On the Wenoski design community an interesting topic came up around the question of designing "systems that care."

I jumped in to suggest the framing was quite broad, and questioned: what do we really mean by "systems that care?" If we don't have a current example of such a system, then we may just be speculating, a fun thing designers do but ultimately without much impact. Are there examples of systems that demonstrate the human values of caring?

I went on a bit about my own (doctoral) research that relates - which is essentially that values become embedded into systems and organizations, but they become part of structural processes (see Giddens, 1984) and become invisible to the participants in the process (Star and Bowker, 1999, others). They may be better perceived from outside the process. Its unlikely that caring becomes so embedded that it becomes part of a process or system. But it depends on what we define as a system, does it not?

Most of the responses on the Wenovski Design Thinkers interpreted systems as organizations. There were plenty of references to early management and motivation theorists and such. Nothing very postmodern was noted. I do think we need to be a little circumspect and self-critical with our futurism though, which perhaps explains to critical tenor of my question and my request for examples and models. And McGregor's Theory X (or Maslow's Theory Z), which was not mentioned but actually is relevant) may be a little far afield to this question.

I think we have to relocate the focus of agency on real people making a difference, and systems that might support and enable those people. We have to consider what Greg Walsham (It was Rose and Jones, after Walsham) calls the dual dance of structure and agency. Caring is as agentic as it gets. As a phenomenon, it moves against structures in favor of the relational, personal, and disruptive. Many of the best examples of actual caring are so revealed because they contrast so clearly against the background of process structures that enforce consistency and efficiency.

The word "create" in response to systems is a little modernist also. We don't create systems, we co-create and redesign things, usually within existing systems. No systems are designed from scratch, and so we may not ever be able to definitively "create." What we may need to enhance care is a stronger role for human engagement and conversation! Care will show up in systems when we show up with caring.

Designers and people in the caring professions may have different and valid ways to think about caring & systems. My concern for speculation is that, from a design perspective, I want to be clear about what care is and where it shows up in systems, by design or by emergence. Care is obviously a deeply-held value, and one I think is misunderstood. It would be like asking "can we design systems that love?"

While my job is often about technology design, my philosophy is humanistic. So my response is to encourage a reframing about the perspectives on systems that we might entertain, and to dig into where caring actually shows up.

Claudio Ciborra in his last publication, the Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems, (2002) talks about the ways in which systems have a social life the evades our best intentions. While designers may wish to infuse a humanist intent, the social history of systems shows that they become bent toward instrumentality and can take on ends we did not intend. For one, Ciborra cautions against the notion that we can "design in" qualities we believe will be perceived per the intent of design. He notes how "drift" and technique and adapted uses change any system toward often-unforeseeable outcomes. He brings up Heidegger's framing of the Gestell, that systems have a tendency to level experience and become totalizing, wherein everything becomes a resources available to yield. He describes a move from the rational systems approach to one committed to "Xenia," or hospitality. We host our systems design practices with our stakeholders, moving from efficiency to care in the process. Can we actually do this? Ciborra leaves this chapter a incomplete, without an example of caring.

Anyway, all this is to say that, as a former student and designer in Artificial Intelligence, I learned my lesson a long time ago. I am standing for treating care as a uniquely human and non-embeddable value. Perhaps we can create the content for integrated social systems that require the performance of human care, as in healthcare systems. But following Ciborra's line, its clear to me that, over time, the stresses on and drifting of the health system form a context where care becomes a deliverable, and less of a human value. Care must be evidenced in constant acts of kindness, empathy, and situational intervention. So perhaps, systemically speaking, it may be selected by careful hiring, modeled by behavior and rewarded in organizational values sustained by ongoing dialogue.