Welcome to SiD

By Tom Bosschaert, creator of the SiD framework

Where this fits

This is the author's personal story: how a kid obsessed with science grew disillusioned with gadget design, discovered systems thinking, and spent two decades building a framework for meaningful change. If you want to skip ahead to the method, you can. But this story explains why SiD exists, and what it is for.

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A world of wonder

I started writing this book ten years ago, in the summer of 2009. The challenges the world faces have only grown since then. That is what pushed me to finish it: the conviction that SiD is an essential missing tool in our effort to build a future that works.

As a kid in the 1980s, I was consumed by science. I spent weekends reading popular science magazines, amazed by secrets of the atom and our expanding understanding of galactic mysteries. I wanted to be part of it. Science and innovation meant hope, not just for me, but for the hungry kids on the television, the victims of disasters, the downtrodden. Around age ten, I messed with everything from electronics to biology. I "invented" a perpetuum mobile (a rocket car with generators on each wheel) and was hugely disappointed when my uncle Andre explained that it would not solve the world's transport problems. I became fascinated by architecture, deep ocean life, and the beauty of pyrite crystals and the golden ratio. A world of wonder.

The gadget-design dilemma

At 17, wide-eyed and stubborn, I went to Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands to study Industrial Design Engineering. It was the closest thing I could find to becoming an inventor. The program's tagline was "making products for people." That was what I wanted: to make life better for as many people as possible.

But during my studies I saw that the reality was different. The focus was on making better-selling consumer products, not on helping humanity. Hip gadgets, apps to sell phone services, the next piece of plastic. Issues like world hunger, water shortages, climate change, and poverty seemed shelved as impossible problems belonging to other fields. When I raised questions in class, I was told these were topics for sociology, politics, and global economics, not concerns of a design degree.

This perspective turned design from an innovation engine into mere gadgetry. I could not see how mobile phones, carbon bicycles, and interactive websites helped resolve the issues that bring suffering and extinction to living things. Disillusioned, my work ground to a halt. In a spasm of desperation, I moved to Perth, Australia, formally to study architecture, but mostly to escape the crushing feeling of purposelessness.

From chaos theory to systems thinking

In Australia I started reading piles of books: ecological design, land ethics, the Club of Rome, various holistic philosophies. Few provided real relief. Each seemed to wear its own set of blinders. What gave me fragments of hope were, to my surprise, abstract concepts: chaos theory and complexity thinking. They at least tried to comprehend the complexity of the world without denying its essence.

Chaos theory, with its famous parable about a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, set me thinking. Could there be small actions that cause world-changing effects? And if so, could you purposefully find and execute them for global benefit?

I was helped out of that illusion soon enough. While small actions can eventually turn into world-changing events, controlling their effects is impossible. That would require predicting the future, which chaos theory itself proves cannot be done. Yet I found new purpose: to discover a way of acting within complex systems that has a good chance of producing positive global effects.

I realized I wanted to work not on designing things, but on design that supports positive change in societal systems. I became interested in systems theory, complexity theory, eco-engineering, and cybernetics. Looking around in the year 2000, I could find no framework for practical application, and very few organizations focused on this kind of work. The need was clear: an integrated perspective on how to purposefully improve society for the long run, combining knowledge from economics, sociology, ecology, and more. Something that allows you to act responsibly without drowning in infinite complexity.

Building SiD

The key insight came slowly through experiments in Australia: stop trying to develop new objects and singular solutions. Instead, focus on systemic impact on global society as the final measure of anything you do. The objects are tools along the way.

This led me to start building what would become SiD in the summer of 2001. First, just for myself. Later, I saw the value it could bring to others who struggled with the same questions.

Symbiosis in Development (SiD) has been formally developed since 2005 as a step-by-step process for generating sustainable, symbiotic solutions. I continued my research at the Yale School of Architecture, where I had the chance to draw on many brilliant minds.

While studying at Yale and running the sustainability consulting practice Except Integrated Sustainability, SiD grew into a complete framework for responsible innovation from start to finish. Through daily use, it expanded to include stakeholder participation, co-creation, and multi-factor optimization. SiD became not just an effective tool, but an enjoyable process that delivers surprise, deeper insight, and learning from others in the co-creation process.

With my colleagues at Except (to whom I am deeply indebted), we have applied SiD to over 600 projects worldwide. These range from some of the first designs in vertical agriculture, to systemic solutions for complex supply chains at companies like IKEA and Heineken, to training hundreds of people in sustainability thinking, to smart government policies, corporate strategies, and designs for buildings, cities, and industries.

An open invitation

SiD is far from done. As a framework meant to be practically useful, I look forward to seeing it improve and expand in the years to come. I look forward to learning from applying SiD in projects at Except, but mostly to seeing what others will do with it: reinterpreting it, adapting it, applying it to challenges I can hardly imagine.

This book is thick and expansive, but I hope you will find you can read it in parts, and that it proves useful as a practical handbook. It was made possible with the help of various people, most notably Renske Kroeze in the role of early-phase editor and conversation partner, Emily Vierthaler for editing support, Damon Taylor for the ever-available mirror and mastery of conversation, and Hanna Maas for the wonderful hand-sketches throughout the book.

I invite everyone who wants to participate in expanding SiD to do so. This is why I have made SiD open source.

To a beautiful time. May SiD bring hope and opportunity to you as much as it has brought me, and may it lead to a more resilient, harmonious, and flourishing world for all of us.

Tom Bosschaert, August 2019

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Takeaway

SiD was born from a simple frustration: brilliant tools existed for making consumer products, but no practical framework existed for making the world better. Two decades of building, testing, and refining produced one. The chapters ahead show you how it works.

Next up: Why Now? explores the forces that make systemic change not just desirable, but urgent.