviour of the situation in the first place -
and most designers education is way behind MIT students on that one.
Now, take into account that most 'saving the planet' design problems have
dozens or hundreds of feedback loops. I'm not confident that  most students
coming out of design schools are well trained to handle these design issues
(particularly if they struggle with the 10cents and the bath).
There are two (at least) confounding problems that make the situation worse
with respect to designers.
1. Individuals  feel they understand complex situations and feel they know
exactly what to  when they do not - evidence shows individuals typically
adjust designs in the opposite direction to the intended solution in
situations with 2 or more feedback loops.
2. Many designers  design complex systems and do so badly but it is not
obvious at first. Then later when problems emerge, traditionally they are
blamed on something else.
A common alternative, as a partial remedy for incompetence in understanding
the behaviour of multifeedback systems, is to design things put them out in
the world and then see whether they worked. This is common in graphic
design, advertising, branding etc. It seems a  hope is attached to a belief
that single feedback loop thinking will somehow magically work for multiple
feedback loop systems and that observation about failures and successes will
help in understanding system behaviour.
I'm not that convinced that current design education is doing much towards
good planet designing skills.  I agree, introducing systems methods might
help - but many  systems methods don't do the business either...
Best wishes,
Terry

===

Berger wrote:
In fact i think designers and architects are especially well suited to
become great systems thinkers in practice because:
1: Designers have a synthesizing mindset and are used to deal with complex,
fuzzy and ill-defined tasks.
2: Designers have great visualization skills for
     a) The visualization of complex information through diagramming and
mapping
     b) The designer's visualization capacity is very central in developing
visions for new innovative solutions.

[David Sless]

Terry and all,

I don't want to put a further dampener on enthusiasm for design as the  
solution to the world's ills, but I concur with Terry. Indeed, from my  
research, I think it's even worse than Terry describes it. I think we  
are no more able to control the world than does the travelling tinker.  
Indeed, I think we designers are the inheritors of that tradition of  
practice. We fix today's pots and pans.

You may remember that a few weeks ago I asked some questions about the  
issues surrounding making predictions about the behavious of complex  
systems. I was not impressed with anything I read on that.

I may be particularly jaundiced at the moment. I am sitting in Cologne  
airport waiting for a flight to Stansded and we have just been told  
that we won't get any news about our late flight for at least an hour.  
What that news will be, who knows! I tell you, we are all doomed! Time  
for another beer.

Bring back the Schlieffen Plan, I say! Planning for certainty in  
outcomes!

Come on guys, we don't even know where we are now, let alone where we  
might plan to end up. The latest departure time in one hour…


David

[Keith Russell]

Hey Terry - while I am always impressed at how stupid we humans are and how good we are at pointing out how stupid we are, I am equally interested in examples of how some of us are OK at things that most of us are crap at.

I too like double entry book keeping examples of how our brains don't much like cross hemisphere thinking, but I'd very much value examples of people who are good at doing this stuff and what they think about what they do.

That is, can we at least learn how to spot the need for an expert and how to spot an expert?

cheers

keith russell
OZ newcastle

[sukantamajumdar]

Dear All,

Prof. Terence said about multiple loops; for a holistic view of sustainability and system concept this kind of multiple loops are required. But what kind of design education will provide this kind of knowledge to the designer? So that he/she can become efficient enough to handle the situation?
Is there any requirement of tie up with Urban planning, Social Science, Behavioural Economics or Psychological fields?
Because if?we?place a product within the social systems, obviously we will get multiple loops to analyze its contexts and reasons for its existance. But on the other hand, it has a technical part also.
So what will be the limit of syllabus of product design, which can be taught at the Masters level?

Sukanta
India

[Lars Albinsson-2]

In an executive training course I took, prof Jan Bergstrand (Norwegian
School of Economics and Business Administration) gave the following account
of why large cooperations always are aiming at 10-15 % profits.

* If the ceo fail to make good profits (legally) s/he will be replaced.

* Most corporations are owned by pensions and savings funds (in the US I
think he claimed 89%). These require the large profits.

* Most pensions and savings funds are owned by (in the western world)
ordinary people who want to secure a good retirement.

* Then it is us (most academics and professional designer are fund owners)
who is forcing large corporations to earn major profits.

Doesn't that qualify as a systemic loop to consider?

I would suggest Jones hierarchy of design levels (function, product, system
and community) as a good starting point in training students to consider
these matters. Jones, J. C. (1992). Design methods (2nd ed.). New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold.

The classic work in systems thinking: Churchman, C. W. (1968). The systems
approach. New York,: Delacorte Press.

I also think some of this can learnt from: Krippendorff, K. (2006). The
semantic turn: a new foundation for design. Boca Raton: CRC/Taylor &
Francis.

Sometimes these discussions get locked into the old (in my view terribly
outdated) Marxist analysis of a perpetual conflict between the worker people
(good) and the capitalist owner (bad)... (Note Marxist, not Marx; he was not
that simple minded.) Particularly with students.

Setting up courses as long term field work involving a large number of real
stakeholders is one way, that was successful in urban planning at
KTH/Stockholm School of Architecture. As the students were interacting with
citizens, municipalities, real estate and construction companies and
interest groups of all kinds, they learned something about balancing
interests and inspire shifts in views (even their own). We always engaged
municipalities that were in the process of making new major plans.

This type of action learning/action research in teaching do however require
that the schools/professors have both experience in practice as well as good
connections outside the academic world. (A key to the success at KTH was
that prof Kai Wartiainen was a practicing urban planner/Architect, now
creative director at Pöyry Architects, part of one of Europe's largest
construction engineering firms.)


/Lars


**************************************
Lars Albinsson
lars.albinsson@...
+ 46 (0) 70 592 70 45

Affiliations:
Maestro Management AB www.maestro.se
Calistoga Springs Research Institute www.calistoga.se 
School of Business and Informatics
University of Borås www.hb.se
Linköping University www.liu.se
**************************************

[Terence Love-2]

Hi Berger,

Thanks for your message. I'll respond more fully later. Good to hear you
sail!

My feeling is sailing is a good example in favour of my comments:  race
training of successful helmsmen and boat teams  attempts to reduce
everything to single feedback loops or at most, two feedback loops.
Match-racing, one boat against another, is essentially a single feedback
loop system. Your boat makes a move, the other boat responds and you need to
change your move. One feedback loop. All the other factors are not part of
feedback loops or also single feedback loops - wind, tide, hydrodynamics
etc. You cannot change the tide, wind or hydrodynamic laws by your sailing
you can only respond to them.
From my experience in regatta racing, helms typically reenvisage any
situation to two feedback loops or less.  In the main, this reduction back
towards a single loop thinking is done by learning whole sets of fixed
moves, patterns and  strategies that can be wheeled out in particular
situations (i.e. single feedback loop). There are large numbers of books and
training courses dedicated to learning these strategy groups (e.g. "Learn to
sail like Dennis Conner" - I'm showing my age!). This is similar to the way
those in the martial arts learn patterns and katas. Improving sail racing
skills is dedicated to reducing everything to seeing only one feedback loop
or less at any moment a decision needs to be made. You can easily test this
by listening to discourse when  sailing  decisions are made (e.g. 'Look they
are starting to lift, going about now'). The use of  'gut feeling' is not
about the solution. Otherwise any physiologically sensitive novice sailor
would be good. The use of 'gut feeling' is about which strategy to use in
seeing a particular pattern out on the water - simply a single feedback
loop.

There has been a lot of confusion about systems methods. There is no magic
in understanding them, the situation is very straightforward. The 'magic'
that has been used to  apparently differentiate between 'hard' and 'soft'
methods is a politically driven illusion. The same conceptual and empirical
situation applies to all. The systems field suffers in parts from much the
same sort of mess that the design field does. For example, one  problematic
systems belief is that systems analysis IS  designing. I wrote about this
problem some years ago in a mapping of the ways that systems analysis and
design activity fit together (confession - the title and spirit of the paper
was based on John Langrish' battleships paper at La Clusaz). You can find it
at
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2003/systems%20&%20design.htm

What I'm more interested in is getting this right in terms of Design
Education about complex systems. Designers can learn to be able to design
better in the realm of multiple feedback loops. The question is how, and
which methods are likely to result in successful designed outcomes. In that
sense, I feel we are on the same side but seeing things from different
perspectives.

Warm regards,
Terry

Berger wrote:
"On a race cource of a regatta the action is a complex interdisciplinary
thing that involves aero and hydrodynamics, strategy, tactics and social
systems (teamwork) Some of these things can and are modelled in realtime
with computers, but in large we deal with chaotic systems (weather)
nonlinear tubulences over foil surfaces and social dynamics. It makes you
wonder why the best guys always are at the right spot at the right moment ,
how they catch the shifts etc... If you ask them they dont answer. Its the
gut feeling, years of experience. its the deep knowledge and skill of being
a specialist in coping with multi-layered systems in real time. Soft systems
approaches are fokused on these issues and therefor have renewed the way we
think of and cope with systems. So this way of approaching systems askes for
different skills than mentioned in the paper (thanks for the reference!) It
would only make partly sense to approach this with the old school systems
view: isolating the systems and their subsystems and look at all the
feedback loops and relations separately etc. And we have not even talked
about the technologies and economies of sailing (wich can hurt badly :) )"

[Birger Sevaldson]

Here are some unsorted references to the system thinking discussions. (please add) :
Anderson, V., & Johnson, L. (1997). System Thinking Basics: from concepts to Causal Loops. Waltham: Pegasus Communication INC.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a Systems Perspecive for the Study of Creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Creativity Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gedenryd, H. (1998). How Designers Work. Unpublished doctoral, Lund University, Lund.
Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence; The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. New York: Touchstone.
Maier, M. W., & Rechtin, E. (2000). The Art of Systems Architecture. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Mariussen, Å., & Uhlin, Å. (Eds.). (2006). Trans-national Practices, Systems Thinking in Policy Making. Stockholm: Nordregio.
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in Systems. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Olsson, M.-O., & Sjöstedt, G. (Eds.). (2004). Systems Approaches and Their Applicaitons: Examples from Sweden. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academisc Publishers.
Peter Checkland, J. P. (2006). Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology and its use for Practitioners, Teachers and Students. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Rechtin, E. (1999). Systems Architecting of Organisations: Why Eagles Can't Swim. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press LLC.
Sage, A. P., & Armstrong, J. E. J. (2000). Introduction to Systems Engineering. New York: John Wiley & Son.
Senge, P. M. (2006). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. New York: Doubleday.
Senge, P. M., Smith, B., Kruschwitz, N., Laur, J., & Schley, S. (2008). The Necessary Revolution:  How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world. New York: Douobleday.
Stacey, R. D. (2007). Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamic; The Challenge of Complexity (Fifth edition ed.). Harlow: Prentice Hall.
Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking. Washington: Island Press.

[Birger Sevaldson]

Hello Terry
Cool you are a sailor too :)  If you are interrested check my sailing site (http://www.birger-sevaldson.no/seiling/index.php)
I only partly agree with what you are stating. though decisions on the race course are seemingly reduced to single loop decisions if it was that simple you could make a computer program telling you what to do in different situations. Well it partly exists but only partly.
A very experienced sailor who i know had a very different view. He said sailing is like playing chess on several boards simultaneously. I would add yes but while the boards in chess are disconnected and static in sailing they are interlinked and dynamic. One single loop decision that seems right at a certain moment may turn out to be wrong at the next. Well enough about this only a small comment on gut feeling: i think everybody can have gut feelings but the only gut feelings that are relevant are those intuitions that are based on experience and deep knowledge. exactly when the single loop decisions fall short and a fractioning of the networks of interrelations and when calculated models don’t work the experts base their decisions on gut feeling. in contrary to what you say i think only very skilled experts can make decisions on gut feelings that make sense.
 
Now back to saving the planet: I think what has left us as designers in depression because of the disability to act is the last generations realization of the complexity and dynamics of things. Systems are counter intuitive and best intentions often produce worst results. But i think that this depression can be overcome by these partly new soft systems approaches in combination with other views. i think the designers ability to synthesize from very complex data is only partly developed into this. I had a very good experience with my students this spring where they were able to learn a deeper and wider thinking. look at big fields of interrelated data and to respond to this, attack their solutions with catastrophic scenarios to speculate about the resilience of their systems design.
The examples of this will follow as promised i hope within the autumn.
 
I am not saying that this is the way but its one way. it is hard but fun and creates innovation. Its also very much connected to real life, in the end by looking at an intervention as an ecology were economy and the survival of actors on many different scales simultaneously are included factors.
 
What i am saying is that designers have to trust less on their bright ideas and instead start to work with deep and wide ideas and interrelated ideas that work in synergies over time. Systems oriented designing is a creative activity also because looking at systems carefully brings you beyond the object fixation, beyond your prejudices and schemata.
My experience is that this has to be learned as skills and techniques more than methods and this is where it becomes interesting for the discussion on design education and to your question of the outcomes you mention.
If we agree that designers need to cope with more of the consequences, suggest alternatives and engage in the ecologies of the industrial production they are a part of, what are your suggestions or models for coping with this?
 
I think there must be other approaches out there? I fyes its crucial we bring the suggestive solutions to the table so that they can be challenged and developed further.

Best
Birger


________________________________________
Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [PHD-DESIGN@...] på vegne av Terence Love [t.love@...]
Sendt: 5. juli 2009 03:55
Til: PHD-DESIGN@...
Emne: Re: Betraying the Planet: systems oriented design

Hi Berger,

Thanks for your message. I'll respond more fully later. Good to hear you
sail!

My feeling is sailing is a good example in favour of my comments:  race
training of successful helmsmen and boat teams  attempts to reduce
everything to single feedback loops or at most, two feedback loops.
Match-racing, one boat against another, is essentially a single feedback
loop system. Your boat makes a move, the other boat responds and you need to
change your move. One feedback loop. All the other factors are not part of
feedback loops or also single feedback loops - wind, tide, hydrodynamics
etc. You cannot change the tide, wind or hydrodynamic laws by your sailing
you can only respond to them.
From my experience in regatta racing, helms typically reenvisage any
situation to two feedback loops or less.  In the main, this reduction back
towards a single loop thinking is done by learning whole sets of fixed
moves, patterns and  strategies that can be wheeled out in particular
situations (i.e. single feedback loop). There are large numbers of books and
training courses dedicated to learning these strategy groups (e.g. "Learn to
sail like Dennis Conner" - I'm showing my age!). This is similar to the way
those in the martial arts learn patterns and katas. Improving sail racing
skills is dedicated to reducing everything to seeing only one feedback loop
or less at any moment a decision needs to be made. You can easily test this
by listening to discourse when  sailing  decisions are made (e.g. 'Look they
are starting to lift, going about now'). The use of  'gut feeling' is not
about the solution. Otherwise any physiologically sensitive novice sailor
would be good. The use of 'gut feeling' is about which strategy to use in
seeing a particular pattern out on the water - simply a single feedback
loop.

There has been a lot of confusion about systems methods. There is no magic
in understanding them, the situation is very straightforward. The 'magic'
that has been used to  apparently differentiate between 'hard' and 'soft'
methods is a politically driven illusion. The same conceptual and empirical
situation applies to all. The systems field suffers in parts from much the
same sort of mess that the design field does. For example, one  problematic
systems belief is that systems analysis IS  designing. I wrote about this
problem some years ago in a mapping of the ways that systems analysis and
design activity fit together (confession - the title and spirit of the paper
was based on John Langrish' battleships paper at La Clusaz). You can find it
at
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2003/systems%20&%20design.htm

What I'm more interested in is getting this right in terms of Design
Education about complex systems. Designers can learn to be able to design
better in the realm of multiple feedback loops. The question is how, and
which methods are likely to result in successful designed outcomes. In that
sense, I feel we are on the same side but seeing things from different
perspectives.

Warm regards,
Terry

Berger wrote:
"On a race cource of a regatta the action is a complex interdisciplinary
thing that involves aero and hydrodynamics, strategy, tactics and social
systems (teamwork) Some of these things can and are modelled in realtime
with computers, but in large we deal with chaotic systems (weather)
nonlinear tubulences over foil surfaces and social dynamics. It makes you
wonder why the best guys always are at the right spot at the right moment ,
how they catch the shifts etc... If you ask them they dont answer. Its the
gut feeling, years of experience. its the deep knowledge and skill of being
a specialist in coping with multi-layered systems in real time. Soft systems
approaches are fokused on these issues and therefor have renewed the way we
think of and cope with systems. So this way of approaching systems askes for
different skills than mentioned in the paper (thanks for the reference!) It
would only make partly sense to approach this with the old school systems
view: isolating the systems and their subsystems and look at all the
feedback loops and relations separately etc. And we have not even talked
about the technologies and economies of sailing (wich can hurt badly :) )"

[Terence Love-2]

Hi Berger,
Great website! and nice boat! Never heard of the Albin. It has sweet lines.
All the best,
Terry
 

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:PHD-DESIGN@...] On Behalf Of Birger
Sevaldson
Sent: Sunday, 5 July 2009 9:05 PM
To: PHD-DESIGN@...
Subject: SV: Betraying the Planet: systems oriented design

Hello Terry
Cool you are a sailor too :)  If you are interrested check my sailing site
(http://www.birger-sevaldson.no/seiling/index.php)
I only partly agree with what you are stating. though decisions on the race
course are seemingly reduced to single loop decisions if it was that simple
you could make a computer program telling you what to do in different
situations. Well it partly exists but only partly.
A very experienced sailor who i know had a very different view. He said
sailing is like playing chess on several boards simultaneously. I would add
yes but while the boards in chess are disconnected and static in sailing
they are interlinked and dynamic. One single loop decision that seems right
at a certain moment may turn out to be wrong at the next. Well enough about
this only a small comment on gut feeling: i think everybody can have gut
feelings but the only gut feelings that are relevant are those intuitions
that are based on experience and deep knowledge. exactly when the single
loop decisions fall short and a fractioning of the networks of
interrelations and when calculated models don't work the experts base their
decisions on gut feeling. in contrary to what you say i think only very
skilled experts can make decisions on gut feelings that make sense.
 
Now back to saving the planet: I think what has left us as designers in
depression because of the disability to act is the last generations
realization of the complexity and dynamics of things. Systems are counter
intuitive and best intentions often produce worst results. But i think that
this depression can be overcome by these partly new soft systems approaches
in combination with other views. i think the designers ability to synthesize
from very complex data is only partly developed into this. I had a very good
experience with my students this spring where they were able to learn a
deeper and wider thinking. look at big fields of interrelated data and to
respond to this, attack their solutions with catastrophic scenarios to
speculate about the resilience of their systems design.
The examples of this will follow as promised i hope within the autumn.
 
I am not saying that this is the way but its one way. it is hard but fun and
creates innovation. Its also very much connected to real life, in the end by
looking at an intervention as an ecology were economy and the survival of
actors on many different scales simultaneously are included factors.
 
What i am saying is that designers have to trust less on their bright ideas
and instead start to work with deep and wide ideas and interrelated ideas
that work in synergies over time. Systems oriented designing is a creative
activity also because looking at systems carefully brings you beyond the
object fixation, beyond your prejudices and schemata.
My experience is that this has to be learned as skills and techniques more
than methods and this is where it becomes interesting for the discussion on
design education and to your question of the outcomes you mention.
If we agree that designers need to cope with more of the consequences,
suggest alternatives and engage in the ecologies of the industrial
production they are a part of, what are your suggestions or models for
coping with this?
 
I think there must be other approaches out there? I fyes its crucial we
bring the suggestive solutions to the table so that they can be challenged
and developed further.

Best
Birger


________________________________________
Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [PHD-DESIGN@...] på vegne av Terence Love
[t.love@...]
Sendt: 5. juli 2009 03:55
Til: PHD-DESIGN@...
Emne: Re: Betraying the Planet: systems oriented design

Hi Berger,

Thanks for your message. I'll respond more fully later. Good to hear you
sail!

My feeling is sailing is a good example in favour of my comments:  race
training of successful helmsmen and boat teams  attempts to reduce
everything to single feedback loops or at most, two feedback loops.
Match-racing, one boat against another, is essentially a single feedback
loop system. Your boat makes a move, the other boat responds and you need to
change your move. One feedback loop. All the other factors are not part of
feedback loops or also single feedback loops - wind, tide, hydrodynamics
etc. You cannot change the tide, wind or hydrodynamic laws by your sailing
you can only respond to them.
From my experience in regatta racing, helms typically reenvisage any
situation to two feedback loops or less.  In the main, this reduction back
towards a single loop thinking is done by learning whole sets of fixed
moves, patterns and  strategies that can be wheeled out in particular
situations (i.e. single feedback loop). There are large numbers of books and
training courses dedicated to learning these strategy groups (e.g. "Learn to
sail like Dennis Conner" - I'm showing my age!). This is similar to the way
those in the martial arts learn patterns and katas. Improving sail racing
skills is dedicated to reducing everything to seeing only one feedback loop
or less at any moment a decision needs to be made. You can easily test this
by listening to discourse when  sailing  decisions are made (e.g. 'Look they
are starting to lift, going about now'). The use of  'gut feeling' is not
about the solution. Otherwise any physiologically sensitive novice sailor
would be good. The use of 'gut feeling' is about which strategy to use in
seeing a particular pattern out on the water - simply a single feedback
loop.

There has been a lot of confusion about systems methods. There is no magic
in understanding them, the situation is very straightforward. The 'magic'
that has been used to  apparently differentiate between 'hard' and 'soft'
methods is a politically driven illusion. The same conceptual and empirical
situation applies to all. The systems field suffers in parts from much the
same sort of mess that the design field does. For example, one  problematic
systems belief is that systems analysis IS  designing. I wrote about this
problem some years ago in a mapping of the ways that systems analysis and
design activity fit together (confession - the title and spirit of the paper
was based on John Langrish' battleships paper at La Clusaz). You can find it
at
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2003/systems%20&%20design.htm

What I'm more interested in is getting this right in terms of Design
Education about complex systems. Designers can learn to be able to design
better in the realm of multiple feedback loops. The question is how, and
which methods are likely to result in successful designed outcomes. In that
sense, I feel we are on the same side but seeing things from different
perspectives.

Warm regards,
Terry

Berger wrote:
"On a race cource of a regatta the action is a complex interdisciplinary
thing that involves aero and hydrodynamics, strategy, tactics and social
systems (teamwork) Some of these things can and are modelled in realtime
with computers, but in large we deal with chaotic systems (weather)
nonlinear tubulences over foil surfaces and social dynamics. It makes you
wonder why the best guys always are at the right spot at the right moment ,
how they catch the shifts etc... If you ask them they dont answer. Its the
gut feeling, years of experience. its the deep knowledge and skill of being
a specialist in coping with multi-layered systems in real time. Soft systems
approaches are fokused on these issues and therefor have renewed the way we
think of and cope with systems. So this way of approaching systems askes for
different skills than mentioned in the paper (thanks for the reference!) It
would only make partly sense to approach this with the old school systems
view: isolating the systems and their subsystems and look at all the
feedback loops and relations separately etc. And we have not even talked
about the technologies and economies of sailing (wich can hurt badly :) )"=

[Filippo A. Salustri]

Nice note Birger.

I'll say one thing about my observations from within engineering.
Engineering designers seem to be not as "depressed" as seems to be the case
outside engineering.  Some may think what comes next is very controversial,
but I don't think so.  No insult to anyone is intended; this is just my
well-intentioned opinion.

Some might argue that this is because engineering designers are part of the
problem, having been responsible in (nearly) direct ways for many of the
technologies that are screwing up the planet and humanity.

Of course this is true for some of our members, but not most.  We were
trained, for the 2nd half of the 20th century, to follow a strict division
of labour, and to understand that we can create something in good faith that
users turn into some catastrophe-inducing machine of death.  But that is the
scientist in us speaking, and there is /some/ merit there.  If everyone else
did do the right thing that these products we designed would not be causing
so much trouble.  Yes, it was naive to assume everyone would do the right
thing, but at that level, scientists and engineers tend to be that naive.
They tend to be aspire to the elegance of nature, and so eschew the nasty
Machiavellian tendencies of others.  From the outside, this often looks like
naivety; but it is more often a personal choice.

Some might argue that engineering designers simply don't "get" the intricacy
of the interactions that occur between system elements in the "real world."
Well, there are no "system elements" in the real world.  Nature doesn't do
systems.  Systems happens to be a really, really useful way for humans to
understand /parts/ of nature, but they're not real.  If systems don't exist,
then their interactions don't exist.  It's all a matter of how we've chosen
to model the universe.

Science has given us the systems approach, as well as the realization that
systems don't really exist.  If more people truly understood science, more
people would realize that we can /change/ anything that we have just
decided.  That is, we can find and adopt new ways of thinking at will.  All
we need, of course, is will.

And anyways, scientists and engineers /do/ understand the intricacy of these
things.  Complex systems, chaos theory, emergence....all these concepts were
developed in science/math/engineering and then percolated their way to the
rest of the world.

If engineers have a "problem" in this regard, it's that they think the
intricacies that designers work with (which can usually be reduced to
interactions between people) are second-order effects compared to the
primary effects caused by other natural things.  The reason they think this
is because, in nature, a phenomenon is 'fixed'.  Gravity is as gravity does;
F always equals m*a for v<<c, etc.  But the interactions between people are
subject to sudden and total changes.  While there are /some/ patterns to
these changes, they are coarse and unreliable.  No reasonable engineer has a
problem with continued study of the mind for the sake of eventually
understanding it as well as we understand the rest of the universe.
Understanding is always good.  But in the meantime, engineers will largely
prefer to focus on the things that they can treat now.  Think globally but
act locally, and all that.

If you look at virtually any Serious Problem today, you'll realize that the
problem is almost /never/ technical, but rather a "people problem."  And I
think that that problem can be summed up like this: as a species, we behave
like animals, but we think we're better than animals.  This makes us
constantly surprised when things go "wrong" and also ruins our ability to
predict our own actions, even if just coarsely.  So we /seem/ unpredictable,
but only /seem/ so.

Although I haven't done the actual studies, anecdotal evidence tells me
almost all engineers to whom I've ever spoken with about these matters
agrees with me, more or less.  I could very well be wrong, but I've seen
nothing to suggest it yet.

Anyways, the point is this, engineering designers tend to be less depressed,
as near as I can tell, because they console themselves with a better
scientific understanding than many other kinds of designers can bring to
bear.  Whether the engineers are right or not - only time will tell.

But one thing is certain: it's better to do something 'good' today, in the
near term, and be happy about it, than just beat your chest about some
distant and hypothetical ill of the future about which nothing can be done.

Cheers.
Fil

2009/7/5 Birger Sevaldson <Birger.Sevaldson@...>

> Hello Terry
> Cool you are a sailor too :)  If you are interrested check my sailing site
> (http://www.birger-sevaldson.no/seiling/index.php)
> I only partly agree with what you are stating. though decisions on the race
> course are seemingly reduced to single loop decisions if it was that simple
> you could make a computer program telling you what to do in different
> situations. Well it partly exists but only partly.
> A very experienced sailor who i know had a very different view. He said
> sailing is like playing chess on several boards simultaneously. I would add
> yes but while the boards in chess are disconnected and static in sailing
> they are interlinked and dynamic. One single loop decision that seems right
> at a certain moment may turn out to be wrong at the next. Well enough about
> this only a small comment on gut feeling: i think everybody can have gut
> feelings but the only gut feelings that are relevant are those intuitions
> that are based on experience and deep knowledge. exactly when the single
> loop decisions fall short and a fractioning of the networks of
> interrelations and when calculated models don’t work the experts base their
> decisions on gut feeling. in contrary to what you say i think only very
> skilled experts can make decisions on gut feelings that make sense.
>
> Now back to saving the planet: I think what has left us as designers in
> depression because of the disability to act is the last generations
> realization of the complexity and dynamics of things. Systems are counter
> intuitive and best intentions often produce worst results. But i think that
> this depression can be overcome by these partly new soft systems approaches
> in combination with other views. i think the designers ability to synthesize
> from very complex data is only partly developed into this. I had a very good
> experience with my students this spring where they were able to learn a
> deeper and wider thinking. look at big fields of interrelated data and to
> respond to this, attack their solutions with catastrophic scenarios to
> speculate about the resilience of their systems design.
> The examples of this will follow as promised i hope within the autumn.
>
> I am not saying that this is the way but its one way. it is hard but fun
> and creates innovation. Its also very much connected to real life, in the
> end by looking at an intervention as an ecology were economy and the
> survival of actors on many different scales simultaneously are included
> factors.
>
> What i am saying is that designers have to trust less on their bright ideas
> and instead start to work with deep and wide ideas and interrelated ideas
> that work in synergies over time. Systems oriented designing is a creative
> activity also because looking at systems carefully brings you beyond the
> object fixation, beyond your prejudices and schemata.
> My experience is that this has to be learned as skills and techniques more
> than methods and this is where it becomes interesting for the discussion on
> design education and to your question of the outcomes you mention.
> If we agree that designers need to cope with more of the consequences,
> suggest alternatives and engage in the ecologies of the industrial
> production they are a part of, what are your suggestions or models for
> coping with this?
>
> I think there must be other approaches out there? I fyes its crucial we
> bring the suggestive solutions to the table so that they can be challenged
> and developed further.
>
> Best
> Birger
>
>
> ________________________________________
> Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
> research in Design [PHD-DESIGN@...] på vegne av Terence
> Love [t.love@...]
> Sendt: 5. juli 2009 03:55
> Til: PHD-DESIGN@...
> Emne: Re: Betraying the Planet: systems oriented design
>
> Hi Berger,
>
> Thanks for your message. I'll respond more fully later. Good to hear you
> sail!
>
> My feeling is sailing is a good example in favour of my comments:  race
> training of successful helmsmen and boat teams  attempts to reduce
> everything to single feedback loops or at most, two feedback loops.
> Match-racing, one boat against another, is essentially a single feedback
> loop system. Your boat makes a move, the other boat responds and you need
> to
> change your move. One feedback loop. All the other factors are not part of
> feedback loops or also single feedback loops - wind, tide, hydrodynamics
> etc. You cannot change the tide, wind or hydrodynamic laws by your sailing
> you can only respond to them.
> From my experience in regatta racing, helms typically reenvisage any
> situation to two feedback loops or less.  In the main, this reduction back
> towards a single loop thinking is done by learning whole sets of fixed
> moves, patterns and  strategies that can be wheeled out in particular
> situations (i.e. single feedback loop). There are large numbers of books
> and
> training courses dedicated to learning these strategy groups (e.g. "Learn
> to
> sail like Dennis Conner" - I'm showing my age!). This is similar to the way
> those in the martial arts learn patterns and katas. Improving sail racing
> skills is dedicated to reducing everything to seeing only one feedback loop
> or less at any moment a decision needs to be made. You can easily test this
> by listening to discourse when  sailing  decisions are made (e.g. 'Look
> they
> are starting to lift, going about now'). The use of  'gut feeling' is not
> about the solution. Otherwise any physiologically sensitive novice sailor
> would be good. The use of 'gut feeling' is about which strategy to use in
> seeing a particular pattern out on the water - simply a single feedback
> loop.
>
> There has been a lot of confusion about systems methods. There is no magic
> in understanding them, the situation is very straightforward. The 'magic'
> that has been used to  apparently differentiate between 'hard' and 'soft'
> methods is a politically driven illusion. The same conceptual and empirical
> situation applies to all. The systems field suffers in parts from much the
> same sort of mess that the design field does. For example, one  problematic
> systems belief is that systems analysis IS  designing. I wrote about this
> problem some years ago in a mapping of the ways that systems analysis and
> design activity fit together (confession - the title and spirit of the
> paper
> was based on John Langrish' battleships paper at La Clusaz). You can find
> it
> at
> http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2003/systems%20&%20design.htm
>
> What I'm more interested in is getting this right in terms of Design
> Education about complex systems. Designers can learn to be able to design
> better in the realm of multiple feedback loops. The question is how, and
> which methods are likely to result in successful designed outcomes. In that
> sense, I feel we are on the same side but seeing things from different
> perspectives.
>
> Warm regards,
> Terry
>
> Berger wrote:
> "On a race cource of a regatta the action is a complex interdisciplinary
> thing that involves aero and hydrodynamics, strategy, tactics and social
> systems (teamwork) Some of these things can and are modelled in realtime
> with computers, but in large we deal with chaotic systems (weather)
> nonlinear tubulences over foil surfaces and social dynamics. It makes you
> wonder why the best guys always are at the right spot at the right moment ,
> how they catch the shifts etc... If you ask them they dont answer. Its the
> gut feeling, years of experience. its the deep knowledge and skill of being
> a specialist in coping with multi-layered systems in real time. Soft
> systems
> approaches are fokused on these issues and therefor have renewed the way we
> think of and cope with systems. So this way of approaching systems askes
> for
> different skills than mentioned in the paper (thanks for the reference!) It
> would only make partly sense to approach this with the old school systems
> view: isolating the systems and their subsystems and look at all the
> feedback loops and relations separately etc. And we have not even talked
> about the technologies and economies of sailing (wich can hurt badly :) )"
>

--
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON
M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: [phone] ext 7749
Fax: [phone]
Email: salustri@...
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/

[Ranulph Glanville]

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