RECOLOR the World: Systems Mythology (Map + Toolkit)

A design tool for recoloring the world

Over the next decades, our global society will face continual disruption at massive scales. Disruption of the way we deliver goods and manage information, but also of the centuries-old institutions that define our society: education, health, work, government. As we pull the stuffing out of these systems and replace it with something else—pull learning out of schools and put it in the cloud, or pull diagnostics out of the doctor’s office and put them into consumer devices—we’re not always changing what these systems do, but we’re certainly changing what they mean to us, how they fit into our personal and shared narratives of what the world is, and how our society works.

We’re also building new systems—such as global networks and autonomous drone fleets—that have never existed before. We don’t have centuries of shared culture to tell us how these things fit into our lives. We need new stories, new mythologies, to address these transformations in the bedrock of our society. And we need new design tools for making sense of a rapidly changing world. Systems Mythology was developed to address this gap.

Publication Date: 2014