In many real-life situations, design projects respond to complex realities that require designers to explore interactions between different parts or scales of those realities. This guide helps you observe these complexities and identify what are called systemic issues.
As a brief introduction, it is helpful to clarify what this means.
A complex reality (or complex system) is a reality that consists of many interconnected elements whose interactions produce outcomes that cannot be understood by looking at each part in isolation. For example, making a cup of tea can be understood as a food-related ‘complex system’ involving water use, energy for boiling, supply chains, packaging for the tea, retail systems, household habits, and cultural practices. Together, these elements produce wider effects such as patterns of energy use, waste, and resource consumption, as well as impacts on individuals (e.g. cost, enjoyment, health) and the environment.
In this context, you may need an approach for capturing observations and identifying systemic issues. This may involve creating a systemic observation map, log, or diary to record your observations and findings. More specifically, it includes:
Systemic observation: this refers to observations that focus on relationships and interdependencies within a situation (e.g. different parts of a food system) and across scales (e.g. individual, local, global). It sees reality as a set of interconnected elements and examines how systems and subsystems influence one another. The emphasis is on connections rather than isolated parts. The term “systemic observation” is used here to highlight this relational way of seeing, rather than treating a system as a fixed object.
Systemic issues: these refer to problems that affect multiple parts of a system and often operate across different scales (e.g. local and global). They emerge from interactions between multiple elements rather than a single cause, and their effects are distributed across the system. Identifying systemic issues therefore involves recognising problems that arise from these interactions and that produce effects across different parts or scales of a system.
