A Shift to Life-Centered Systems Thinking: Teaching Modules to Design Regenerative Futures.

Abstract

This paper critiques the use of design thinking (DT) to solve wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973) and proposes life-centered systems thinking (LCST) as a better process to design for systemic positive impact. It presents a series of LCST modules that design educators can use to either start a prompt or act as a provocation to pause and pivot a project already in motion. This paper also details the strengths and weaknesses of each teaching module and how it was created, revised, and adapted based on student and instructor feedback in design courses at three different universities. The results are exciting and hold promise to increase designers’ ability to design more climate and socially responsible outcomes. Design is taught through a linear approach, with project prompts that historically focused on the intended visual outcome, leaving little room to investigate the root causes of an issue. Over the past two decades, DT has emerged from research done at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design to “...tackle society’s most intractable problems” (McCarthy, 2022, p. 40). It adapted the design process (largely known only to design disci- plines) into a formulaic, step-by-step, human-centered, solution-focused method that any profession can understand and implement to address simplistic to systemic problems. However, as DT hopes to be more successful in solving systemic global issues, it still is a comparatively reductive toolkit that most often fails to meet the complex challenges at hand. It is unable to gaze beyond our anthropogenic perspective where “...the prevailing theories of design thinking in organizations remain entrenched in the making or techne - paradigm. Ironically, this serves to maintain the status quo and stifle progress” (Lee, 2021, p. 497). Instead, a more holistic approach for adapting to our cultural shifts and growing climate crisis is to engage in LCST. LCST, as the authors see it, differentiates itself as a practice and mindset that is framework agnostic, discipline inclusive, nature- inspired, life-centered (not exclusively human-centered), and intersectional in its approach to problem framing. Like systems thinking (ST), it gives ... designers a powerful tool for circumnavigating the problems of the age. Focus on relationships over parts; recognize that systems exhibit self-organization and emergent behaviors; analyze the dynamic nature of systems to understand and influence the complex societal, technological, and economic ecosystem in which you and your organization operate. (Vassallo, 2017) LCST is a fluid practice that does seek solutions but is problem focused. It is also a mindset, a way of seeing the big picture and the details simultaneously by visualizing connections, causes and effects, and relationships between people, the planet, and their actions. In other words, LCST shows how everything is connected and that our natural systems depend on a dynamic non-equilibrium trying to achieve balance. Indigenous biol- ogist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015) builds upon this definition more poetically: “The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It’s the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world” (p. 344)