Systemic design was mentioned recently in the British Design Council’s publication on Medium ( https://medium.com/design-council/challenging-the-brief-tackling-the-climate-crisis-through-design-153da39babc8 ) "An approach that tackles complex problems by considering all the interconnected parts of a system. " Like Horst Rittel’s term ‘wicked problem” — taken in directions quite different from Horst’s original thinking — which is too often mischaracterized, I feel it is important to give an alternative approach to ‘systemic design’ from that proposed by the Design Council. I don’t have a copyright on the term ‘systemic design’ but I do have a long personal history with the idea and the term. I have been developing and applying systemic design ideas over a very long period and want to offer a generable alternative to the ‘problem-focused’ definition of the Council. Systemic design should be considered as ‘design’ and not ‘problem-solving’: The Reconstitution of Sophia-the Wi
During the process of developing a series of master classes in systemic designing (www.haroldgnelson.com/masterclasses) I became aware of a critical issue. Many of the terms I was using, such as ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’, had been hollowed out by the predominance of AI-related terms in public discourse like ‘machine learning’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). In addition, the dominating hype or shallow understandings of the ideas behind the terms I was using further hampered any meaningful communication with others. Even the term ‘masterclass’ had lost common meaning — much like the term ‘equal’ has lost shared meaning among mathematicians. Common terms like ‘innovation’, ‘change’, ‘creativity’, ‘agent’, or ‘paradigm shift’ are among a growing list of words that have become mere tags or indicators rather than carriers of useful information in shared discourse. In my master classes, for example, key terms like ‘learning’, ‘teaching’, and ‘knowledge’ are central concepts t