Gigamapping is a primary methodology created within the Systems-Oriented Design (SOD) framework and systemic design practice. It is a visual practice used to express collaborative design investigations within highly complex domains.
By creating extensive maps that span multiple layers and scales of a system, Gigamapping enables mixed teams of stakeholders to envision and formatively visualize large-scale, highly complex, part-whole system structures and networks.
Key characteristics of Gigamapping include:
- Interactive Collaboration: It allows diverse groups to pool their experiential knowledge, interactively investigate relationsips between multiple intersecting categories, and build shared models of a problem.
- Intentional Complexity: Gigamaps are purposefully designed to be dense and complicated. Rather than reducing a situation into simplified abstractions for public communication, they present the salient concerns within a system in its “native complexity,” ensuring it is deeply understood by the domain participants living in that reality.
- Boundary Critique: The visualization process facilitates boundary critique, helping stakeholders to collectively negotiate how a system is conceived and framed.
- Co-constructed Reality: The systems depicted in Gigamaps are not just objective entities; they are models of organizational structures and processes that are co-constructed through cycles of design conversation and agreement among stakeholders.
Ultimately, Gigamaps act as system designing artifacts. They go beyond simply analyzing or explaining a problem; they empower teams to actively propose and design effective solutions and forge new relationships within complex sociotechnical systems, such as public policy, healthcare, and urban planning.
Reference: Metcalf, G. S., Kijima, K., & Deguchi, H. (Eds.). (2021). Handbook of systems sciences. Springer.