Systems thinking is a mindset to delineate underlying systemic interrelationships which are responsible for patterns of behaviour and events. It embodies a world-view for understanding objects and values; a world-view where understanding lies in interpreting interrelationships within systems.

Interrelationships are responsible for the manner in which systems operate, and result in the patterns of behaviour and events we perceive. In this sense, a system exhibits characteristics that cannot be found in any of its parts. These characteristics emerge from the interactions of the parts of the system.

Systems thinking is commonly applied to understand the material world of objects. Here the perspective is an operational one and has the aim of managing the environment to target particular objectives.

Systems thinking is also applied to manage the non-material world of values, where the aim is to define mental systems for managing the unknown in the context of:

With regard to the first type of value system, we live in a culture whose attention to, and understanding of, reality is changing. This is becoming ever more evident in our contemporary educational and social systems, science and art and design.  At present three perspectives of consciousness dominate our Western culture, from which subjective reality is viewed, perceived and conditioned.

The first, in a historic sense, is the traditional view of body and mind as separate entities: the mind is separate from the body, mind from matter. The outer external physical world is where subjective experience is located external to the brain and is transmitted to the brain for analysis.

In sharp contrast is the reductionist view, where subjective experience, whether perceptual, emotional or otherwise, is located in the brain and not external where preference and priority are given to objective, observable and measurable phenomenon. 

But there is a third perspective whch defines consciousness not as the end product of material evolution, rather that consciousness creates reality, or is reality, where both internal and external phenomena are valid and valuable.

A recent social survey indicates that we are presently at the forefront of a cultural shift to the third perspective, which has been called an Integral Culture. The values and beliefs inherent to this rapidly growing community include idealistic and humanistic motives, concerns and interests in relationships and psychological development, environmentalism, and the co- creation of a positive and meaningful future.

Advances in the new sciences of quantum physics, holistic biology and complexity theory (with their discoveries of non- locality, ecological independence, and self-organising systems) are proceeding according to the third perspective.

Nick Udall believes that this is an opportunity for designers to transform their identity in order to learn to explore, harness, and play with, their own consciousness.  Further still, the emphasis is no longer on designing objects per se, but designing conscious objects which through mediation, or relationship, enable the Subject to release an attachment to the known, and an aversion to the unknown, and experience an empathy with knowingness. It is this empathy, and indeed intimacy, between the Subject and the Object which activates numinous experiences and expands consciousness.

Udall’s view is that it has become essential, if not imperative, for designers to question the role of Design, and their relationship to it. Design has helped increase material investment to an unprecedented level, but it has not really advanced humankind in terms of improving the content of experience. Design has certainly focused on the user so that interaction is pleasurable with regard to function; but pleasure itself does not bring happiness, or add complexity to Self. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.  To improve the quality and richness of subjective experience, the designer must discover ways of encouraging mindful interplay - to experience the totality, the subtleties, and the numinosity of living.