On the role of systems thinking in design and its application to public self-services

This paper uses the paradigm of e-accessibility, and in particular the application of publicly available selfservices in order to demonstrate and discuss the power of a Systems Thinking perspective in Design, and more specifically in the design of services. Our aim is to present some justification as to why employing systems thinking can help designers to identify and acknowledge holistically the dimensions of problem space for which they are required to design. The richness of the approach will be discussed, through some theoretical tenets of systems thinking, such as the use of the emerging properties, and the law of requisite variety, notions of second order cybernetics etc. in the conceptualisation and praxis of design