Tag: SystemsBookcase

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Clash of system goals

I took this photo at Étampes station. It shows a nineteenth-century roof that spans four platforms with no internal columns. And then, right in the middle of that column-free space, stand the massive posts that support the electric cables — added in the 1920s.

It’s a clear clash of system goals.

The roof was built to create a grand civic space — a place that celebrated the station as a node of travel and encounter.

The cable gantry belongs to a different system altogether: it’s about maintaining a rigid, continuous grid for electrical power.

In the first, place is what matters.

In the second, continuity is what matters.

Retrofitting the roof to carry the cables would have been expensive, yes. But the network engineers could at least have designed special gantries for inside the station — ones that respected the goal of place while still meeting the goal of network.

The station architects began with a blank sheet of paper and could design more or less what they wanted.

The electrification engineers didn’t start with a blank sheet, but arguably designed as if they did.

We rarely start with a blank sheet of paper. Existing and new systems bring different goals. Our task as designers is to reconcile those goals through better design.

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The Map Room – mapping systems, horizons, and change

This week we ran The Map Room, the second workshop in our Critical Thinking for Engineers (and Other Humans) programme. If the Observatory was about looking outwards, this session was about making sense of what we’ve seen—mapping the system, tracing its logic, and finding out where we might start to make change.

We explored:

  • The Systems Bookcase model: a tool for organising system layers, from what gets built through to the values and paradigms that shape it.
  • The Three Horizons framework: helping participants spot signs of long-term change—and understand their own role in it.
  • The Library of Systems Change: a way of recognising how future practices are already quietly present in today’s systems.

Some of the most powerful insights came when participants started applying the tools to parts of their work they hadn’t considered “design” before—like internal policy, comms strategies, or team culture. It was a reminder that systems thinking isn’t just for buildings or infrastructure—it’s for how we work, organise, and evolve.

We also talked about system boundaries, shifting roles, and what it means to design something that doesn’t just meet a brief, but changes the system the brief sits inside.

The Map Room builds on the Observatory, taking data and analysing it in readiness for the Decision Engine, where we decide on the next course of action to take. That will come later in June.