Design Branding/Business Fundamental

Design Journeys through Complex Systems: Practice Tools for Systemic Design

Peter Jones Kristel van Ael (Authors)

Kang Ye-jin (Translator)

2025. 7. 11. 272 pages 178×245 mm Softcover 9791168230958 KRW 36,000

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Design Journeys through Complex Systems combines systemic design, leading thinking practices, and years of the combined authors’ experiences into a practitioner’s handbook for design thinking. By drawing upon the authors’ Systemic Design Toolkit, this book provides detailed knowledge of systems science, expanding upon essential systemic design texts in order to demonstrate the power of visual sensemaking.

No matter if you’re a design professional or have never come across design systems, these pages allow the user to reassess, reorientate, and address complex issues. By using these methods, you’ll be able to visualize socio-technical systems, democratizing engagement as you simplify complex thought processes.

Formed by leaders of and pioneers in systemic design, Dr. Peter Jones and Kristel Van Ael, Design Journeys through Complex Systems is an illuminating text that ushers in a new era of systems change. If you’re a change-maker looking to become a thought leader, the methods embedded in systemic design will light your way to success.

편집자의 글

Design Journeys provides a repertoire of collaborative practice tools for system solutions that we developed and tested in dozens of projects, as well as in teaching at our university courses. The book integrates theory and practices of the Systemic Design Toolkit for design cocreation, in a single handbook, designed to be like a tour guidebook for both Tourists and experienced Explorers. The Journeys methodology anchors powerful system methods from the Toolkit with cases from the two authors’ years of experience in systemic design projects and method development.

Design Journeys has been updated since the first run as well, not a second edition, but the more recent books printed have many small updates that clarify how to use the tools based on feedback. We found the experience to develop and define the text and tools to be a wonderful learning experience, and we are working on new material now because this has opened up new areas of practice. The tools guide systemic design practice across the contexts that we regularly tour with actual clients or research cases: Public sector (government), systems change (often non-profit or development programmes), and sociotechnical services (private sector, mixed).

The journeys travel well in education, as the Toolkit is used in several graduate design programmes. In practice, governments are the most common systemic design sponsor, as they have the budgets and mandate to address problems at the aggregate system level and the access to multistakeholder groups. Corporations, even when leading large consortia, rarely fund efforts beyond their organisational boundary, and corporate cases are largely sociotechnical or complex service systems. Systems change projects have rapidly emerged from foundation-sponsored non-profit programmes, across many sectors, including the United Nations and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) programmes and innovation labs.

There are translations in Japanese and a Korean in the works, as these tools are being used in complex service design there. Other languages are being explored, as well as extensions to the toolkit. Find more about the Systemic Design Toolkit.

추천사

Design Journey Through Complex Systems is an essential contribution to the systemic design field. Jones and Van Ael have masterfully curated tools and methods from a wide range of domains and integrated them into a Systemic Design Methodology for practitioners. They have built a path between theory and practice upon which future systemic design practitioners will learn to address change.

Liz Sanders (Associate Professor in Design at The Ohio State University and Principal at MakeTools, LLC)

The focus of the book is participatory design, “learning while traveling together.” Design is seen as “system sensemaking” that reaches beyond mere systems thinking. The “practice tools” help teams reveal the complexity of their organizations and provides maps of that complexity. Reframing, iterating, mapping, and imagining are terms used. Hierarchies, feedback loops, networks, boundaries, and more—what I refer to as “systems processes”— are explored and graphically displayed. A beautifully designed guide to systemic design by a couple of the most accomplished systemic designers out there.

Lynn Rasmussen (Author of “Seeing: A Field Guide to the Patterns and Processes of Nature, Culture, and Consciousness”)

Design Journeys is an important and timely book that contributes to a growing body of thought on design for positive systems-level change. A must read for anyone addressing complex problems in the 21st century.

Terry Irwin (Professor & Director, Transition Design Institute, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University)

Designers are now starting to address issues within supercomplex systems that have multiple stakeholders, deep, difficult issues, conflicting requirements, political and policy issues, and a process that can last many years. Traditional design methods are not sufficient. In their book, Peter Jones and Kristel Van Ael provide a superb, well-structured, and documented set of methods and tools that set the standard for these new skills and methods. All designers involved in these essential societal issues and instructors in design classes that address these issues need this book.

Don Norman (Author of “Design of Everyday Things”)