by Darwin Muljono, service designer
This blog is a summarized version of the topic I am writing that will be published as a full paper at the RSD (Relating Systems Thinking and Design) 13 conference.
Introduction
This article aims to explore design research inquiry, pointing out where researchers could investigate problems from a systems perspective that allows a critique of the system itself, e.g., the fundamental contradictions of the structure, the legitimacy of its existence, etc. I propose applying an approach from the tradition of the philosophy of science called critical realism, which was founded by Roy Bhaskar for complex systems research. Critical realism emerged from the attempt to clarify the relationships between knowledge and reality. Consider our daily work as service designers; we conduct research to obtain insights (knowledge) about people’s experiences (reality).
Imagine a scenario. A customer engages an organization’s representative who presents a bundle of products and services to address the customer’s needs and problems. Despite somewhat exceeding the customer’s budgetary constraints, the customer is impressed and convinced. However, the customer engages an implementation team later, only to realize that what’s really needed is a fraction of the products/services bought to augment the customer’s already existing solutions. Of course, this describes only a moment (or an event) in a customer’s experience with an organization. However, such a moment is not always immediately apparent from what our research participants may recount.
Structural Analysis
In trying to understand the customer’s pain points, it is often not enough to analyze just what’s being said by the customers or any service recipients. To surface problems more systematically, it is crucial for researchers to investigate and hypothesize what the structure is like that makes it possible for a specific pain point to occur. This is what a critical realist researcher would ask to study complex systems. First, people (or actors) are never truly separated from their environments. And, in an ecotone — an overlapping area between multiple environments — when two or more actors interact with each other, it creates an event (or a moment) where each of their tendencies and behaviors are driven or constrained by their environments, i.e., causal mechanisms in those structures produce those tendencies.
In the example scenario above, it may be the case that the customer’s pain point is the result of multiple distinct but interrelated events. For one, the potentiality of the pain point is planted early in the customer experience during the transaction between the customer and the organization’s rep. Here, a contradiction exists between the customer’s financial reality and the rep’s need to reach a certain sales quota. Then, the customer’s pain point is fully realized when they engage with the implementation team. But when a design researcher and service designer dive deeper, they might learn that the main tension might be between the organization’s rep and the implementation team — an internal contradiction between fulfilling sales quota and prioritizing customer success. Such a case is, of course, not necessarily always happen, i.e., there could be win-win situations. However, further analysis might reveal that such a tension is a contradiction in principle, and the win-win situations occur only by coincidence. We should then consider if such a trade-off is worth the pain points that will eventually happen to the customer.
Deep diving into the problem
In our service design practice, we frame problems from a systems perspective and surface systemic challenges through understanding experiences. Yet, from my own experiences, understanding experiences is a basic requirement for a complex system researcher. There needs to be an understanding of what the structure of the world is like. While we can’t achieve the “absolute” truth, critical realists will attempt to be as accurate as possible and, at the same time, realize that their framework comes with certain prejudices and blind spots. That being said, critical realists assume that in multiplicity and plurality of ideas and knowledge interpretations, it is possible to postulate that some ideas or knowledge are more accurate than others. In the social sciences, it is possible to postulate a structural analysis that explains the tendencies of certain behaviors. For example, when we look at academic performance, while there’s some truth in individual efforts that contribute to results of certain measures, e.g., test scores, literacy level, etc., we could also explain that from the actors’ worlds, such as the structure of educational institutions and the country’s policy in education, which would contribute greatly to the behavioral tendencies of certain types of actors, e.g., without governmental or infrastructural supports, single parents that hold multiple low-paying jobs may not be able to be as involved in their children’s education, whereas wealthy parents can afford their children’s extracurricular activities or private tutors, etc.
Conclusion
This article intends to push our practice so our research is more inclusive of more systems-oriented entities. The introduction of critical realist open and stratified reality—empirical, actual, and real—is to help us understand distinct layers of reality and how they are interrelated. One aspect that is most useful is realizing that events happen because of various complex, intertwined mechanisms. The pervasive attitude in the design disciplines often limits our interests to what specific problems and challenges do to people, usually pain points, why they happen, and what we should do to address them. However, we should also be interested in why they are the way they are. That is, why do these things operate the way they do in the first place? This line of inquiry begins to surface insights on a systemic level. In proposing design solutions, what are the things or features that we preserve? Why do we preserve them? Most importantly, do they have to be the way they are? And I believe the answer to the last question is a resounding: “No.”
