What is Dialogical System Design?
Dialogical System Design names, studies and applies the process of developing, agreeing and changing social systems dedicated to meeting common needs.
Examples of this are present wherever peoples gather and develop consistent community. Usually we see it's evidence in organised responses to recurrent inherent collective dynamics - such as justice, learning or health - emerging at the intersection between the personal, the relational and the political.
Design is the art of sketching or marking something out, imagining and constructing its details and putting together the components that make it work.
In its early uses it also referred to the meaning something had.
Design was what something signified.
A system is an ongoing harmonious orchestration of elements.
We use the word system when the elements are interconnected in such a way that they produce an effect over time.
Like a band of many musical instruments, that play together to make sound they couldn’t make on their own, a sound that lingers and moves you long after the session is over.
The continuing nature of the system is key to it's definition.
Once it’s set up we don’t need to build it again and again: it keeps running.
A system hosts different activities or practices, as a band can play many different tunes or the world wide web can deliver many websites like this.
So the interconnected elements of a system form an ongoing environment where certain possibilities of interaction are welcome and thrive.
In this way a system has influence. It is not neutral but an instance of power.
Lastly, dialogical means that something is made by, for and changed through dialogue.
One consequence of this, when talking about social systems, is that a system is intentionally open to change and adaptation from more than one source.
Dialogue isn't simply conversation. It's not compromise or power games.
Rather dialogue is a way in which two or more elements sustain a dynamic balance, going beyond what they already know or believe, in discovery.
In this way dialogue is a means to action.
In our case, of designing social systems, dialogical means each system is designed through a process of joint discovery towards solutions that are new or updated to current circumstances.
This means the system’s practices will promote further action through dialogue.
And it means the system itself will keep evolving, faithful more to fulfilling its intention than to staying the same.