Deconstructing Wicked Systems to Understand Them

I find myself attacking and deconstructing various wicked, complex systems and over and over again I lean into taxonomies and hierarchical presentations as a way to understand scope and to pull apart the various pieces.

I am currently working on a diagramming structural racism and I have worked up a couple of ways to present the information I have been researching but ultimately, it will stay unfinished. The rest of the work needs to be done in collaboration with designers who are part of the communities who have been impacted by these structures. I can’t know the impact or if I have things correctly organized because it isn’t my experience.

Clusters of structural racism outcomes seen in different fields. Often perpetuated by technology building on existing systems and biased AI. These are just two examples from the whole which includes Housing, Finance, Social Media, Activism, Technology, Healthcare among other systems.

User research with interviews would be one way to tease out these experiences. Alternatively, collaborating together, letting other voices take center stage and learning from their experiences is another way.

I get nervous about showing this work. I don’t claim to be expert and don’t want to insinuate, through my whiteness and privilege that I have experienced any of these effects, or that I know better. All I have done is read a lot of articles and research papers and tried to pull out pieces and organize them in a way that makes sense to me—as a starting point.

This uncomfortable feeling with this work is interesting to me when digging into different kinds of systems. Designers often dig into things they are not experts in. We are experts at digging, in questioning, in collaborating, in learning and then synthesizing and hopefully, re-presenting information and ideas in a way to be more easily understood by others. Personally, I synthesize research visually instead of writing literature reviews.

But this feeling of discomfort, drives home to me, the absolute necessity to do user research and to co-create with the people directly affected by what I am researching or designing.

After deconstruction and organizing, I want to look at relationships of the actors within these complex overlapping systems and plot out places for change. How do we start over? How do we redesign these systems with equality and inclusivity in mind? We must do more than surface level changes. How can design light up these opportunities? How can design change deep structural issues in our society? I don’t know if we can, but we sure can make things more transparent and bring it all out into the light.

If you are BIPOC and interested in co-creating this work with me, please let me know in the comments. I am currently working on this as part of my work at the ADL (Anti Defamation League) in our efforts to mitigate online hate.