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Design Journeys through Complex Systems: Practice Tools for Systemic Design
Design Journeys for Complex Systems is a designer's handbook to learn systemic design tools to engage stakeholder groups in collaborative design to address complex societal systems.
Systemic design uses systems thinking and service design to address large-scale societal contexts and complex socio-technical systems. These are contexts characterized by social and technological complexity, high uncertainty, and often problematic outcomes.
Using a tour guide metaphor, the book trains people's mindsets and provides tools for dealing with hyper complexity, to enable understanding of systemic problems, and to build capacity to collaborate in teams to produce action proposals.
Systemic design uses systems thinking and service design to address large-scale societal contexts and complex socio-technical systems. These are contexts characterized by social and technological complexity, high uncertainty, and often problematic outcomes.
Using a tour guide metaphor, the book trains people's mindsets and provides tools for dealing with hyper complexity, to enable understanding of systemic problems, and to build capacity to collaborate in teams to produce action proposals.
- GenresDesign
248 pages, Paperback
Published August 30, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 21, 2022
It's a comprehensive roadmap to design 4.0 and feels like reading a masterclass complete with workshop models.
The ambition and execution are perfectly rendered in a visually appealing format. The pluriversality and space for recognising the mystery of human experience resonated.
It’s a manual for changing the world that I’ll be taking everywhere with me.
The ambition and execution are perfectly rendered in a visually appealing format. The pluriversality and space for recognising the mystery of human experience resonated.
It’s a manual for changing the world that I’ll be taking everywhere with me.
April 4, 2026
Designing Social System Initiatives for People in a Hurry
The subtitle of "Design Journeys through Complex Systems" (DJtCS) gets it right: what this book contains is "Practice Tools for Systemic Design". A number of professional practices are about applying the insights from research fields as triage. For example, lot of design can be framed as triage psychology, but Systemic Design is triage social science. The field attempts to inject informed guidance into the business of formulating appropriate policy and institutional initiatives.
DJtCS is meant to provide a full toolkit of workshop methods usable by both advanced ("explorer") and beginner or partnering ("tourist") practioners. The promise is whether an old hand or a beginner, you are going to get succinct explanations of time-tested workshop methods. The promise is that, if you show some care about who you invite to what (as advised) and prepare well, your efforts should lead to well-scoped, carefully-framed, effective initiatives for changing the dynamics of systems.
Is that what's provided? Does DJtCS live up to its promise? Honestly, in the name of making the body of methods accessible and usable, a lot has been left out, so it's hard to tell. We don't see any complete sequence of using these methods, much less a comparative body, so we can't judge for ourselves if it's effective. Nor do we see any kind of overall outside evaluation of attempts to use these practices, so there's no judgment from others either. Despite that, there's no denying the contribution of even offering what seems to be triage-level guidance for a full sequence of accessible systemic design methods in such a succinct package.
To achieve a full sweep of methods accessibly presented in 240 non-crammed but tastefully designed pages is a real achievement, despite the sacrifices I think it makes.
A Journey Sometimes Shared
I have a particular vantage point for appreciating this book. I was an early graduate student of Peter Jones and undertook perhaps the first of the OCADU major projects he advised, and have been able to see nearly the full sweep of the Systemic Design Association and the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) symposia, the stewardship and cultivation of which is the source of this book. I have presented at a few RSD, and provide initial reviews for a few submissions almost every year.
For the past few year, I've also been a busy professional working at what are, for me, rather demanding positions, and so I've really been unable to absorb to much of any extent what all has come of the growth of the field. So, I was grateful to finally make some time for this book, which is, among other things, what I read to be Peter's summary of where he thought the field has gotten to.
I also can see the grounding that has remained the same: the section on the different schools of sensemaking was something Peter brought from the very beginning, as were the different scopes of design domains, as was the emphasis on dialogue and co-creation, as was the emphasis on convivial conveining, as was the optimistic co-construction of meaning. If you know his voice, you hear it sometimes, along with the synthesis with his coauthor.
I think the coauthor (Kristel Van Ael) has brought a lot to the table, as far as that goes: dialogue is always better with an interlocutor, and you can feel the concision of the shared focus and richer perspective that comes from two views of the same objects. Really, hats-off to her.
Contents (Batteries Not Included)
DJtCS starts by briefly introduces the discipline of systemic design, the intent of the systemic design toolkit it covers, and the stages it sequences the journey with (framing, listening, and then understanding the system, envisioning desired futures, exploring possibilities, planning change, and fostering transition). It then proceeds with advice on how to put together workshops, discussing workshop participant selection, the appropriate kinds of stakeholders for particular workshop and scales (helpfully shorthanded as Lab, Studio, Arena, and Agora), facilitation styles, and workshop activity types (framing, sensemaking/analysis, reframing, codesign, and roadmapping). It then has a chapter for each stage, introducing the sequencing of that stage and giving methods. It ends the book with reflections, which include principles, schools of thought, and other theoretical ideas the reader is now hopefully equipped to appreciate.
Each method is embodied with a particular empty canvas or set of templates to be filled by workshops. The book introduces each method and the lays out preparation, steps, some guidance on how to turn the workshop outcomes into a deliverable, and occasionally tips for adapting the workshop or particular directions to take it in. Each method includes an estimated workshop runtime, overall processing time, recommended scales, activity type, and other methods that are believed to have a particularly salient connection to the one presented.
This book does generally not provide advice beyond this about the methods, such as: the behind-the-scenes processing or coding of the results, advice on how to know if the results have yielded what they're supposed to, any real information architecture for the findings, or much in the way of either analytical or pragmatic ways the activities can be framed.
I'd like to give a specific example of the last one, the gap in analytical and pragmatic advice by exploring a simple classic: the "Future State Scenarios" grid (pgs. 154-157). This grid splits a page into four quandrants, each with a possible futures scenario. The future scenarios are organized along two key axes of uncertainty, such that one ends up with (low, low), (high, low), (low, high), and (high, high) scenarios. There are a variety of ad-hoc ways to find this split, such as the axes cleanly splitting discovered trends and system behavior. However, there are two ways that are clearly principled based on what you've discovered to this point:
* the analytical way: you form a system dynamics or trend influence network, and give a variety of setting to the ones you don't have a clear indication of already corresponding to a particular level. You then simulate the dynamics of the network and cluster the findings. If you find that the dynamics have clusters and cross-clusters based on the settings, and particularly ones that are easily partitioned, you've derived the scenarios.
* the pragmatic way: often times, you're actually working with some instution. One axes represents "the way we thought things used to work" versus "the way we've discovered things are now", while the other represents "the way we are doing things" versus "the way we'll have to do things to respond to the actual situation". It's a very powerful rhetorical wedge.
It's hard to state the rhetorical difference between being able to pose a set of pragmatic scenarios as emerging analytically from the analysis, versus a more ad-hoc selection. The first is a real victory for the process, while the second will still give you some food for thought, but without either the pedigree or impact.
Do We Know Nothing?
There is one particular gap that really stands out to me. It's a consideration of the field that has started to strike me as odd over the years, so maybe you'll humor me in some strangemaking. I think it's odd that methodological guidance is the only guidance provided as triage to systemic design elementary practioners, as opposed to specific items we hope to see emerge from the process as a sign the process is engaging with the actual problematique. Said differently: isn't it weird these design templates are always empty?
After all, there are really two different ways of solving design problems: one is to apply methods to discover answers, and the other is to already know key considerations and applicable sets of best practices. If there are a known set of chronic problems within the scope of systemic design, and I believe we probably could agree that there are given that they are occasionally name checked, then there have to be a set of shared concerns and facts concerning those concerns that are relevant.
The optimistic side of me would like to read this book, as a particular manifestation of the systemic design discipline as a whole, as now in the process of diverging from more constrained "Limits to Growth" physical framings, with a corresponding convergence on the key factors to frame transformation in our shared world. Or, perhaps, we should understand this as a certain kind of academic and professional admission that they've chosen to focus on their particular specialty ("workshopping methods") to deliver useful discovery processes at the cost of specific guidance and its information architecture.
And, in the spirit of the book, I'll actually just stay with the optimistic side. I won't bother to suppose any deliberate reason for this neglect other than focusing where the protagonists feel they have the most leverage. Instead, I'd like to propose that there should be companion work to develop these resources of common knowledge grounded in the actual world: key considerations, best practices, pertinent facts, and accepted constraints. Should I find the occasion to do systemic design research, looking into how these methods could be supported by a corresponding knowledge management would be where I might look. Until then, I hope students who find this interesting get advised to develop support systems along these lines.
Conclusion
Ultimately, what we have here is a short and focused book about a very big subject. You can see DJtCS as a textbook for a systemic design methods course: it's going to be necessary for you to understand systemic design, even fundamental, but by no means is it sufficient to consider yourself to have a degree in the discipline. Yet, as the basis of something like a certificate program, DJtCS is entirely reasonable. You're going to be able to do some very complex things at a triage level; it's just best to acknowledge that's what you've come away with.
The subtitle of "Design Journeys through Complex Systems" (DJtCS) gets it right: what this book contains is "Practice Tools for Systemic Design". A number of professional practices are about applying the insights from research fields as triage. For example, lot of design can be framed as triage psychology, but Systemic Design is triage social science. The field attempts to inject informed guidance into the business of formulating appropriate policy and institutional initiatives.
DJtCS is meant to provide a full toolkit of workshop methods usable by both advanced ("explorer") and beginner or partnering ("tourist") practioners. The promise is whether an old hand or a beginner, you are going to get succinct explanations of time-tested workshop methods. The promise is that, if you show some care about who you invite to what (as advised) and prepare well, your efforts should lead to well-scoped, carefully-framed, effective initiatives for changing the dynamics of systems.
Is that what's provided? Does DJtCS live up to its promise? Honestly, in the name of making the body of methods accessible and usable, a lot has been left out, so it's hard to tell. We don't see any complete sequence of using these methods, much less a comparative body, so we can't judge for ourselves if it's effective. Nor do we see any kind of overall outside evaluation of attempts to use these practices, so there's no judgment from others either. Despite that, there's no denying the contribution of even offering what seems to be triage-level guidance for a full sequence of accessible systemic design methods in such a succinct package.
To achieve a full sweep of methods accessibly presented in 240 non-crammed but tastefully designed pages is a real achievement, despite the sacrifices I think it makes.
A Journey Sometimes Shared
I have a particular vantage point for appreciating this book. I was an early graduate student of Peter Jones and undertook perhaps the first of the OCADU major projects he advised, and have been able to see nearly the full sweep of the Systemic Design Association and the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) symposia, the stewardship and cultivation of which is the source of this book. I have presented at a few RSD, and provide initial reviews for a few submissions almost every year.
For the past few year, I've also been a busy professional working at what are, for me, rather demanding positions, and so I've really been unable to absorb to much of any extent what all has come of the growth of the field. So, I was grateful to finally make some time for this book, which is, among other things, what I read to be Peter's summary of where he thought the field has gotten to.
I also can see the grounding that has remained the same: the section on the different schools of sensemaking was something Peter brought from the very beginning, as were the different scopes of design domains, as was the emphasis on dialogue and co-creation, as was the emphasis on convivial conveining, as was the optimistic co-construction of meaning. If you know his voice, you hear it sometimes, along with the synthesis with his coauthor.
I think the coauthor (Kristel Van Ael) has brought a lot to the table, as far as that goes: dialogue is always better with an interlocutor, and you can feel the concision of the shared focus and richer perspective that comes from two views of the same objects. Really, hats-off to her.
Contents (Batteries Not Included)
DJtCS starts by briefly introduces the discipline of systemic design, the intent of the systemic design toolkit it covers, and the stages it sequences the journey with (framing, listening, and then understanding the system, envisioning desired futures, exploring possibilities, planning change, and fostering transition). It then proceeds with advice on how to put together workshops, discussing workshop participant selection, the appropriate kinds of stakeholders for particular workshop and scales (helpfully shorthanded as Lab, Studio, Arena, and Agora), facilitation styles, and workshop activity types (framing, sensemaking/analysis, reframing, codesign, and roadmapping). It then has a chapter for each stage, introducing the sequencing of that stage and giving methods. It ends the book with reflections, which include principles, schools of thought, and other theoretical ideas the reader is now hopefully equipped to appreciate.
Each method is embodied with a particular empty canvas or set of templates to be filled by workshops. The book introduces each method and the lays out preparation, steps, some guidance on how to turn the workshop outcomes into a deliverable, and occasionally tips for adapting the workshop or particular directions to take it in. Each method includes an estimated workshop runtime, overall processing time, recommended scales, activity type, and other methods that are believed to have a particularly salient connection to the one presented.
This book does generally not provide advice beyond this about the methods, such as: the behind-the-scenes processing or coding of the results, advice on how to know if the results have yielded what they're supposed to, any real information architecture for the findings, or much in the way of either analytical or pragmatic ways the activities can be framed.
I'd like to give a specific example of the last one, the gap in analytical and pragmatic advice by exploring a simple classic: the "Future State Scenarios" grid (pgs. 154-157). This grid splits a page into four quandrants, each with a possible futures scenario. The future scenarios are organized along two key axes of uncertainty, such that one ends up with (low, low), (high, low), (low, high), and (high, high) scenarios. There are a variety of ad-hoc ways to find this split, such as the axes cleanly splitting discovered trends and system behavior. However, there are two ways that are clearly principled based on what you've discovered to this point:
* the analytical way: you form a system dynamics or trend influence network, and give a variety of setting to the ones you don't have a clear indication of already corresponding to a particular level. You then simulate the dynamics of the network and cluster the findings. If you find that the dynamics have clusters and cross-clusters based on the settings, and particularly ones that are easily partitioned, you've derived the scenarios.
* the pragmatic way: often times, you're actually working with some instution. One axes represents "the way we thought things used to work" versus "the way we've discovered things are now", while the other represents "the way we are doing things" versus "the way we'll have to do things to respond to the actual situation". It's a very powerful rhetorical wedge.
It's hard to state the rhetorical difference between being able to pose a set of pragmatic scenarios as emerging analytically from the analysis, versus a more ad-hoc selection. The first is a real victory for the process, while the second will still give you some food for thought, but without either the pedigree or impact.
Do We Know Nothing?
There is one particular gap that really stands out to me. It's a consideration of the field that has started to strike me as odd over the years, so maybe you'll humor me in some strangemaking. I think it's odd that methodological guidance is the only guidance provided as triage to systemic design elementary practioners, as opposed to specific items we hope to see emerge from the process as a sign the process is engaging with the actual problematique. Said differently: isn't it weird these design templates are always empty?
After all, there are really two different ways of solving design problems: one is to apply methods to discover answers, and the other is to already know key considerations and applicable sets of best practices. If there are a known set of chronic problems within the scope of systemic design, and I believe we probably could agree that there are given that they are occasionally name checked, then there have to be a set of shared concerns and facts concerning those concerns that are relevant.
The optimistic side of me would like to read this book, as a particular manifestation of the systemic design discipline as a whole, as now in the process of diverging from more constrained "Limits to Growth" physical framings, with a corresponding convergence on the key factors to frame transformation in our shared world. Or, perhaps, we should understand this as a certain kind of academic and professional admission that they've chosen to focus on their particular specialty ("workshopping methods") to deliver useful discovery processes at the cost of specific guidance and its information architecture.
And, in the spirit of the book, I'll actually just stay with the optimistic side. I won't bother to suppose any deliberate reason for this neglect other than focusing where the protagonists feel they have the most leverage. Instead, I'd like to propose that there should be companion work to develop these resources of common knowledge grounded in the actual world: key considerations, best practices, pertinent facts, and accepted constraints. Should I find the occasion to do systemic design research, looking into how these methods could be supported by a corresponding knowledge management would be where I might look. Until then, I hope students who find this interesting get advised to develop support systems along these lines.
Conclusion
Ultimately, what we have here is a short and focused book about a very big subject. You can see DJtCS as a textbook for a systemic design methods course: it's going to be necessary for you to understand systemic design, even fundamental, but by no means is it sufficient to consider yourself to have a degree in the discipline. Yet, as the basis of something like a certificate program, DJtCS is entirely reasonable. You're going to be able to do some very complex things at a triage level; it's just best to acknowledge that's what you've come away with.
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August 4, 2025Read this if you want systemic design tools and frameworks to engage stakeholders in collaborative design on complex systems.
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