Engaging with competing demands in systems through design: Fostering a paradox lens

This paper aims to foster a paradox lens on competing demands to ensure their productive engagement in design. Competing demands are inevitable and ubiquitous features of today’s systems. Thus, being subject to competing demands is a pervasive and inherent feature of designerly work. Drawing from organizational studies, we first outline four main streams of competing demands underlying today’s systems; related to time, cognition, social interactions, and focus. We demonstrate the importance of a purposeful conceptualization of competing demands by exemplifying how different conceptualizations can lead to different responses. We suggest employing a paradox lens on competing demands, which stresses that seemingly contradictory or even mutually exclusive factors can and ought to coexist and therefore should be leveraged simultaneously. Through a series of research-through-design experiments we explore how framing competing demands according to paradoxes impacts the way they are approached in design practice, and how paradoxes can be engaged
with through design.