What is a System?: A Lesson Learned from the Emerging Practice of DesignX

While design does not have its own subject matter, the scope of the subject matters of design stretches across the areas ranging from signs and symbols, tangible objects, and activities to systems [1]. Richard Buchanan maintains, “the common subject matter of design is variously described as the artificial or the human-made or products that support human beings in all of their individual and collective activities [4].” This commonality allows us to understand the significant transformation of design emerging over the past decade: design is moving beyond the conventional artifact-centered practice and starting to tackle larger matters of greater complexity, for example, sociotechnical systems [15]. This is also the origin of the emerging DesignX exploration.

DesignX is an initiative promoted by a group of scholars with genuine curiosity about how design could address the complex issues the world faces today [10]. The initial Manifesto [7] emphasized that design must change in order to tackle complex problems. The DesignX Conference in 2015 as a follow-up was planned to advance the understanding about how designers could play a role in designing for complex sociotechnical systems. It was in that Conference, an impromptu dialogue was triggered and thus disclosed to the participants a plain fact: we lacked basic understandings of the system that would allow us to address the DesignX problems.

In this paper, I attempt to reflect on the developing trajectory of DesignX dialogue through synthesizing Buchanan’s work on systems as a reference framework. Employing this framework, I will further analyze a DesignX project to demonstrate how the understanding of the nature of systems could be a powerful theoretical tool to improve our practice.

During October 10–11, 2015, a small working conference on “DesignX,” organized by the Don Norman and Pieter Jan Stappers, two key members of the DesignX Collaborative, was held at the Tongji University College of Design and Innovation (Shanghai, China). As a follow-up to the DesignX Manifesto, this conference was designed, before its kickoff, to harvest the preliminary common understandings about the nature of DesignX problems, the principles of DesignX approach, and possibly tools and methods. During the discussion, one of the participant—Richard Buchanan—raised a simple, yet provocative question: “What is a system?” The room become quiet.

The first response from Don Norman was, “a system is a set of interacting parts.” When situated in the social context of greater complexity, the idea of a system becomes further blurry as Don Norman noticed that: “actually I don’t know how to define a system … it’s one of those ‘I know when I see it.’ It’s all of the components that come together to make possible whatever it is that we are interested in. It’s really easy to talk about the mechanical process, but it’s really hard when you start to talk about the social, complex system, because—where to draw the boundary? … How to draw the line to define a system is part of the problem [9].”

This was an unusual moment to a gathering whose participants’ background exhibiting a deliberate mixture ranging from design to systems theory, cybernetics, computer science, education, business and management, and industries. What did it mean that a group of experts familiar with systems thinking and working on system design were not sure about what a system was?

In addition, John Flach borrowed a view from general systems theory that, according to Gerald Winberg [19], a system is a way of thinking about the world: “That the idea there is an extrinsically defined object down there as the system that exists in the world is a mistake. The system is where we choose—as scientists—to draw the boundary. It’s our definition of the problem that makes it a system.”^{Footnote 1}

The inspirational, generic definitions of system sensitized DesignXers’ curiosity to know more about systems, given that designing (for) complex sociotechnical systems was focused on. Hence, “systems” was added as a theme in the group discussion. The statements and questions teased out during the discussion are summarized in Appendix.

Instead of addressing the How questions emphasized by the organizers, most of the considerations focused on What and Why—What a system is when viewed from different perspectives and Why that matters. The DesignXers were impressed by the pluralism of understandings of systems but were unable to frame the pluralist positions. It also signaled that, in order to deal with complex, larger design issues, it was too ambitious to solely focus on the Hows without giving the Whats and Whys ample considerations.

Buchanan’s question “Do we actually understand the meaning of a system?” is a rhetorical one. The point is that, although each of us may have a certain definition for a system, we are neither aware of the perspective we hold to obtain the definition, nor do we pay attention to other definitions and the perspectives implied, not to mention the relationships between them. As one of the participants of the DesignX Conference, I was fascinated by the different, sometimes conflicting, understandings of system, and was curious to know their implications for how design has been practiced. Hence, a review on the idea of system was conducted.

In Merriam-Webser’s Collegiate Dictionary [18], one of the most significant meanings of “system” is “a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole.” This entry includes a set of variations including: “a group of interacting bodies under the influence of related forces”; “an assemblage of substances that is in or tends to equilibrium”; “a group of body organs that together perform one or more vital functions”; “the body considered as a functional unit”; “a group of related natural objects or forces”; and “a group of devices or artificial objects or an organization forming a network esp. for distributing something or serving a common purpose.” Considering sociotechnical systems where human beings become part of the system, it would be interesting to ask, what it means by a human being, being a component of a system, as, for example, a “natural object,” or a “body organ” in a metaphorical sense.

This dictionary definition goes in concert with the received view of systems in the systems thinking discipline. Similar to Norman’s definition at the Conference, Donella H. Meadows [17] began her renown treatise Thinking in Systems with: “A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something…. [A] system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.”

This is what Richard Buchanan [5] called “a commonplace definition,” which is full of uncertainty as it consists of solely variables—relationship among “X” in a process of “Y” that achieves “Z.” By grasping this definition alone does not help one understand what a system really is. For Buchanan [5], to understand what “a system” means, one must ask him/herself 3 questions:

1. (1)

   What is being systemized? (What’s the content?)

2. (2)

   How does the interaction or the relationship actually happen? (How do they work together?)

3. (3)

   What holds the system together? (What are the principles/goals/purposes/values?)

In addition, Buchanan’s earlier work on the nature of interaction [6, 8] and the strategies of inquiry [3] would make a useful expansion to that list by considering:

1. (4)

   What is the nature of the interaction?

2. (5)

   What is the underlying strategy of seeing the system as so?

After years of systematic exploration of the meaning of system, Richard Buchanan [5] developed a schema that accommodates four big kinds of understandings of a system, each implying a significant philosophical stance. First, and the most common definition is: “A system is an assemblage of interacting parts or bodies under the influence of (natural) forces”; second, a system can be seen as “a set or arrangement of things so related as to form a unity”; third, a system is “a group of units to form a whole and to operate in unison”; and fourth, a system is “a condition of harmonious, orderly interactions.” In addition, “system as an assemblage” has a sense of contingency, controlled by the natural forces; “system as a set” is arbitrary in that it is an intentional choice made by human; “system as a group” is a biological metaphor indicating a functioning organic whole; and “system as a condition” overcomes conflicts to achieve harmonious, orderly interactions of unlimited number of parts [5].

This schema of systems echoes two different but corresponding schemata that Buchanan developed to describe strategies of inquiry and the nature of interaction. Considering these two will allow us to better understand the underlying position that each kind of system definitions indicates.

In his seminal article “Thinking about Design: An Historical Perspective,” Buchanan [4] pointed out that “the strategy of inquiry is to seek the resolution of theoretical, practical or productive problems and move toward to advancement of knowledge in the various branches of human learning and activity.” He further introduced four strategies [3, 4]: the strategy of design science seeks the underlying elements or parts of complex phenomena so as to investigate mechanisms of combination; the strategy of rhetoric focuses on communication through formulating persuasive arguments; the strategy of poetics (productive science) focuses on the analysis of essential elements and the creative synthesis of these elements as a unified whole; and the strategy of dialectic is to identify and to overcome conflicts, contradictions, and oppositions by accommodating them within a system or a bigger whole (see Fig. 1).

(Source: Richard Buchanan [3])

Four strategies of inquiry.

Full size image

Based on an equivalence of the modes of thought, Buchanan [6, 8] also established a schema of interaction. He identified four kinds of interactions: the “thing to thing” interaction, the “person to person” interaction; the “person to environment” interaction, and the “person to idea (cosmos)” interaction.

With the above two schemata as a reference framework, the distinctions between the kinds of systems can be further clarified. Seeing a system as an assemblage of interacting parts for a certain goal has a root in the pursuit of “the basic elements that underlie the complexities of the material world and the workings of the mind [4],” and is directed to combining those elements into processes and mechanisms. The thing-thing interaction dominates in this kind of systems. Seeing a system as a set of things arbitrarily decided by human beings, instead, follows the rhetorical strategy that focuses on argumentation and communication, where person-person interaction prevails. Seeing a system as a group of functioning units within an organically unified whole reflects the poetic strategy of analyzing essential elements and creatively synthesizing them into a whole by means of person-environment interaction. And, seeing a system as a condition indicates the dialectical position [8, 16] that calls for a process, characterized by person-idea interaction, of assimilation in which unlimited number of parts with conflicts or contradictions may find something in common and thus get closer to the truth.^{Footnote 2}

Bearing the five key questions about a system in mind, I summarize Buchanan’s schema of kinds of systems in Table 1. Based on this framework, it is clear that the popular understanding of a system from the systems thinking doctrine stems from the tradition of design science as it largely focuses on identifying the basic parts and then process and mechanisms. And the general systems theorist’s interpretation of system as a way of thinking about the work is true, but what remained unarticulated then is that the different ways of thinking about the world are not randomly and subjectively individual-based, but instead their fundamental philosophical positions can be characterized.

As design evolves, the kinds of systems that designers work with/for vary. When design is mainly focused on making artifacts and giving form to technology, the first kind of systems is the largest whole that the designer attempt to grasp. However, when design begins to intervene in sociotechnical systems such as healthcare, education, and transportation, human actors become a significant part of the kinds of systems that designers work with, and various principles, goals, purposes, and values emerge. A subtle but crucial change happens: If it was sufficient for the designer to work as an objective observer overseeing the process and mechanisms of an assemblage of interacting parts when working with the first kind of systems, it is no longer the case for the rest three kinds because designing has become part of the system resulting from designers’ intervention and the interaction between designers and all the other parts of the system including other human actors are wide and profound.

The What question is oftentimes entangled with the Why question. It is natural to ask, “Why do we discuss the idea of a system?” Aside from to satisfy the genuine curiosity toward the distinct philosophic significances the idea of a system implies, Buchanan’s inquiry into the pluralistic understanding of a system is timely to the design field because such understanding sheds light on different ways design has been practiced and why.

This is particularly relevant to the emerging DesignX inquiry. Although the discussion about “system” was included ad hoc into the group discussion during the DesignX Conference, it was short and underdeveloped, and was absent from the rest agenda. However, the more people talked about the practices, the tools and processes, the less clear it became what the unique contribution DesignX would bring in to the design field. Puzzled by the difficulty of advancing the knowledge about DesignX, Norman and Stappers [10] tentatively concluded that the major challenges facing DesignX do not “stem from trying to understand or address the issues, but rather arise during implementation, when political, economic, cultural, organizational, and structural problems overwhelm all else.”

When viewed with reference to the nature of systems, one may argue differently. The problematic DesignX issues are the content of the system that designers attempt to deal with; by designing in such systems, however, designers’ implementation becomes exactly part of the intrinsic interactions of the system; and in order to make solutions work, both the solutions as new constructions and the design implementation process must pay respect to the principle that holds the system as a whole. None of the three aspects could be treated as an independent task, because the three together constitute a system. Therefore, the understanding of kinds of system could serve a powerful complement to the agenda of DesignX, because while Norman and Stappers promote to seek new approaches how to design the complex systems, Buchanan’s schema provides insights about What a system is and Why it works or doesn’t work when designing in a system.

When focusing on the How issues, Norman and Stappers [10] called for the exploration of implementation using modular approach and incrementalist strategy of “muddling through.” The un-spelt simplistic strategy of Design Science and its influence is manifested. The challenge rises from that the principle of seeing the system following the natural forces that influence the material world and the working of the mind does not apply to the kinds of systems other than an assemblage of interacting objective parts. The design science view of a system is not enough for DesignX.

The confusion prevails not only in theoretical conversations, but in practices inspired by the ethos of DesignX. It was challenged that both the tangible and intangible design products that were seen as great achievements from the design perspective may not work at all in the aimed system. In the rest part of this paper, I will investigate a project on design for healthcare, using Buchanan’s schema of systems to analyze the predicaments the designers encountered during the process.

The Tongji University College of Design and Innovation (D&I), Shanghai, focuses on studying and improving the burning issues facing today’s China by using design as an agent [11,12,13]. Being the place where DesignX was first voiced, D&I has been actively promoting practices that deal with DesignX issues. Healthcare is one of the areas of special interest to this college.

Healthcare in China is undergoing a crucial transitional phase—the Healthcare Reform promoted by a series of national policies since 2009 introduces a hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system to be supported by establishing the primary care service system [14]. The current healthcare system is characterized by its institutionalized uneven distribution of medical resources. The top-tiered hospitals tend to be patients’ first choice unconditionally, regardless of what is needed: advanced medical treatment or primary care. Given that Chinese population is huge, almost every top-tiered hospital runs on an overloaded basis providing limited resources to unlimited demands. As a consequence, numerous conflicts occur including the increasingly deteriorating doctor-patient relationship. In contrast to overcrowded big hospitals, community hospitals that are purported to be responsible for primary care remain largely invisible to most of the public.

Situated in this context, shortly after the DesignX Conference my colleague Dr. Hao Yang and PhD candidate Dongjin Song invited me to work with them to plan a master’s studio project—“Design for Healthcare in the Community.” Its aim was to understand the status and emerging needs of the transitional healthcare system on the community level in Shanghai. And hopefully it could become a preliminary step of a long-term healthcare service system design initiative grounded in the community where the school is located.

First, we reached out to the Community Healthcare Service Center (CHSC)—the community hospital that shares the neighborhood with D&I, seeking their collaboration and basic information the plan the project. In spring 2016 thirteen Year 1 master’s students, divided into 4 groups, participated in the 5-week project. Each group worked respectively on one division of the services offered by CHSC: family doctor, outpatients, hospice care, and children health services. The medical professionals were engaged in the entire process providing expert knowledge about their daily work. In the following section, I will describe some of our memorable pathways in systems during the project and will analyze them by means of the framework of systems.

5.1 The Principle of a DesignX System Is Emergent Through Conflicts

The first impressive pathway came from the supervisor group during project planning. Based on the desktop research on the medical systems in China and a field study in CHSC, the supervisor group were surprised to realize that the medical resources accessible to the public provided by the community hospitals are much richer than we previously knew. How strange that we, as the residents of this community, were blind to what we already have? We arrived at a hypothesis that, in order to implement the nationwide hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system, it must be supported by making the primary care distributed on the community level become visible to people when needed. In short, the goal of our project should be “How to make community hospital based healthcare services visible and attractive to more patients?”

However, when we approached the Vice Director of CHSC and asked for his opinion, his response was a surprise to us. The VD maintained that the community hospital was a state-owned institution and that the greatest challenge to this hospital was the lack of financial allocation and policy supports from the government. The problem was that the community hospital doctors overwork, too, but their salary was too poor to support them to lead a decent life in the city of Shanghai. In short, the community hospital did not need to attract more patients.

This was the first time that we reflected on the question “What is the system that we are trying to intervene?” The community hospital is undoubtedly a system in itself, but it is at the same time a part in the healthcare service system that could possibly be available to the residents living there. To expand the scale and to enhance the quality of the medical service was not of interest to the current hospital. In the meanwhile, the reason why residents put the top-tiered big hospitals as their first choices also seemed reasonable: the big hospitals are equipped with the best doctors, best facilities, and best resources. Nonetheless, should these two parts of the system continue to function the way as is, the contradiction between the limited resources possessed by top hospitals and the increasing demands for quality healthcare from the public would grow even worse. This is also the reason why National Healthcare Reform was first planned and promoted by the government. Although it seemed well justified for the community hospital, the local residents, and the government to interact with the rest components of the system in their current manners, none of them are happy with their gains from the system. What if the private hospitals, social workers, the families of the patients, and social enterprises/associations were to be considered? There is obviously no exhaustive list of components of the system at all. Bewildered by our ignorance of the system, we reshaped the project topic into “How to improve community healthcare experience based on the relationship between medical professionals and patients.” By shifting back to the “home domain” of human-centered design and experience design, we gave up the idea of describing the system before the study of experience revealed the system to us.

With hindsight, it would be helpful to see this unknown system of the community-based healthcare service as a condition of potential harmony if the conflicts of the ideas could be overcome and be assimilated into a bigger whole. When the designer enters such a system in order to understand the system’s goal, the person-to-idea interaction occurs. A dialectical strategy should be employed to develop the possible common goal through dialogues with different actors involved. The conflicts of ideas and values cannot be resolved by merely studying the organizational structure of the hospital, the procedures of the diagnosis and treatment, the experience of the patients, or by proposing pre-determined argument. The designer must allow him-/herself to be exposed to the variety of conflicting ideas and seek the common principle so that all these ideas can be well absorbed into a whole. Although CHSC is a major part of the studied system, the hospital administrator’s voice is not sufficient to establish the principle how the more preferred community-based healthcare service system works. Adopting the co-creation approach in an experience design project may be a sufficiently good starting point, however, to design for a system it requires the supervisor group to work more on establishing the principle of the system by reaching out to more relevant actors.

5.2 Pathways of Human Experience Lead to Possible Constructions in the System

The second pathway was from the group that worked on family doctor service. Family doctors work at the networked small clinics subordinated to the community hospital. Their responsibilities consist of two main parts: offering daily outpatient services at the clinic and visiting patients who live in family wards at their homes. The family doctor group worked closely with family doctor Shen by immersing themselves in Dr. Shen’s work environment, accompanying and observing the doctor at both the clinic and patients’ homes. Because of such immersion, the students entered the environment where Dr. Shen resided in his work time. They recorded, by notes and photos, the shabby clinic, the patients (mostly the elderly) suffering from chronical diseases and confined to beds, the anxious family members, Dr. Shen’s encounters in the street on his way to the medical rounds, etc. They talked with the doctor as well as the people the doctor communicated with. More importantly, sliding into the environment and experiencing the tedious but professional encounters between Dr. Shen and his patients allowed this group of students to empathize with the doctor. During the tutorials, the students spoken for medical professional’s concerns by stepping into the shoes of Dr. Shen. They took pictures that have emotional impact in order to let people know more about family doctors’ work (Figs. 2 and 3). They admired the doctor’s way of communicating with his patients, the families, and the helpers, always ready to provide detailed information, usually repeatedly, in order to release their anxiety, but they also observed that such communication physically and emotionally exhausted the doctor, not to mention the piles of paper work after the rounds back to the clinic.

Courtesy of Shengyu Huang, Chi Zhang, and Yiting Hu.

The family doctor and his clinic. Photo taken in field study.

Full size image

Courtesy of Shengyu Huang, Chi Zhang, and Yiting Hu.

Family doctor’s visit. Photo taken in field study.

Full size image

The final proposal from this group was an information management system that connected the family doctor, the patient’s helper, and the patient’s family member in terms of the reconstructed information flow (Fig. 4). The students discovered that the patient’s biggest concern was that he/she or the helper who took care of him/her would forget or confuse the doctor’s order after the doctor left; the patient’s adult sons and daughters who live elsewhere would be eager to be updated on their parent’s conditions. Both lead to that the family doctor was overburdened by having to repeat his/her orders whenever approached by the patient side. On the other hand, the doctor nonetheless must record such information in the patient’s chart saved in hospital’s database. Aided by an online platform, the doctor’s diagnosis and prescription updates in the database could be turned into a resource and be sent to different people in customized ways. Hence, the new service would be able to satisfy the needs of communicating clear and timely information by using the existing resource, without creating any extra work for the doctor.

Courtesy of Shengyu Huang, Chi Zhang, and Yiting Hu.

The proposed information management system for family doctor and patient.

Full size image

This is an example of approaching the system from the poetic perspective. The detailed observation of the interaction between a person and his/her environment allowed the students to draw the boundary of the family doctor-based healthcare service system in their project. It also enabled them to identify the possible tangible objects that could serve as useful touch point in the new system. The previous surroundings of the doctor became a part of a unified whole. It is notable that the students used pathways of their own experiences to reveal such interactions. Without entering Dr. Shen’s working environment and later becoming part of his could-be-changed environment (by prototyping), the deeper concerns of the doctor—his compassion for the patients, dignity about his profession, and helplessness about the current situation—would be hardly addressed in one resolution.

Using pathways of human experience is widely used in human-centered design, however. It merits further exploration when the subject matters of human-centered design are complex systems that human beings cannot experience the whole. The boundary of the aimed system could be melted down when new elements are taken into account. In this case, the CHSC VD’s feedback was, this system was technologically feasible but did not work because it might involve leaks of patients’ privacy information.

5.3 Tracing Elements and Interconnections Alone Does Not Grasp a System

The most challenging pathway in this project occurred to the group that worked with the hospice care department at CHSC. During the field study, the students found that nursing workers played an important role in providing hospice care as they were the ones closely interacting with the dying patients—they not only looked after but lived with the patients in the same space. Employed by independent labor companies, the nursing workers were outsiders to the hospital and therefore worked and lived without being able to use the resources as the hospital employed nurses and staff do. The students argued that, should the value of the nursing workers be appreciated by the hospital and their working and living condition improved, the patients would get better comfort care. This idea was however rejected straightaway by the hospital during the interim presentation as the hospital administrator saw it impossible and unreasonable to spend anything more on these third-party employees: it called for additional investment that the currently limited finance barely afforded. This encounter sensitized the students’ curiosity to know how the hospice care service system currently ran.

The students then set about mapping the community hospital based hospice care service system in the hope that the significant problem and new opportunity could be identified. Their approach was to identify all possibly involved elements of this service system, and to trace the interconnections between the elements. Because of the complexity of the system, they categorized the elements and their interconnections into different layers with each layer depicting one type of connections, for example, financial relationship, reputation network, personal relationships, etc. To present the whole system, they merged these layers into one system map. (See Figs. 5, 6 and 7.) By doing so, the students were confident in maintaining their argument of improving nursing workers’ working and living conditions to enhance the entire service, but this idea was still not welcomed by the hospital.

Courtesy of Xin Guan, Li Qian, Yuhong Ma, and Ottla Arrigoni.

The map based on the service process and activities.

Full size image

Courtesy of Xin Guan, Li Qian, Yuhong Ma, and Ottla Arrigoni.

Layers of the system based on financial connections, reputation network, and personal relationships.

Full size image

Courtesy of Xin Guan, Li Qian, Yuhong Ma, and Ottla Arrigoni.

The merged system map of community hospital based hospice care service.

Full size image

Despite the effort of describing each part of the system, it was challenged that the system still appeared unclear: What held the detached snapshots together? What were the principles, values, goals, or visions for the future?

With the reference to the framework of systems, at least three significant problems of the designing process can be identified.

First, when the students aimed to convince the hospital of the value of nursing workers, unknowingly they embarked on a journey of wrestling with a system from a dialectic perspective. Instead of approaching the stakeholders who held distinct and often conflicting ideas, the students analyzed the needs of the stakeholders mostly based on desktop research and logical elaboration. The dialogue directed to achieving the condition to assimilate all the conflicts and contradictions never happened.

Second, although the students were originally inspired by their experiences of the interactions happening in the ward, they became alienated from human experiences during the system mapping stage. They treated each actor as a thing, instead of as a human being, a thing with material inputs and outputs. The system was regarded as an assemblage of things whose interconnections could be objectively described. The problem is, they employed a stance of design science to analyze the system, but did not implement the scientific analysis by calculating the inputs and outputs through systematically collecting facts and figures, employing statistics tools, or applying models from cognitive science. Instead, most of the analysis was conducted based on logical elaboration and subjective judgment. This is the reason why the claimed design opportunity was perceived as arbitrary imaginations.

Third, the more the students worked on mapping a complex system, the lesser they were aware of that they were designers with the expertise of making. The products made by designers, no matter explorative prototypes or manufactured ones, are “argument about how we should lead our lives [2].” This is a rhetorical stance to see design in general, and it also applies to designing for complex systems. Holding the argument about nursing workers, the students did not make any tangible prototypes and use them to persuade the key players in the very system. There was no creatively synthesized materials in appropriate form which was able to demonstrate the purpose of the aimed system. The more complex the subject matter of design grows, the more important designers are able to provide tangible, visualized argument if they aspire to convincing communication.

The project of Design for Healthcare in the Community is a preliminary step of a designer-driven initiative to tackle the DesignX issues around us. The challenges the designers experienced converge at the key question: What is a system? If we, designers, are about to participate in or to drive the practice aiming to improve the complex sociotechnical systems, we must know our objects better than we did.

As inquiry into the approaches of how to design for complex systems, DesignX initiated in 2014 is successful in bringing together people from different disciplines and domains to examine this issue. It nonetheless exhibits the lack of sufficient interest in reflecting on the nature of the system in the purported endeavor of addressing Hows. In my view, the lack of understanding the nature of a system will impact the significance of DesignX, both on theoretical and practical levels.

Richard Buchanan’s exploration of the schema of systems, when combined with his persistent work on the strategies of inquiry and types of interaction, provides a valuable holistic framework to enrich the DesignX dialogue and practice. The framework allows the designer to position the kinds system that he/she is working on and therefore to choose strategies and methods and tools that are consistent with the principle of that system they try to map, synthesize, and design for.

The community based healthcare design project was conducted before Buchanan’s presentation of “Systems and Pathways of Human Experiences.” By synthesizing Buchanan’s framework of systems and applying it in the analysis of the problems encountered during this project, it sheds light on how our practice could be improved in terms of design attitudes, methods and tools, processes, and ability to seek knowledge from relevant disciplines. All these will be influenced by understanding the nature of the system that we are working on.

What we learned from this project can be summarized as follows:

1. (1)

   A system is greater than components and interconnections between the components; it is principles, values, goals and purposes that hold everything together. However, the approach to seeking principles or purposes must go concert with the principles or purposes that kind of system implies.

2. (2)

   A system is inherently dynamic, and different types of interactions could be traced when the system is viewed from different perspectives.

3. (3)

   It is unlikely for a human being to grasp the totality of a system due to two reasons: (a) the relationship of parts-and-wholes makes the boundary of a system relative—while a system contains components, each component as well as the system per se can be a part of a bigger whole; (b) there can be more than one kind of systems that are involved in one design project, and the boundary and content of the system change when the view shifts.

4. (4)

   The process of designing for a system involves the designer entering that system and interacting with the components of the system. Such interactions are determined by which kind the system is viewed. When the type of interaction is not consistent with the kind the system is treated, it is likely that the system that the designer thought he/she is dealing with does not hold.

How to design for complex systems will be further studied with the above findings well taken into account.