Abstract

This short paper is a summary of Mapping and Methodology session abstracts, presentations and discussions of the Relating Systems Thinking and Design 8 symposium (RSD8) held at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, organised by the Systemic Design Association (Systemic Design, 2018). The topic of the conference was ‘Systems Change + Design for Governance’ (“RSD8,” 2019). The all work in progress (WIP) presentations in this session were touching the topic of systems change and governance through discussing design of mapping and tools when the ‘product’ design process could be given out of the hands of the designers. Ryan Murphy, who is co-authoring with Jennifer DeCoste and Heather Laird presented an online accessible real time participatory modelling for social systems that is editable and open to multiple kinds and number of stakeholders who map themselves. The tool called ‘Open Social Mapping’ was discussed in relation to Systemic Design based on two case projects (Murphy, DeCoste, & Laird, 2019b). Murphy presented both, the successes and the failures which generated a fruitful discussion with the audience as well as with the other speakers. The presentation ended with the invitation for a workshop to help to develop this tool: ‘Getting the Whole System into the… Map: Addressing Key Issues in Open Social Mapping’ (Murphy, DeCoste, & Laird, 2019a). Joanna Boehnert, who is co-authoring with Simon Mair, introduced a discussion on mapping methodologies for the relation of productivity and wellbeing on an ongoing project for the Economic and Social Research Council. The discussed WIP project has questioned the commonly understood relation of productivity and growth (Boehnert & Mair, 2019). The evidence based with researchers co-mapped data will be digitally visualised and put interactive online to reach its audience amongst researchers and other stakeholders to work with. The presentation asked for an experience with both, the codesigning methodologies as well as for the experience with the mapping provision to interaction. Gordon Rowland questioned the designer’s cliché on that the humans resist to change. He asked us: ‘How could we possibly value what might be if we are not valuing first what is?’. He explained that people only resist to changes which they haven’t been involved in, the ones that are imposed to them. Rowland introduced two fully interconnected tools of his ‘CHIIS Model’: a) a set of activities to guide process and; b) objects of enquiry as system of parts and relations. Such model is thus interconnecting the process and the product and is meant to be given out of the designer as a facilitator’s hands to non-experts (Rowland, 2019). The presentation ended with questions for a dialogue to the audience and the two other speakers whether he has developed a real systemic design tool for non-experts and whether it reflects the today ethical values dealing with environmental issues. The discussion was opened with the speakers’ presentations’ questions to the audience. We asked first the audience for the feedbacks and suggestions to the presenters and later on we opened the discussion to their questions. To the topic of this session was particularly relevant the discussion of the designing of the methodology, therefore, the designers are outside of the expertise of their mapping. They are experts of its methodology and of the mapping itself, synergising the stakeholders together. Such performance and output are performed and given out for different levels of participation. It was discussed that typically the people who want change would come to the sessions for codesignig. That proves the fact that people are typically not resistant to change, if they can be involved. However, there was not found a clear answer to a scalability and political implementations of the discussed models, though there were some interesting speculations of translates between different local maps and discourse mapping references from previous work (Boehnert, 2019). The critical question is who and why is participating and whether we reach diverse enough audience which is equally heard and how is this evaluated. Employment of creativity in invitation to codesign was found as a critical tool for gaining wider participation across diverse communities. This one, however, requires an ongoing innovation and actually, being ‘weird’ in your invitations/innovations. Can it help to fold an origami crane for the event invitation instead of a flyer? The session was closed with that that reaching the diversity and the participants that are typically not heard was a challenge that was not resolved by the discussion. Sevaldson suggests to have experts talking on behalf of those who are typically not heard, in this case in larger consideration of the ecosystem (Sevaldson, 2018). These papers are offering many answers in this discussion. However, I would conclude this session that there should be paid much larger attention to the development of methodologies for more inclusive participation in codesign that is considering overall ecosystem for the better for planet’s future, its systems change and the governance.