Systems Thinkingfrom screens to service ecosystems

Most design decisions are made in local context: this screen, this interaction, this component, this sprint. The local context is tractable. It has edges. The design tool draws a frame around it. But the frame is not the system. Design decisions that are individually rational can be collectively incoherent when made without reference to the whole.

Donella Meadows defines a system as “a set of elements interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time.”¹ The critical phrase is the last one: their own pattern of behaviour. Systems generate emergent properties that cannot be read from any individual element.

• A product with individually excellent screens can create a disorienting journey when the transitions between those screens are structurally incoherent.
• A design team with individually excellent designers can produce a fragmented product when the decisions made by each designer are not in dialogue.

Individual decisions don’t add up to the experience: their interaction creates it.

Meadows’ systems thinking applies directly here: in any product, a user’s trust accumulates through many positive interactions and depletes through failures and friction. Each design decision either adds to it or draws it down. A notification that arrives too frequently, in the wrong context, draws down the user’s tolerance. Once that tolerance is gone, the user disables notifications entirely, and no settings-screen redesign will reverse that. The design team working on the settings screen may be working three levels downstream of the actual cause.

Systems thinking for designers operates at three scales simultaneously, each with a different unit of attention and a different pitfall.