Understanding how design, systems and persons with disabilities might have something to do with each other is a challenge. I went to Bela Banathy for some understanding of what design is, and to Draper Kauffman Jr. for an understanding of what a system is. I pursued the Whole Systems Design program at Antioch University. Along the way, I have found that I have something to say about systems theory and design in relation to disability. This section is a reflection of my thought on design, systems and persons with disabilities, but I begin with a short description of my educational process through Divergence and Convergence.

I have created a model for the parts of disability that I expect to see more of in my future. During my Whole Systems Design education, I first pursued a period of Divergence, where I simply experienced as much as possible in an effort to find a direction. During Convergence, I created my domain of interest, which is People with Disabilities. I also studied design.

Design is, according to Bela H. Banathy, “the initiation of change in man-made things.” I feel that this is a simple definition of a multi-faceted activity. While design is used to fulfill the needs people have, it also helps us to simulate what we desire before it exists; design helps us to imagine our future based on current reality. Design is used to bring something useful and entirely new into the human experience. (Banathy, 1996)

Design is largely a process of thought and communication; you must first think of a design, and then communicate it with others. When thinking of a design, I have to first think of how something should be, and then create a plan of action. Design appeals to me because I can use it to reach for how persons with disabilities should be treated in America, and come up with actions that lead toward change. I am pleased with the fact that design can be used to create change in regard to the social problems that persons with disabilities face. The social problems that persons with disabilities face are systemic, and before anyone can design a way to work with a system, we must understand what a system is.

One definition of what a system is comes from Draper L. Kauffman, Jr.’s Systems 1: An introduction to systems thinking, and reads, “A system is a collection of parts which interact with each other to function as a whole.” This is a very basic definition, but there is more to systems theory than just this small definition. For example, systems cannot be divided in half with the expectation of having two, smaller systems. For a system to function, all of its parts must be present in the proper arrangement. In my mind, existence is made up of system after system, and the scale of these systems reaches to every extreme we are capable of sensing, and beyond. (Kauffman, 1980)

Interaction between systems interests me because of the way social organizational systems interact. Working to keep the growing efforts of disability organizations, which are systems, from disintegrating into a mob, while better defining the specific, working systems within these organizations, is one of the goals I have. Interaction between disability organizations must function well, or their efforts will not produce the quality results they seek.

Another important part of systems theory is the concept of feedback. Information concerning the efforts of disability organizations which is used to enhance their efforts is called feedback. Negative feedback is a kind of feedback that helps to cancel out or maintain a system’s work. For example, a disability organization that works to fight ADA legal cases in favor of clients with disabilities might have a gain in the number of clients they serve. Yet their work helps to lighten their load of clients, and keeps the number of clients they work for over a year at a level they can handle. (Kauffman, 1980)

If, however, there is an increase in the number of clients, each bringing more information, which keeps on rising, the legal workers won’t be able to keep their workload at a level they can deal with. The clients will keep coming, and the ADA legal workers will eventually have to find additional help. Feedback that continually gains is called positive feedback, and is another part of systems theory. Feedback loops can work together to create a stable system as well. If the gain in the number of clients the legal workers have to work for keeps rising, but the number of businesses in the area becomes educated about ADA law through previous legal action, the number of clients that the legal workers have will decrease or become stable over time.

Keeping a system like the organizational one I have described going requires more and more energy as it increases in complexity. As a social system it can never completely stop, or it will cease to exist. On the other hand, it cannot become endlessly more complex, or it will exhaust its energy. I believe that maintaining a balance of energy use within a disability organization is crucial to its survival. I also think that keeping a balance in any social system is difficult because change is constant, and it can take a long time for a social system to react to change. (Kauffman, 1980)

The other side of the change issue is that if change occurs too quickly it can do damage. If the ADA legal organization I described opens the door on Monday to find eighty clients with very involved issues to be represented, it could have some damaging effects, such as frustrated and angry clients and legal workers. The result could be confrontations between legal workers and clients who had been working together well before the rush. If the legal workers had the opportunity to anticipate the rush for their services, maybe through a news item they viewed the evening before, they could have prepared for it. I think that helping disability organizations to “see what’s coming” is a worthy goal for anyone involved in them.

The changes that come to disability organizations ideally should not be brought on a whole-organization level. Working with the parts of the organization that make the whole is a better option. So, in order to work with change in an organization, I would have to first figure out how the organization works through studying the parts that make it up, and their interactions. Learning about a disability organization can be tricky because, like many systems, there may be some hidden systems within it. If changes were made to the schedules of several employees in the ADA legal organization because it was felt it would benefit the system, it might turn out that the employees who had originally been working together were working together well out of personal connections between them, and that productivity dropped because of the changes made. The employee’s system of personal interaction was not readily apparent. (Kauffman, 1980)

Disability organizations, like many systems, have vulnerabilities that can be difficult to work with. Some of these vulnerabilities can be very small, or difficult to see coming. For example, a disability organization might be doing rather well as measured by number and quality of services provided. Yet if a manager of the Human Resources department is unsatisfied with his job, and starts to promote discontent within the entire organization through his contact with employees, then making a policy of open communication in the organization a part of the organization’s whole might prevent discontent by allowing anyone to voice his discontent without fear.

The knowledge a disability organization has grows with practice. I’m not sure any organization stagnates where the experience of its practices is concerned. The gaining of knowledge is a feedback loop that organizations have as part of their whole. While the experience of learning may not always be a pleasant one, the knowledge from the learning experience is a gain. (Kauffman, 1980)

Power, like knowledge, is a feedback loop. As a disability organization works for persons with disabilities, those persons become supporters of the organization, and the organization grows in social power. If the organization grows to the point of having too much power, persons with disabilities might feel like they are expected to support the organization. If the organization continues to grow in power, they may become an oppressive force instead of a supportive one. A positive feedback loop of power can be pleasant, exciting, disconcerting, or frightening depending on how much power it has. I think that working with a disability organization to keep the organization’s vision, goals and values in perspective is essential to worthwhile efforts to work for persons with disabilities.

By finding the feedback loops in a disability organization’s system, as well as identifying the system’s parts and the way the parts interact, I can use my Whole Systems Design degree to keep the organization healthy. Any change that I make to an organization must change the feedback loops I find within the organization or it may be a temporary change. To create long-term change within an organization, I might change the relationships between the feedback loops that are present in the organization. (Kauffman, 1980)

A disability organization is a complex system that has several features. It keeps itself stable enough to function, and hopefully to flourish. Such an organization looks for goals to pursue that support what it is doing, helping it to work toward being purposeful. Disability organizations follow a program, and are capable of changing that program to suit the needs of the organization. As a complex system, a disability organization can anticipate many changes that face it.

Disability organizations must continually learn how to interact with the social environment around them, or they will fail. Disability organizations can grow beyond one office, to different cities and towns and neighborhoods. If an organization is to survive, it can maintain and repair itself, or learn how. As changes face a disability organization, it can reorganize itself to better work with persons with disabilities. (Kauffman, 1980)

Because disability organizations are complex systems, they can handle more information, work better with change, learn faster, can be more flexible and are more capable of dealing with events that face them than a simple system. An example of a simple system might be one where you write to my address, and I mail you back a coupon for $50 off on a new unicycle. As a simple system, I don’t have as much to maintain or coordinate as a disability organization. I also don’t have to spend as much energy or resources as a disability organization, and I don’t have to work with as much information. I also wouldn’t reap the rewards of having a complex system like a disability organization.

It is easy to make decisions in a disability organization at a low level, and avoid problems. Doing so is faster and more flexible, but it can create conflict. At a disability organization with a problem in putting out a newsletter, it would be wiser to make the decision to approach the person who is responsible for the newsletter than to go to her manager. If the person responsible for the newsletter does not produce the newsletter, even after being reminded, then maybe it is time to approach their manager. In a complex system, it is always best to make decisions at the lowest level, but be willing to make a decision at a higher level if necessary. Whatever the case, it is a good idea to leave some room for the unexpected – maybe the person responsible for the newsletter is sick, or had a bad night before work. (Kauffman, 1980)

No system, disability organization, or society is going to work perfectly. Whenever I make a decision to change something within a system, it will almost certainly create another problem. As someone who supports disability organizations, I have to be ready for some sloppiness and unfairness, and be ready to work with change.

To understand a system you must understand it as a whole, as well as understand its parts. A “whole” in nature consists of a living organism that has several parts that interact with each other. Studying the parts of the organism alone will not help you to understand the whole of the organism; you must study the entire organism to understand it as a system. To understand an organism as a whole, you have to take the parts and the whole organism in context with each other. None of the parts in an organic whole has all of the properties of the whole organism; properties of the whole come from the interrelation of the parts.

To understand a whole you must understand the relationships between the parts that are within the whole. You must also understand the contents of the whole, and the patterns that are present within the whole. The whole of a human community contains parts, the interrelation between those parts, and patterns of interaction between its parts; it is a system. Disability organizations are not whole natural systems, but they are whole systems nonetheless. (Capra, 1996)

An organization that works for persons with disabilities has parts which interact with each other, it has patterns which are identifiable as such, and you must take the parts of the organization into context with each other as a whole in order to understand the whole organization. No single part of a disability organization has all of the properties that the whole organization does, and if you were to remove one or more parts of a disability organization it would alter or even possibly destroy the organization. An example of a disability organization as a whole might be the ADA legal support organization I have described.

The ADA legal support organization in this paper might have a public relations department, a human resources department, a research department, and a legal department. All of these departments are a part of the ADA legal support organization’s whole. Looking at the whole of this organization you might find that the different departments all interact with each other in various ways, and that each department has a pattern of interaction with specific other parts of the organization. For example, the human resources department finds workers for all of the other departments, while the research and legal departments interact with each other consistently to provide services to clients. The legal and the public relations departments have a pattern of interaction because the media, an outside system, often requires information from them. (Capra, 1996)

When taken into context with each other, the public relations, human resources, research, and legal departments make up a whole that functions to assist persons with disabilities. If you were to remove any of the departments in the ADA legal organization you would remove the organization’s ability to function as well, or possibly destroy the whole of the organization.