Systemic Design for Complex Services: Multiple Goals, Logics, Rhythms

Peter Jones, Professor, OCAD University, Toronto and Editor in Chief, Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal

Experio Lab is inviting to the Experio Seminars. Once a month we’ll invite interesting researchers to talk about service design, service logic and user-driven services in public sector.

In design education and practice we artificially separate different domains of design value based on what clients of design believe if possible and what we can guarantee as skilled designers. Service design opened up the practice of designing reliable experiences for space and time, for temporally-extended value chains to many customers and mixes of users. Services creates processes that realize (make real) an organization’s value offer to customers. However they are also complex abstractions of preferential value interactions, that can be optimized at the point of service logic (e.g. designed to maximize value for a specific service outcome to a recipient) or they can be optimized within system logic (e.g., the total value of the system according to the goals and potentials of the system). The difference between these two distinctions can be seen most clearly in a system such as healthcare, where many individual health outcomes must be realized, but the system logic is to maximize healthy outcomes for a level of shared costs for a population.

Join the seminar to explore the potential for an incipient system value logic that can be useful for evaluating system outcomes in complex systemic design. We assume that, for complex social systems that provide services, services can be designed that compose a whole system and therefore can be optimized as whole systems. The goal of this approach to systemic design is to provide a basic logic for staged design, evaluating prototypes, and cocreating a “minimal viable system.” As designers our own goals can be guided by a logic that enables satisfactory interim outcomes, short of idealized final processes, and guidelines to construct arguments to avoid imbalanced compromises in early stage social systems and service systems.

Recording from November 17th 2023

Peter Jones, Professor, OCAD University, Toronto and Editor in Chief, Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal