2014-03-20

Post-meeting artifacts

See the photo set at https://www.flickr.com/photos/daviding/sets/72157642879813595/.

GIGA-mapping

March 20 was the fourteenth meeting for Systems Thinking Ontario. The registration was on Eventbrite.

The location this time was the Auditorium, room 190 -- just down the hall from the Lambert Lounge where we usually meet.

Theme: Systems Thinking and Strategic Design

The emerging practice of systemic design (or system-oriented design) has been developed at OCAD University and Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) over the last several years. Strategic Foresight and Innovation students in the Systemic Design course have produced a number of large-scale system maps for representing innovations in complex social system problems, adapting AHO’s Gigamapping process. These are densely articulated rich pictures of systemic relationships in wicked problem domains, including urban ecologies, regional transportation, healthcare problem areas, and education. Gigamaps embody visual narratives of a social system and the value co-creation within it, including stakeholders, organizational structures, process dynamics, and unintended functions. Unlike the highly-abstract system models of system dynamics, or the process flows of service mapping, Gigamaps are a designed artifact encompassing the findings and concrete problems discovered in field research, synthesized as visual narratives that portray the functions of social system and the salient relationships in the problem area.

Suggested pre-reading: 

Birger Sevaldson, "GIGA-Mapping: Visualisation for Complexity and Systems Thinking Design", Nordic Design Research Conference, 2011.

Participants should not feel limited to this suggested pre-reading, but should recognize that other attendees may have not read, or are reading differently, that article.

Agenda