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Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
1
Tangible Thinking
Materialising how we imagine and understand systems, experiences, and
relationships
Dan Lockton1, Lisa Brawley2, Manuela Aguirre Ulloa3,4, Matt Prindible1, Laura Forlano5,
Karianne Rygh3, John Fass,6,7, Katie Herzog1, and Bettina Nissen8
1Imaginaries Lab, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University; 2Vassar College;
3Designit; 4Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO); 5IIT Institute of Design;
6London College of Communication; 7Royal College of Art; 8University of Edinburgh
Abstract (H4)
This workshop explored how ‘tangible thinking’ tools can be used to materialise how people
imagine and understand systems, in particular questions of (inter)disciplinarity. Thirty-five
participants used three different kinds of tools—topological, relational, and performative, to
construct physical models supporting group discussion around how we conceptualize and
experience “disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity”—abstract ideas that regulate and structure
many of our lives as designers and researchers working in systemic contexts, in practice and in
academia. In this working paper, we pay attention to the materials used, and their properties,
alongside the affordances of physical modelling itself, as a way of externalising thinking in ways
which could be shared and discussed together; we explain the background thinking behind the
workshop, and illustrate some of the results.
Introduction
This half-day workshop asked how we can use methods drawn from design, art, and craft, informed by
interdisciplinary and systemic design thinking, to materialise not just envisioned ‘things’, but abstract or
invisible ideas and relationships. In particular, we paid attention to the materials used, and their
properties, alongside the affordances of physical modelling itself, as a way of externalising thinking in
ways which could be shared and discussed together.
Over four hours, 35 RSD8 participants took part in the Tangible Thinking workshop, working in groups,
constructing tangible models responding to questions around how we conceptualize and experience
“disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity”—abstract ideas that regulate and structure many of our lives as
designers and researchers working in systemic contexts, in practice and in academia. In this working
paper, we explain some of the background thinking behind the workshop, and illustrate some of the
results.
Expressing what we can’t see
As Jones and Bowes (2017) put it, “the systems we describe are only as tangible as our renderings” of
them. While much work concentrates on rendering a variety of kinds of map (e.g. Sevaldson, 2018;
Jones & Bowes, 2017), there is an emerging set of research practices using physically tangible, material
models, or constructive making process to visualize how people think about concepts ranging from
invisible systems and infrastructures to mental models, personal data which would otherwise be
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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invisible, or even the phenomenological dimensions of experiences themselves. Rygh (2018) offers a
detailed analysis of how tangible thinking tools can support collaboration as part of co-design processes,
particularly in relation to healthcare systems; other examples include explorations of the design of
public services, mental health experiences, career paths, crafters’ movements, and experiences of social
networks (Aguirre Ulloa and Paulsen, 2017; Rygh and Clatworthy, 2019; Ricketts and Lockton, 2019;
Nissen and Bowers, 2015; Fass, 2016; Vink et al, 2017).
While these methods and tools come from many contexts, they share an aim of helping people express
and communicate thinking about things we cannot see, to make them tangible, reified, to enable
discussion or peer support, or to facilitate group sensemaking. They fulfil at least three of the five main
qualities that Inie and Dalsgaard (2020) characterise design tools as offering designers in support of their
processes—externalising ideas, generating new knowledge through action, and enabling sharing or
mediation.
Methods and insights rooted in one context may be transposable to others. This seems worth exploring
for the systemic design and innovative social research communities. How can methods inspired by
(often participatory) design and facilitation processes from user experience and service design—or the
attention to metaphor and novel translations of abstract concepts emerging in data physicalisation
(Thudt et al, 2018), synaesthesia research (Lee et al, 2019), and even art therapy (Rosal, 2018)—as a
form of research through design, a way to communicate otherwise intangible or inaccessible private
worlds? How important are material choices, aesthetics, ease of construction, and the life of ‘artefacts’
once they have been constructed? What is the value of individual (even private) tangible tools,
compared with shared activities? Is the process as important as the ‘outcome’, as part of a
constructionist learning approach? There is no ‘right’ way to externalise thoughts: we need “visual
prostheses” (Jonassen and Cho, 2008) to share our mental imagery with each other.
Tangible Interdisciplinarity
Field, n. From Feld: open country
-an open land area free of woods and buildings
-area or division of an activity, subject, or profession
-a space on which something is drawn or projected
(Merriam-Webster; OED)
The topic of our workshop was interdisciplinarity—something of great relevance to many in the systemic
design community, where a ‘systems approach’ often means working at a level above, or perhaps below,
established disciplinary boundaries, or finding connections between ideas or ways of doing things in
multiple fields. So, our workshop activity focused on materializing participants’ thinking about the
nature of disciplines (academic or in practice) and their relations from a systemic perspective, using
tangible forms (there are precedents in the RSD community’s work intersecting with studies of
interdisciplinarity, for example Metzner-Szigeth et al (2018)).
There is an emerging scholarly literature describing ongoing transformation of disciplinary structures of
knowledge production in higher education (Klein, 1999; Biagioli, 2009). These changes are signalled by a
growing list of prefixes—interdisciplinary, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, post- pre- meta- cross-
and anti-disciplinarity—that seek to name the ways that disciplines are transformed as they
accommodate new kinds of questions and new ways of asking them. In his discussion of “post-
disciplinarity,” Mario Biagioli has argued that the conceptual model of the organization of knowledge in
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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the sciences is shifting—from “From Discipline and Canon to Collaborations and Problems”—in ways
that scholars in other fields (there’s that word) might find useful. Rather than attempt to map these
shifts from above, or to advocate for or against a given form of (inter)disciplinarity, the activity we
convened sought to understand and make tangible how participants conceptualize their own field(s) of
inquiry—views of the ‘system’ from within. We aimed to make the most of the opportunity of the RSD
community’s diverse disciplinary backgrounds to participate in the activity.
This systemic design approach to disciplinarity has relevance at the institution-specific level: the
particular ways that departments and programs are organized at a college or university enact mental
models: university departments are most often spoken about as if they were the same thing as
academic disciplines, and these are in turn mapped onto institutional structures: the humanities
building, the Science Quad, etc. Scholars working in emerging fields like, say, “Critical Ethnic Studies” or
“Disability Studies” must then navigate this intellectual landscape. To what extent do extant mental
models—rather than interdisciplinary lines of inquiry themselves—contribute to the way emerging fields
thrive (or don’t) at given institutions? While we were unable to examine these aspects of the question in
our RSD 8 workshop, as participants were from different institutions, the possibility points the way to
potential future work.
Some examples of ‘tangible thinking’ tools
As the intersection of complex socio-technical systems comes to dominate human experience, and the
way those systems are regulated and arranged becomes ever more opaque, giving people the
opportunity to express them in physical form offers possibilities for new kinds of research, as well as
being useful for people’s own understanding. ‘Tangible thinking tools’ involve research questions around
relationships between what people can imagine, what materials are available to them, and what types
of what kinds of shared understanding emerge. How do people understand their own personal and
professional trajectories, and how do these shape their understanding of disciplinary boundaries?
The cognitive psychologist Barbara Tversky suggests that “when thought overwhelms the mind, the
mind puts it into the world” (Tversky, 2015:99), noting how “people use anything at hand, their hands,
their bodies, arrangements of sticks and stones and coffee cups, sketches in the sand, scribbles on paper
napkins, and more” as “external representations of thought...designed to serve thought, for self or for
others”. While the use of drawing in this context has been relatively widely explored (Hartel et al, 2018;
Oates et al, 2018; Bowden et al, 2015; Sturdee & Lindley, 2019), physical models have been less so. In
design fields like architecture, planning and product design, physical models can narrow the gap
between abstract concepts and concrete implementation by allowing complexities to surface as part of
the design process. Physical models are often used to surface implicit assumptions and values as well as
to communicate and test ideas; they are especially useful tools for working with the qualitative,
experiential elements of a design, such as the quality of the lighting, the effect of an acoustic
environment, the feel of the surface of an object. Physical models allow for the development of new
guiding metaphors (Cila, 2013; Gero & Chilton, 2019; Mothersill & Bove, 2019; Lockton et al, 2019),
which can be a critical way for designers to generate and communicate their internal understandings.
They also enable a public to convey their experience of a design-concept in process in order to more
meaningfully inform a design (Sanders & Stappers 2012). Kirsh (2010) finds that ‘the materiality of
external representations provides affordances that internal representations lack.’ We are interested in
what these affordances may be and how participants in co-design activities have taken advantage of
them. More specially, we are interested in what materials one might use to physicalise the qualitative
data that is generated and enabled in any design or co-design process. How do materials matter?
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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In another paper (under review), we explore in more depth some of the relations between creative
research methods (Kara, 2015; Lupton, 2018), inventive methods, and critical making (Sayers, 2018) in
the humanities (Lury & Wakeford, 2012; Marres et al, 2018) and in science and technology studies with
how, in the words of Donna Haraway, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it
matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts
think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”
(Haraway, 2011). There are parallels with emergent themes in data physicalisation, such as constructive
visualization (Huron et al, 2014) personal physicalisation constructions for self-reflection (Thudt et al,
2018), and the idea of affective materials palettes (Lean, 2019).
Here, however, we concentrate on the systemic design perspective, through reporting on our workshop,
with some examples of how participants’ ‘tangible thinking’ was manifested. First, however, it is worth
looking briefly at some examples of ‘tangible thinking’ tools developed in other contexts. We devised a
tentative classification of three different ‘modes’ of making ideas tangible for our workshop—
topological, relational, and performative—and we use these here also to categorise the examples.
Figures 1, 2, and 3 show what might be thought of as topological tangible thinking tools.
These tools are primarily about the arrangement, layout, structure, or landscape of elements—their
positions relative to each other, and the overall ‘picture’ or form produced.
Figure 1. Actor mapping flags, tangible co-design communication tool created by Karianne Rygh, AHO
(Rygh & Clatworthy, 2019).
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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Figure 2. Mental Landscapes (Ricketts & Lockton, 2019), described further below.
Figure 3. Models of emotions produced using the Emotional Modeling toolkit by Laura Rodriguez, Katie
Herzog, Josh LeFevre, Nowell Kahle, and Arden Wolf (Rodriguez et al, 2018). Photo by Ulu Mills.
One step further perhaps are relational tangible thinking tools (Figures 4 and 5), in which the
relationships and links between elements, and the ways in which these are configured—and even the
materials used to form these relations—are as important, or more important even, than the elements
themselves.
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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Figure 4. A multi-sensory relational tool (Aguirre Ulloa & Paulsen, 2017) that supports the design process
of complex public services, developed by Manuela Aguirre Ulloa and Adrian Paulsen. Photos from RSD3,
2014.
Figure 5. Digital social networks, by John Fass, 2018.
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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Finally, performative tangible thinking tools (Figures 6a, 6b, 7, and 8) involve a dynamic, time
component—the elements change themselves, or are changed (moved, reshaped), in form, position,
etc, to enable a performance of sorts over a period of time.
Figures 6a and 6b. Alternative Unknowns Method, for participatory scenario planning as part of disaster
preparedness. Developed by Chris Woebken and Elliott P. Montgomery (Extrapolation Factory, 2016).
Figure 7. A computational judicial system, by John Fass, 2018
Figure 8. Model of algorithmic decision making, by John Fass, 2018.
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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The workshop
To explore these questions around both the material nature of tangible models, and how they might
relate to interdisciplinarity in a systemic design context, our RSD8 workshop explored these three
different modes of making ideas tangible—topological, relational, and performative—using tools
developed by some of the authors.
The workshop took four hours, including a break: it featured a brief orientation and context-setting
session, followed by three one-hour sessions each of which explored a different modes of physicalizing
ideas. Participants worked in small groups of five to eight people to co-design models in response to
questions posed about how they understood and experienced disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. At
the close of each session, groups shared their models drawing on the narrative that co-creating the
model had generated. We describe each of the three sessions and their relevance to systemic design
below.
A topological example: deploying elements of landscape
In the first session, participants worked with a pre-designed kit of parts that featured elements of
landscape, the Mental Landscapes kit (Figures 9 and 10; Ricketts & Lockton 2019). This kit comprises a
selection of laser-cut card elements embodying a particular set of metaphors based around stylised
landscapes and features within landscapes, such as hills, roads, bridges, fields, fences, and weather.
These include:
● hills, mountains, and raised ground, of many sizes and colours—both 3D cones and flat
elevations held vertically using slotted blocks;
● lakes, ponds, and rivers, of many sizes and colours, plus ‘whirlpools’ or eddies;
● fields/areas of land, of many sizes and colours, including a ‘ground’ sheet;
● roads, bridges, and fences which could also be interpreted as railway tracks;
● trees and cacti of different shapes and sizes;
● silhouettes of people of different sizes;
● weather elements such as sun/moon, clouds (cirrus-esque and cumulus-esque), clouds with
rain, clouds with snow, clouds with lightning bolts, held vertically using crocodile clips on rods
(whirlpools could also be used as ‘cyclones’);
● sticky notes for use as labels or annotations;
● and generic shapes, modifiable in different ways.
Participants can modify the card elements by cutting them and joining them together, and—although it
can probably go without saying—creative reinterpretation of what particular elements represent, or
could be metaphors for, is strongly encouraged. Our design process aimed to maximise participants’
ability to express their thinking, while not overwhelming them with sheer quantity of pre-made
elements. We wanted to provide opportunities for expression without prescribing a particular narrative
format, although ‘journeys’ of various kinds have often resulted. There are parallels with approaches
such as Rygh’s (2018) use of actor mapping flags and seascape maps or Ekblom et al’s (2013) use of
physical boat models and nautical elements in exploring customer experience strategy.
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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Figure 9. Elements of the Mental Landscapes kit laid out for participants
Figure 10. Elements of the Mental Landscapes kit laid out for participants to choose from. The wooden
blocks are used to enable flat elements to be held vertically.
From a systemic design perspective, the kit’s value is in enabling people to externalise or represent their
mental models of systems, individually or together, through using the landscape metaphors as a proxy—
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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as a ‘mapping’ process, there are parallels with methods such as Gigamapping (Sevaldson, 2018) but we
do not claim that the landscapes are in any way a ‘complete’ way of approaching a system (the
landscape elements are perhaps more like the different kinds of system element patterns identified by
Boehnert et al (2018)). The kit has generally been used in workshops where participants make
abstracted model landscapes which on some level translate imaginaries of concepts such as career
paths, life journeys, group projects, how people feel within their workplace culture, and visions of
humanity’s past and future. These could be investigated systemically in a more formal way, but the
landscapes enable a particular way of thinking about the structure of systems; landscapes are a common
type of metaphor in speech, particularly for talking about relations between parts of a whole, or
mapping the structure of one concept onto another.
In relation to the questions of interdisciplinarity which we explored at RSD8, landscape metaphors can
be especially relevant. Discussions about disciplines are very often expressed using landscape
metaphors—e.g. “What is your field?”, as we discussed earlier. It could be productive to use the Mental
Landscapes kit within a context where the dominant landscape metaphor may no longer express
people’s understanding and experience of what they know and how they work. In the first part of our
workshop, we posed the following questions as prompts for participants:
● How do we each imagine our knowledge in relation to other people’s?
● What would our ‘areas of expertise’ look like if they were actual ‘areas’?
We asked participants, in groups, to choose elements from the kit, and build models, on a black foam
core surface, that responded to the questions. The suggestion was that participants might initially create
their own ‘parts’ of the model, then discuss how to build a landscape together from them, prompting
discussion around the intersections and differences between people’s areas of expertise and knowledge.
Some illustrative moments and vignettes from the group modelling include:
● a group who found that the issue of the climate crisis was shaping their collective landscape,
with its inevitable approach being modelled as something like a storm front, a bright red
rectangle sweeping in, towards everything in its path [Figure 11]
● A participant who showed his disciplinary training and expertise (in computer science) as being
‘walled in’, corralled behind a fence—he said he felt he could see other areas of interest outside,
but felt unable to reach them [Figure 11]
● A group who used ‘rivers’ labelled “Why? What?” as a way to unite the different areas of
knowledge they identified they had collectively, seeing the rivers as being something like a
‘common thread’ (to use another metaphor) of questioning running through their professional
expertise [Figure 12]
What do these tell us about systems? We could imagine each moment here being translated into a
common schematic diagram format to enable comparison (e.g. as Phillips et al, 2013 did with
instructions people produced), and this would certainly enable a more formal analysis, comparison
between groups’ models, and so on. However, some of the emotive or meaning-laden metaphors
present in the use of the landscape elements would be lost; climate change as an “inevitable storm
front” is experientially different than climate change as an arrow on a diagram. This suggests the value
of tangible thinking tools for exploring the experiential side of systems—what do they ‘feel’ like from the
inside?
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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While the participants’ use of the landscape kit mostly involved the arrangement of materials pre-
figured into shapes and forms, their use of, for example, rivers to link parts of the landscape together
suggests a need unmet by a static set of elements: it is perhaps these connections between ideas and
concepts, and the nature of those links, that enable more of a systemic understanding. As such, the next
stage of the workshop focused on these relational aspects.
Figure 11. Both the climate crisis storm front and ‘fenced in’ area are visible here.
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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Figure 12. Rivers of “Why? What?” This photo (taken during the next stage of the workshop) also
includes relational material elements.
A relational example: emphasizing what connects
The next stage of the workshop process was based on methods arising from Aguirre Ulloa and Paulsen
(2017). Participants were asked to augment their landscape models using materials that emphasize
connections and relationships (elements of this second workshop overlay are visible in the photo above,
Figure 12)—how do these relationships create or illustrate a ‘system’?
● How are the different areas of knowledge related?
● What relationships influence our fields of practice?
● What do these relationships look like?
● What are their qualities, properties, values and “materials”?
Workshop materials included copper wire, elastic thread, yarn, and elastic banding (Figure 13). Their
variegated material qualities—thick, rough, smooth, stretchy, shiny, elastic, fragile—were intended to
help participants focus especially on the character of “in-between”—and to co-construct physical forms
that conveyed the nature of social and epistemological relationships that characterize their experiences
of interdisciplinarity. (In the collective connection and linking of ideas, there are parallels with Chueng-
Nainby et al’s (2016) ‘collective imagery weave’ method for co-design.)
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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Figure 13. Supply of connective materials emphasizing differing qualities of relation: elastic, shiny, rigid,
lose, firm, fuzzy.
The workshop’s connective materials did indeed provoke just this sort of conversation about cross-
disciplinary and interdisciplinary work. For example, one participant working in a group of five chose a
short strand of silver sequence from the pile of materials at the front of the room. She described her
choice to her group members, explaining that working in a way that connects two different disciplines
can seem very appealing from the outside, like a shiny thing:
“I chose this [strand of silver sequence] because, in many cases, the connection between two
different disciplines seems . . well, everyone says, ‘oh! that’s cool, that’s great, You’re working in
sociology and design!’”
Then she knotted the strand to make her more emphatic point: trying to forge a career by working
across disciplines can be very difficult:
“But then—and you know, and this is a very personal thing—for my career, it’s not cool. So it’s
like shiny and nice, but then . . .”
And here another member of the group completed her sentence, adding to the building narrative “—
and then there’s the reality.” The first participant began to drape her shiny strand from one paper cone
(taken to represent a discipline) to another paper cone (Figure 14). At this point, another participant
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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adds, “But maybe the shiny thing is not the connector piece”...And another still, “Yes, maybe put it
around here, yeah, I’m not sure if it is a connector...”. The group was collectively building a narrative
about the paradoxical character of interdisciplinary work.
As ‘connectors’ between elements of systems, the material qualities used here clearly offer something
beyond the “typical sort of systems diagrams with boxes here and here and here and here and arrows
connecting them” (Glanville, 2014).
Figure 14 A knotted strand of silver sequins used to convey the appeal and also the difficulty of
interdisciplinary work/working across disciplines.
A performative example: exploring dynamic performance
The dynamics of systems are not always easy to show with static diagrams, and even where they are
illustrated through visual system dynamics tools such as Loopy (Case, n.d.), these focus primarily on
different kinds of feedback loop and stocks and flows (Meadows, 2008) which do not necessarily capture
the experiential or performative elements of change over time. In the third session of the workshop,
based on work by Fass (2016), the materials that participants used had varying temporal qualities:
rolling, dissolving, dripping, magnifying, and flashing on and off. The materials included glass marbles,
wooden chutes, LED lights, a magnifying lens, ink, and sugar cubes. These materials were intended to
encourage/allow participants to express temporal experience and the dynamic nature of ideas;
knowledge systems change, knowing takes time. A second performative aspect came in here when
participants alter and re-arrange the materials in a live explanation of what they did. In this session
participants created new models rather than augmenting the model they had created in the first two
sessions.
One group used these materials to express the dynamic and shifting nature of interdisciplinary
relationships between technology, academia, science, policy, and design (Figures 15 and 16), seeking to
capture ‘the tension and influence between arts and everything else’ by showing in two and three
dimensions how elements are related. Attention, which they explained was represented by the marble
in a wooden chute, is shown moving from technology towards art and design, whilst attention in
academia increasingly turns towards critiques of technology. Using the lights allowed the group to show
how attention turns gradually towards effects of system interactions—it is not a sudden realisation but a
sense of growing awareness.
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RSD8 Symposium, Chicago, 2019
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Figure 15. This image shows how materials are organised to show their interrelationships.
Figure 16. This image shows participants arranging the elements to show how the attention is shifting
over time from technology towards art and design.
Another group’s model explored the growing influence of business on government policy. This is shown
by the use of lenses which move in and out (in the live explanation of the model) that enable ‘looking in’
and ‘zooming in’. This happens at different speeds and at different levels of magnification for the various
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aspects of the system. Red ink, standing for human blood, was dripped onto the sugar cubes,
demonstrating the potential cost in human lives of policies overly influenced by business objectives.
Again the progressive, gradual absorption by the sugar cubes of the ink stands for a dawning realisation
rather than immediate understanding. Relationships are shown using curling lines drawn onto the base
paper layer to indicate that interdisciplinary relationships are not linear or static; ‘the messy relationship
that connects all these different fields together is human behaviour’.
The specifics of the materials involved offer particular affordances for making system dynamics tangible,
and allow group members to collectively and consensually assign them particular metaphorical functions
that are played out in the model. For example, the steady, unblinking nature of an LED light illuminates a
specific area of the model and is small enough to be limited in what it can highlight, but can also fit
inside one of the wooden cubes. Sugar cubes can be stacked or lined up, coloured ink diffuses slowly
through them onto the paper below, but must be carefully dripped onto them requiring deliberation
and a steady hand. The glass marbles run through the wooden chutes much faster and are here used as
connective devices to help explain how attention shifts between knowledge domains. Lenses sit on the
base paper magnifying a specific area. When the group explained what they had done and why, they
picked up these lenses and moved them slowly from arm’s length away to directly above a confluence of
the orange and green lines drawn in tape on the base paper.
The collaborative and participatory nature of the modelling exercise means that materials were able to
work in a variety of ways, to produce a group understanding of how elements of a gradually changing
situation are related to one another. Participants used the physical materials to express various aspects
of the system, such as gradual state change, the placing of awareness, and shifting attention. The
contrasting speeds of change have been carefully arranged; the fast run of a marble through a chute,
the slow absorption of liquid by a sugar cube, a human controlled zoom in with a lens.
Discussion: How can systemic design use tangible thinking tools?
A selection of the models produced in the workshop were exhibited in the RSD conference’s Prototype
Gallery. This enabled discussion with other conference participants on the value of these kinds of
methods within systemic design—and pointers towards other examples—but also made clear that, at
least in the kind of workshop we ran, the performative aspects were important not just in the third
session, but in fact throughout: the models made most external sense to the people who made them,
during the sessions, with in-context discussion and explanation among the group. Examining them
afterwards, even with the annotations that some groups added, most models were not immediately
understandable as ‘diagrams’ in the way that gigamaps or synthesis maps (Sevaldson, 2018; Jones &
Bowes, 2017) might be. For the purposes of this paper, the authors reviewed videos taken during the
workshop to aid our memories and notes and photos taken at the time. This could be important to
consider when adopting or adapting tangible thinking tools for use in systemic design approaches to
participatory research or co-design—if the goal is to facilitate discussion and group reflection on a topic
during a session, the methods used here are effective, but if the aim is to produce an ‘output’ which can
be analysed and assessed to draw conclusions about the specific topic (e.g. to characterise people’s
mental models of a system), a different approach to structuring and facilitation may be needed to
capture the insights in a more formal way.
Our use of these tools in the workshop was intended as an exploration of the potential of tangible tools
in a systemic design context, not to come to definitive conclusions about when or how they could be
used, nor indeed around interdisciplinarity itself. However, we gained insights around the intricacies of
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running sessions using tools like these, and indeed particularly in relation to facilitating discussion
around interdisciplinarity with groups of participants who mainly did not know each other beforehand.
The modelling process–making, arranging, discussing, negotiating, telling, proposing, placing,
connecting, doing–allowed for more than solely representing, externalising or expressing. Instead, we
argue that there is a deepening of mutual understanding through shared discovery. The models
produced were part of a process of group members getting to know each other, in some ways a
conversation aid.
The major set of insights we derived was around the importance of materials as a way of exploring the
perceived characteristics of systems, in topological, relational, and performative senses. Across the
three sessions of the workshop, the differing qualities of varied materials became prompts and props for
storytelling, and participants acted with materials in a way provoked both by their physical properties
and by their dynamic connection. Participants did not simply externalise interior concepts and feelings
they held as individuals, but in interacting with the tangible materials and with other members of their
group, they developed ideas and built a model that both supported and reflected elements of the
narrative they were creating together. What results is tangible evidence left behind of the conversation
the group had—even a form of autographic visualization (Offenhuber, 2020) created by “material
traces” of a shared encounter, functioning like “collective imagery” (Chueng-Nainby et al, 2016). Coming
to shared understanding takes work—work that underlies any meaningful co-design, but work that is
often invisible and intangible. Here, by asking participants to use these diverse physical materials to
create models of interdisciplinarity, we were also asking them to make visible the effort required to
understand each other’s point of view.
We believe that there is value in further work along these lines in systemic design, using tangible
thinking tools to generate knowledge through this kind of co-created, shared encounter with often
ambiguous physical materials. Tangible thinking tools enable discursive, contingent and sometimes
unanticipated activities, characterised by serendipitous discovery and an uncovering of unseen
connections. The properties and characteristics of objects and the relationship between them act as
mediating agents not only for how people’s mental models and lived experiences structure their
understanding of the systems around them, but for an opening towards new shared realisations and
deepened understanding—not just for surfacing but also for generating new forms of knowledge.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Palak Dudani (Oslo School of Architecture and Design) for insightful input and
feedback on the workshop design and during the workshop discussion; Tammar Zea-Wolfson for
additions to the Mental Landscapes kit; and Delanie Ricketts for originating the kit. Dan and Lisa would
also like to thank Sara Hendren, Benjamin Linder, and Jon Stolk, from Olin College, whose 2018 Sketch
Model workshop was an important milestone in developing some of these ideas.
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