Systems Thinking for Bottom-Up Social Innovation: An Examination of Social Practices

The principles of sustainability and social design have been widely adopted to develop new models of community practice, engagement and innovation. Considering the growing interest of social practices and sustainable models, systems thinking provides an opportunity to further frame and organise various design activities to develop a deeper understanding of the spaces of impact through social innovation. Cybernetics, as a way of looking at and engaging with systems, is discussed to position the role of the designer. Using mapping as a visualisation tool and conversational activity, case-studies are evaluated to provide a broad framework of bottom-up systems thinking through participatory methods to enhance social and cultural values. This paper examines the practices of existing social enterprises to identify best practices, develop replicable models and processes, and inform future social design contexts.


INTRODUCTION
Design has broadened and expanded its research perspectives to involve environmental, technological, political, social and cultural systems (Norman and Stappers, 2015). This shift has produced a new focus towards social design that considers the impact, scale and sustainability of design activities and practices. The growing interest in the complexities and interdependence of design systems has posed a new concern for understanding and measuring the effectiveness of individual activities against broader systems of change. This calls for new ways to define and categorise systems to develop common goals, generate linkages and identify potential gaps in practice.
Design involves the social process of creating through the development of contexts and systems within communities of practice. This paper presents a discussion of systems thinking to support how the visualisation tool of mapping can be used to clarify models and frameworks of practice through bottom-up scaling and thinking. Through an analysis of existing sustainable practices, this paper examines the role of mapping to identify emergent themes and overlapping areas of interest by (1) introducing systems thinking as a design PAGE 139 Chon, H. (2020). Systems Thinking for Bottom-Up Social Innovation: An Examination of Social Practices. Strategic Design Research Journal, volume 13, number 02, May -August 2020. 137-149. Doi: 10.4013/sdrj.2020.132.03 The design problems of today are challenged by increasing complexity due to difficulties in defining situations and contexts. Design in the 20th Century shifted from modes of making to manufacturing, naturally evolving into a focus on systems and systems of systems. The current state of design complexity requires designers to understand the interrelatedness of system-to-system relations in order to produce effective designs. Dubberly and Pangaro (2015) emphasise the cybernetic viewpoint of design, as conversation, to address complexities through subjective framing for the identification of common goals. This requires the 21st Century designer to be open to collaboration and conversation in order to discover new goals, opportunities and co-construct arguments.
It can be presumed that all design activities are cybernetic, in that designers engage with systems to effect change while simultaneously existing within the systems as members of society. The implications of second-order cybernetics, positioning designers as active participants of systems under continual modifications, democratise design as all systems require participatory and social activities through circular processes (Glanville, 2007;Krippendorff, 2007). This produces new discourses of design, building narratives of how one action is understood and perceived in relation to another, motivating broader levels of participation. Social design has become a recent focus for many designers, businesses and communities to sustain cultures and societies. As citizens become more invested in social issues and needs, new innovations are necessary to provide solutions to improve capabilities and relationships within social systems (Simon and Davies, 2013). According to Manzini (2013), social innovation initiatives will become increasingly more relevant as contemporary societies shift towards sustainability. This transition will require new ways of understanding the systems of social design to map new possibilities and future directions. One way to ensure that designers can meet the challenges of sustainability is to reinvestigate the relationship between design and systems thinking (Sevaldson, 2017).
Designers are positioned to think about the future and contribute solutions through understanding how design might impact the existing problems faced today (Margolin, 2015).
Margolin defines the role of the "citizen designer" within the following system of actions:

MAPPING AS A SYSTEMS THINKING METHODOLOGY
This research began with the premise of understanding bottom-up social innovation processes that allow social actors to become co-producers and co-designers of intended social interventions (Morelli, 2007). The three levels of action (Margolin, 2015) provide the boundaries within which social design practices can be further evaluated. This research reviewed a total of 22 social enterprises and sustainable business models that were established in Singapore within the past 10 years. Of the 22 case-studies, 9 were selected to further analyse based on their common goals of community building, knowledge sharing and cultural sustainability.
The challenge of this research was to connect the 9 social design models and forge systemic relationships to propose a more impactful sustainable movement within the region. Taking from the previous section's argument that all design exists within systems and all systems are cybernetically understood, mapping was used as a tool to define the three levels of action and engage with the existing systems. The methodology involved a threefold process: 1. In-depth case-study analyses 2. Mapping of keywords and drawing relationships 3. Identifying thematic parallels

2.1.Case-Study Analysis
The 9 business models included in this study were selected based on an active engagement of sustainable initiatives involving either social or environmental issues within the creative industries. They have been organised in Table 2. Built on the principle of "doing good through art" to build communities for vulnerable children with special needs, living in poverty or suffering from mental health issues.

Baliza Shop Social Issues
Partners with a vocational center in India to provide transferable skills through textile design. Traditional crafts are sustained and preserved through education, profits are used to support communities of women and children living in poverty.
The selected cases are representative of existing activities that increase the social value and quality of a revised, inclusive market (Morelli, 2007). It can be seen from the table that the immediate concerns of the 9 case-studies involve community building and participation through fashion and textile design, handicrafts, art therapy, music education and sustainable consumption. The cases were analysed and further classified by sustainability agenda, focusing on environmental or social issues, and operational models. These social enterprises serve as catalysts to position art and design as a means to connect and engage with communities, promote inclusivity, empower through knowledge and skills, preserve traditional crafts and culture, and adopt ecologically mindful solutions. The 9 case-studies represent a sampling of social enterprises emphasising the importance of collaborative and participatory methods in creative practice.

2.2.Mapping
Form-giving, as an aesthetic and synthetic activity, is necessary to explicate design processes and designerly thinking (Sevaldson, 2017). The visual thinking process of mapping provides participants with rich insights and knowledge by moving across divergent and convergent dimensions of thinking. This produces a generative process of creating structures through interpretations and sense-making, to be further shared and communicated.
Mapping was found to be a necessary tool for this study, to visualise the relationships between the 9 case-studies and identify any overlapping themes or key areas of interest.
According to Bowes and Jones (2016), "humans have been obsessed with systematically collecting and reorganising what in effect already exist". Mapping becomes a design tool to produce representations of complex systems to better understand problems through visual analysis. Glanville (2007) uses the analogy of drawing to illustrate the conversational experience of design, where the central act in designing becomes a cybernetic conversation with oneself. This same analogy can be applied to the activity of mapping, whereby a designer or researcher constructs meanings that can later be reinterpreted when viewing and observing the visualisation of information. The designer, as an observer, is outside of the system when placing pen to paper but becomes part of the system when interpreting and making sense of its implications. This allows a process of divergent-convergent thinking through the criticality of producing keywords and linkages.
The researcher applied the analysis of the case-studies (inferred from Table 2) into a process of unfiltered mapping to draw out keywords, actions, descriptions, boundaries, sub-themes and themes. As outlined in Table 3, three levels of mapping were implemented and information was reorganised, restructured and layered to develop a bottom-up mapping of the 9 case-studies. Although sustainability was an overarching theme, the mapping process revealed that it was not a key objective or underlying motivation shared by all cases. Using Margolin's (2015) system of actions as a framework, a list of keywords was organised and mapped according to the commonalities found in individual practice and categorised as activities centered around communities, inclusivity and narratives. The keywords were further expanded with descriptions and reorganised by common linkages to identify the core themes of sustainability, skills and social change. These three thematic boundaries were scaled up to define the broader organisational implications for cultural, circular and design economies.

2.3.Levels of Action
The mapping process produced shared themes and identified broad areas for future action, producing the classification of individual, group and organisational activities. Mapping has revealed the macro, meso and micro-levels framing the 9 case-studies, suggesting a need to build a classification of sustainable practices in the arts. Systems thinking can be used as an approach to analyse and understand existing situations at the micro-level, where impact is defined by the activities of existing social practices.
Actions at this level produce and propose alternative solutions by introducing community activities, products and services to communicate individual narratives, and create spaces for inclusivity and community-building. The micro-level presents current and ongoing activities as the premise for proposing bottom-up social innovation and change.
The meso-level, which begins to link and connect the existing practices, comprises the key areas for collaboration beyond individual or organisational engagement. This space involves group action through the development of discourses to align shared principles and produce potential spaces for collaboration. Sustainability has become a key focus for individuals, businesses and governments, making it imperative that designers consider the implications and adopt its principles throughout processes of doing, making and communicating. Skills are not only necessary to transition societies from one way of living to another but transfer intangible knowledge through traditions and craft, producing communities of practice. Social change occurs through the active involvement of individuals, communities and organisations to create new movements of thinking and living.
The macro-level indicates opportunities for design to address future contexts of social innovation and sustainable practice. A discussion of a circular economy is inevitable when considering sustainability as a paradigm for creative practice, as all citizens contribute to the adverse outcomes of human action. The cultural economy is relevant to the understanding of how culture is transferred, preserved, reproduced, communicated and redefined against micro-meso-macro-level changes. Within the scope of this study, the design economy is defined as containing all working relationships and knowledge pertaining to the transfer of skills to form communities of practice.
Designers are collaborators in developing methods for dealing with complex systems and applying human-centered perspectives through design implementation (Norman and Stappers, 2015). Defining three levels of action provides a framework for understanding the current landscape of social innovation practices. Actions at the micro-level are easily influenced and concern individual practices and ground-level interventions. The macro-level is defined by the overarching principles framing all activities through economies informing circular models, cultural preservation, and design practices. However, it is at the meso-level that design may be of most influence as this level involves interactions within social networks and institutional frameworks (Margolin, 2015). It is proposed that strategies at the meso-level demand a participatory approach, through co-design, for stakeholders to take ownership of solutions and increase the willingness towards multiple compromises (Norman & Stappers, 2015).

BOTTOM-UP SOCIAL INNOVATION THROUGH SYSTEMS THINKING
This paper proposes that cybernetics, as a conversational process, is deeply embedded within all design activities. Designers observe systems to induce change, producing holistic overviews across sociocultural contexts. This was explored through the conversational tool of bottom-up mapping to position existing social practices and mark the boundaries of systems and sub-systems. The visualisation process provided insights to further understand the deeper levels of existing social enterprises, identifying gaps in how the three levels of action form a system of change. One key factor in systemic change is the role of collaboration, which has become an important focus of design in recent years. Sanders and Stappers (2008) address the ambiguity of participatory methods by defining the terminology associated with collaborative work. Participatory thinking and collective creativity allow multiple stakeholders to develop peripheral awareness of neighbouring domains of practice and realise shared objectives and goals. The differences between the roles of co-creation, co-design and facilitation are distinguished by how the designer or domain expert is positioned within the collaborative working group. According to Sanders and Stappers (2008), co-creation involves any form of collective creativity between experts and non-experts. Co-design is defined by any form of co-creation, between designers and non-designers, following a design process. Designers, researchers and experts can also assume the position of facilitators, leading and guiding participants through creative processes. This produces a hierarchy of collaboration, where participants may enter a participatory working group as a co-creator and eventually engage in the process of codesign. Furthermore, the role of facilitator is increasingly important to develop and foster future collaborative teams to create more impact for sustainable systems.

3.1.Participatory Approach to Social Design
Social innovation requires the alignment of activities, processes and policies across micromeso-macro-levels. Figure 1 illustrates the hierarchy of collaboration, positioning the modes of participation to the three levels of action.

Figure 1. Levels of Social Design
The micro-level, concerning the practices of community, inclusivity and narratives, engages participants through the model of co-creation. Participants are involved in collective creativity, but the methods and processes may not necessarily follow those arising from the discipline of design. It is proposed that the meso-level, containing the sub-themes of skills, sustainability and social change, require design expertise to realise relevant and meaningful outcomes. This demands collaboration through co-design, as all involved stakeholders would need to partake in design development processes to inform and enrich a more dynamic space of participation. The macro-level focuses on the broader systems of the design, circular and cultural economies. It is at this level that the role of the facilitator would be most appropriate to foster the strengths and critical approaches of all stakeholders, through activities of co-creation and co-design.

Model for Social Innovation
Situating current practices allows for the representation of collective issues and concerns to be identified for future solutions to emerge. 5. Systems can be speculative -proposing future problems against artificial constructs.
Systems serve as explanations for complexities and a successful systems design is able to be decomposed, simplified, or approximated by linearisation (Norman and Stappers, 2015).
Understanding the abstraction of problems through a system is a necessary precondition to developing frameworks, models and processes for future actions. As systems provide an understanding of ways of life, by containing all existing things and relationships, it conceptualises and articulates the problems spaces for future design enhancements. The discussion of the case-study has presented a systems thinking methodology within the scope of social design.

Figure 2. Systems Thinking for Social Innovation
This research presents an approach to systems thinking for social innovation that relies on (1) a clear understanding of systems as a means to frame and contextualise communities of practice, (2) the use of visual methods and tools to draw linkages and identify emerging themes, (3) the evaluation and classification of complexity through micro, meso and macro levels, and (4) developing a strategy for intervention. This framework provides a new perspective of design's role in defining sustainable futures through the application of systems thinking in social innovation and design.

CONCLUSION
Design has produced a world in which designers are presented with opportunities to alter, augment, intervene, and change existing conditions by imagining future possibilities. Many of the challenges facing the world today extend into a range of complex, societal issues resulting in a call towards sustainability. This has shifted the role of design from using systematic methods to produce artefacts and information towards a focus on interactions and citizenry. Design now requires new ways of thinking and doing through modifications, iterations and reflections to establish more robust models to evolve as a discipline for positive, social change.
The current movements of sustainability have developed participatory methods and community groups, informing discourses on various issues affecting complex systems.
Cybernetics was introduced as a way of thinking and viewing systems through the three levels of action -micro, meso and macro. This paper collected, organised and evaluated the emergence of socially and environmentally positioned creative practices through a method of visualisation. Case-studies were analysed and categorised according to scale, scope, and impact to inform future contexts of collaboration through the modes of co-creation, codesign and facilitation. This bottom-up approach to systems thinking has produced a classification for the case-studies and future models of sustainability and social innovation.
The implications of this paper suggest that systems thinking can be utilised to analyse, examine and contextualise existing creative practices, mapping the spaces of interaction to build a framework of understanding.