The posts in this series have traced a set of connections between the systems design literature - explored on a recent Linköping University PhD course, and the Tavistock tradition of systems psychodynamics - from how organisations maintain defended images of themselves (the Image and the organisation-in-the-mind), through how simulations and prototypes function as transitional objects requiring containment (simulations as transitional objects), to how the designer's body becomes a container for the system's projections (the body as container), how co-creation workshops carry an unconscious life beneath their structured surfaces (the unconscious life of the workshop), how aesthetic disruption encounters social defences it has no theory to account for (aesthetic disruption meets social defences), and how co-design itself functions as institutional myth and anti-group when its participatory assumptions meet defended systems (the corruption of co-design). Each post has, in different ways, arrived at the same figure: the designer positioned at the boundary of a defended system, subject to its projections, asked to carry what it cannot think. This final post addresses that figure directly.
The systems psychodynamics tradition has a precise framework for analysing the position of the practitioner who works at organisational boundaries: the BART model - Boundaries, Authority, Role, and Task (Green and Molenkamp, 2005; Lawlor and Sher, 2023). Originally developed for the analysis of consultancy and group relations practice, BART provides a vocabulary that design research has not typically developed for examining the designer's own experience as systemic data rather than personal noise.
Boundaries
Boundary is the first element of the BART framework, and it is the one that most immediately connects to the designer's experience in complex institutional settings. As Lawlor and Sher (2023, p. 30) describe it, the analysis of boundaries involves scrutinising "how permeable are the boundaries", the question of "being too far inside or too far outside the boundary", and the challenge of "taking up a position on the boundary" - between the individual and the group, between thoughts and feelings, between the socio-technical system and its ecological context, between the consultant and the client system.
The designer who enters a complex institutional setting is immediately confronted with boundary questions that the design literature tends to treat as logistical - access, stakeholder buy-in, scope definition - but that the psychodynamic tradition treats as diagnostic. Where is the designer positioned in relation to the system's boundaries? Are they inside or outside? Who decides, and on what basis? The boundary is not merely spatial; it is emotional and political. As I argued in Who Whom?, the programme at SCÖ sustained incompatible realities by keeping them in separate registers; the designer was positioned across a boundary that the system needed to maintain, which meant that the designer's presence was simultaneously required (to demonstrate that integration was happening) and impossible (because integration threatened the defensive separation the system depended on).
The psychodynamic insight is that the permeability of boundaries is not a fixed property of the organisation but a function of its anxiety level. When anxiety rises, boundaries harden - departments retreat into silos, role definitions become rigid, information stops flowing across interfaces. When anxiety is contained, boundaries become more permeable, and the kind of cross-boundary work that design proposes becomes possible. The designer who finds that their access is being quietly restricted, that meetings are cancelled, that stakeholders become unavailable, is not encountering a scheduling problem; they are encountering a boundary that is hardening in response to what their presence represents.
Authority
Authority, the second element, is where the designer's position becomes most precarious. Lawlor and Sher (2023, p. 30) describe authority as involving "a scrutiny of different sources from above, alongside, below and within" - authority granted by the organisation's hierarchy, by one's peers, by those one serves, and by one's own sense of professional competence and legitimacy. The systems psychodynamic consultant learns to examine their authority from all four directions simultaneously: what mandate have I been given? By whom? Is the mandate sufficient for the task? And do I experience myself as authorised, or do I feel like an impostor?
The design researcher working in an institutional setting typically has a complicated relationship with authority. They may have formal authority from a programme board or a research ethics committee, but that formal authority may bear little relation to the authority they experience in practice. In The Service Designer as Abstract Signifier I explored how the designer's role becomes a screen onto which the organisation projects its own conflicts about authority - the designer is simultaneously expected to provide expert solutions (authority from above) and to facilitate participatory processes (authority from below), and the contradiction between these expectations is the system's, not the designer's, though it is the designer who carries its weight.
The psychodynamic tradition foregrounds a dimension that design discourse tends to leave implicit: that authority is not only granted or withheld by the organisation; it is also taken up or refused by the practitioner. Obholzer (2019), as cited in Lawlor and Sher (2023, p. 30), insists on authority from within - the practitioner's own capacity to authorise themselves to act, to speak, to make interpretations. A designer who has formal authority but does not experience themselves as authorised - who feels like an intruder, who hedges every statement, who defers to clinical or technical expertise even when their own expertise is what the situation requires - is not merely lacking confidence. They may be carrying a projection: the system's own ambivalence about whether it wants to know what the designer might reveal.
Role
Role, the third element, is distinct from job description. In the systems psychodynamics tradition, as Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 13) describe it, the analysis of role concerns the dynamic intersection between what the organisation asks of the person, what the person brings to the position, and what unconscious forces shape the actual role that is taken up - which may differ substantially from the role that was formally defined. The concept of "person-in-role" captures this: the role is not a container the person steps into but a negotiation between the person's own psychology, the organisation's needs and defences, and the unconscious dynamics of the system.
For design researchers, the gap between the formal role and the actual role is often the most disorienting aspect of working in complex institutional settings. The formal role may be "service designer" or "design researcher" or "user experience lead"; the actual role - the role the system needs the person to occupy - may be something quite different. It may be the role of the person who is supposed to make the intractable problem go away without disturbing anything. It may be the role of the scapegoat onto whom the system's failures can be projected. It may be the role of the idealised saviour whose arrival will solve everything, followed inevitably by the role of the disappointing failure who solved nothing.
In Algorithm Archaeology at SCÖ, the attempt to map a system that resisted being mapped was itself diagnostic - the gap between the formal task (produce a map) and the actual task (be seen to be mapping without producing anything that would challenge the existing arrangements) was the data. In Beyond Technomagic I argued that organisations can commission design work precisely as a defence - the presence of a designer demonstrates that something is being done, without requiring anything to change. In both cases, the designer's actual role was shaped not by their job description but by the system's defensive needs, and understanding this distinction becomes substantially easier with a framework that distinguishes between the espoused role and the role that the system's unconscious dynamics produce.
Task
Task, the fourth element, brings the BART framework to its sharpest point. The systems psychodynamics tradition distinguishes three forms of primary task: the normative task - what the organisation says it exists to do; the existential task - what its members believe they are doing; and the phenomenological task - what can be hypothesised, from observation of actual behaviour, that the organisation is actually doing (Lawrence, 1997; Lawlor and Sher, 2021, p. 12). The gaps between these three are the terrain where social defences operate: the organisation says it is delivering patient care (normative), its members believe they are doing their best in difficult circumstances (existential), but what the system is actually doing - its phenomenological task - may be managing anxiety through ritualised activity that maintains the appearance of care while avoiding its emotional weight.
For the designer, the diagnostic question is: what task am I actually being asked to perform? The espoused task - "redesign the patient pathway", "improve the digital service", "facilitate co-creation" - may be real, in the sense that someone commissioned it and resources were allocated to it. But the phenomenological task - the task that the system's behaviour reveals it is actually asking the designer to perform - may be something else entirely. It may be to produce artefacts that demonstrate progress without producing change. It may be to absorb the system's anxiety about its own inadequacy. It may be to carry the hope that if someone is working on the problem, it need not be thought about further - which is, as I discussed in the post on co-creation, a recognisable instance of Bion's (1961) basic assumption pairing.
The BART framework, taken as a whole, reframes the designer's experience. The confusion, frustration, and disorientation that design researchers commonly report when working in complex institutional settings - the sense of not knowing what one is supposed to be doing, of being simultaneously needed and rejected, of producing work that is praised and then ignored - are not evidence of personal inadequacy or methodological failure. They are data about the system: about its boundary dynamics, its relationship to authority, the gap between the espoused role and the actual role, and the difference between the normative task and the phenomenological one.
Countertransference as the designer's primary instrument
The BART framework provides the analytical structure; countertransference provides a particular kind of data. In the systems psychodynamics tradition, countertransference - originally a psychoanalytic concept referring to the analyst's emotional responses to the patient - has been extended to the organisational consultant's experience within the client system. As Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 8) describe it, the practitioner's task includes "interpreting and using the consultant's own feelings, phantasies, impulses and behaviour as indicators of having become not only in but part of the client system". Lawlor and Sher (2023, p. 22) add that "the consultant's feelings may provide significant evidence about underlying feelings within the client system".
This reframes the designer's emotional experience in the field. The designer who finds themselves feeling useless is not necessarily useless; they may be receiving a communication about the system's own sense of helplessness. The designer who finds themselves feeling contemptible may be carrying the system's projected contempt for the vulnerability that design's questions expose. The designer who finds themselves feeling confused may be experiencing the system's own incoherence - the gap between its espoused theory and its theory-in-use, held in the designer's body because the system cannot hold it in thought. In the post on the body as container I argued that projective identification is a somatic process - the practitioner feels in their body what the system cannot think - and that this makes the designer's body not a neutral instrument of perception but a receiving station for the system's unconscious communications.
The practical implication is that the designer needs a framework for distinguishing between their own psychology and the system's projections - and this distinction is never clean. Countertransference is not a simple receiver; it is shaped by the practitioner's own history, their own defences, their own relationship to authority and role. What the systems psychodynamics tradition offers here is not a technique for isolating systemic from personal material but a practice - supervision, reflective groups, the discipline of examining one's own experience systematically - that makes the distinction progressively more possible. The designer without this practice is left carrying material they cannot process, experiencing affects they cannot locate, and - most damagingly - attributing to their own inadequacy what is in fact a communication from the system.
What this means for design research
The systems psychodynamics tradition does not offer design researchers a new methodology. It offers something in a different register: a theory of the practitioner's own experience as systemic data, and a practice for working with that data. The BART framework provides the vocabulary - boundaries, authority, role, task - for analysing the structural position from which the designer works. Countertransference provides the mechanism by which that position becomes knowable through the designer's own feelings, fantasies, and somatic responses. Together, they reframe the designer's relationship to the system: not as an external agent applying methods to a client, but as a participant in the system's unconscious life who can, with adequate support, use that participation as a source of understanding.
The previous posts in this series have argued, in different registers, that design interventions in complex institutional settings encounter defences - that representations meet defended images, that aesthetic disruptions meet social defences, that co-creation workshops carry an unconscious life, that the designer's body becomes a repository for what the system cannot think. The BART framework and the concept of countertransference provide the practitioner with one way of working with these dynamics - not the only way, but one that foregrounds the practitioner's own affective experience as a legitimate source of systemic evidence. The question - first raised in the orientation post and returned to throughout this series - is whether the design community is prepared to build the containing structures that this kind of practice requires: the supervision, the reflective groups, the theoretical frameworks, and the institutional support that would allow designers to use themselves as instruments without being consumed by what they are asked to carry.
References
Bion, W.R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock.
Green, Z. & Molenkamp, R.J. (2005). The BART System of Group and Organisational Analysis: Boundary, Authority, Role and Task. Organisational & Social Dynamics, 5(2), 247–269.
Lawlor, D. & Sher, M. (2021). An Introduction to Systems Psychodynamics. London: Routledge.
Lawlor, D. & Sher, M. (2023). Systems Psychodynamics: Innovative Approaches to Change, Whole Systems and Complexity. London: Routledge.
Lawrence, W.G. (1997). Centering of the Sphinx for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations. Paper presented to the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations, Philadelphia.
Obholzer, A. (2019). Authority, Power and Leadership. In A. Obholzer & V.Z. Roberts (Eds.), The Unconscious at Work: A Tavistock Approach to Making Sense of Organisational Life (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.