Social system analysis — an approach to design insights at scale

 H

umans design products and services, which in turn influence future designers. Design is not a linear, one-way process but a continuous correspondence of creation and iteration. A new product or service creates new entanglements of relationships that influence and therefore create new designs, and so forth.

Most design research methods quickly reach limitations. Products and services are likely used by groups of people who have different lived experiences and interact with them for different reasons and face a diversity of problems. For instance, the measurement of user satisfaction reveals little about actual user attitudes. As a result, this approach does not find the underlying causes of a problem and is likely to provide solutions that don’t address the depth of the problem.

Designers, therefore, require an interdisciplinary approach that helps to identify the underlying causes of a problem at a meaningful social depth and offers design solutions by addressing the combination of behavioural and social factors that lead to the problem.

In this article, I introduce an interdisciplinary approach that I term social system analysis. This approach analyses sociocultural contexts and identify problems within a social system. This qualitative approach to framing the data helps to design insightful solutions that fit within a given system. While existing examples of systems thinking are driven by big-data and quantitative measurements (see below), my approach adds an ethnographic and qualitative component. It provides a qualitative analysis of the social components that make up a social system. The contribution that I present in this article is a way to frame the qualitative findings that complement the existing visual systems-level methods such as Flow Analysis. By identifying the social components that make up a social system, the intention is to be able to deliver a more targeted analysis and identify weaknesses, strengths, pain points, and other problems within a social system.

Limitations of Design Research

Focusing on one metric and using familiar research methods can lead to siloing of problems, ideas, and solutions. Siloing is a problem because some solutions only seek to address one particular problem. This may come from a bias to improve one metric without acknowledging that causing an increase or decrease of the number is likely more complex than changing one action through addressing one section of human behaviour. Designing to solve towards improving one metric may have unintended consequences and lead to new problems.

While organisations may want to change one particular action, such as increasing user activation, active days, or user retention, the problem is likely deeper and entangled with other problems. The problem may include that the measured data are inaccurate, incomplete, outdated or wrong.

The case study I discuss below demonstrates that addressing a single metric through a single action is often only a small temporary fix, if that. To achieve sustainable long-term success of a design, it is necessary to address the complexity of a problem, not just one part of it — the social transformation that underlines and propels trends.

While systemic transformation is longer-term and has deeper social implications, trends are shorter-term and have more shallow social meanings. Social media ‘phenomena’ like ‘flossing’ (the dance move) are trends, whereas shifting forms of media consumption and production (including who can create, share and succeed at content) are deeper. Fidget spinners are trends, whereas social anxiety due to job insecurity, wealth disparity and climate change hold their causes in deeper, more complex social problems.

Improving singular metrics may be appropriate and possible for some projects, but as we scale the complexity of product and service design, there is increasingly a need to develop analysis methods appropriate for system-level design thinking.

What methodology can designers use to analyse the multitude of social factors that contribute to the systemic and large-scale causes of a problem with a product, service, or complex social system?

Social System: nodes and interactions

Social system thinking is situated in Actor Network Theory and Social Network Analysis. In the way that I conceptualise it, it’s an approach that visualises complexity by mapping the combination of factors that contribute to the particular flow of something while also providing a framework that identifies the underlying sociocultural components that lead to the actions and behaviours. When applied to a particular problem of complexity, it emphasises that there are social groups that interact with a service or business and provides a sociocultural analysis to understand the interactions and experiences they have with a service or product.

A social system, as I define it, is the combination of social components and the interactions that manifest relationships between them through exchanges. Each social group can be understood as a node that is connected to one or several other nodes. A node is defined by a set of characteristics, such as age, gender, or consumption behaviour, but this can also be product-specific, such as a social media platform. A social node is made up of collective individuals and has its own values, meanings, behaviours, motivations, conceptions and beliefs, all of which shape how they connect within and with other social nodes. A node may be a distinct social group, such as a demographic group in a city or state, or one department in a large organisation that has an identifiably distinct way of being and hence interacting in the context of the system of the organisation at large (think of silos of sales, marketing, and engineering teams).

Relationships: binary, agentive, and entangled exchanges

Relationships are multiple, binary, and entangled. We influence our surroundings and our surroundings influence us (binary). We hold multiple relationships at the same time. Think of the different relationships of identities: the same person may hold different relationships as a mother, sister, daughter, friend or manager. Identity relationships in turn influence behaviour by being entangled with other relationships, such as the entanglement of how we engage with our natural surroundings is influenced by our geographic location, language, occupation, identity and others. To analyse the relationships, I draw on the qualitative components of the systems, particularly the relationships that entangle physical and non-physical actors in the system, such as people and products (physical) and concepts or rules (non-physical), as well as the sociocultural attributes of system nodes.

I understand systemic relationships through Tim Ingold’s idea of human correspondence (I wrote more about that here) — because social systems are made up of relationships that overlap, interact, and (re)create themselves to manifest new ones. The human correspondence is what binds the relationships together, the moments and concepts of exchange and connection that combine relationships and create new ones. He refers to these meetings of lives as knots and meshworks, to highlight the overlapping entanglement of relationships, and that single connections are part of and collectively create the whole system.