Designing Systems for People, Not Platforms

How scaling, speed, and smart tech left people behind—and how we bring them back into the system.

In every city and every organization, there’s a system at work. Some are visible—bike lanes, zoning laws, digital permits. Others are quiet but just as influential: the way decisions are made, who gets to participate, what is measured and what is ignored.

In my original report, I described the “fitness gap”—the disconnect between how systems are designed and the lived experiences of the people they’re meant to serve. Five years later, that gap is now a chasm. Smart city dashboards, AI-driven planning tools, and centralized digital platforms have accelerated—but the human contexts they impact haven’t kept pace.

Too often, systems are designed to optimize outcomes, not relationships. They promise scale and efficiency but flatten complexity, ignore culture, and push local nuance to the margins. We end up with platforms instead of places. Dashboards instead of dialogue.

If we want to build cities and communities that people feel connected to—not just pass through—we need to shift our systems thinking from efficiency to empathy. From automation to accountability. From designing for people to designing with them.

This post explores what it means to build systems that are relational, not just operational—rooted in the messy, beautiful dynamics of community life.

The Trouble with Scale

For the past decade, systems thinking in urban planning and tech design has been dominated by a single goal: scale. Whether it’s a startup replicating its model across markets or a city deploying smart infrastructure, the underlying logic is the same—move fast, standardize, and expand. But communities don’t scale like code. People don’t standardize.

Platform-based logic assumes homogeneity. It smooths out differences for the sake of efficiency: one interface, one data set, one policy to rule them all. In doing so, it erases the cultural, ecological, and historical contexts that give places—and people—their meaning.

This is how we end up with cities blanketed in frictionless apps but riddled with trust gaps. We build systems that predict behavior but don’t understand culture. That collect data but fail to ask consent. That optimize for usage but not for belonging.

Worse, this scale-at-all-costs logic can become extractive. It treats engagement as a metric to be harvested, rather than a relationship to be nurtured. As Sidewalk Labs’ failed Toronto experiment showed, even the most advanced “smart city” tech can unravel without social trust and democratic oversight.

So we have to ask: What’s the cost of scaling without understanding? And what might it look like to design systems that grow with the grain of local life, rather than against it?

What Makes a System Human?

Human-centered systems aren’t just more ethical—they’re more resilient. They’re built on relationships, transparency, and a feedback loop that actually listens.

In the report, I explored design methodologies like AEIOU, empathy mapping, and persona development to better understand user needs. But truly human systems go further: they recognize people not just as users, but as co-creators. The difference is agency.

This is where Indigenous systems thinking offers powerful guidance. Frameworks like Two-Eyed Seeing—a Mi’kmaq principle that brings together Western and Indigenous worldviews—offer a model for layered understanding. One eye sees through empirical analysis, the other through relational, land-based knowledge. Together, they offer a more complete view.

Human systems:

• Invite multiple ways of knowing.
• Honour place, history, and memory.
• Make space for contradiction, ambiguity, and emergence.
• Accept that “progress” may mean slowing down.

When we shift from control to collaboration, systems become adaptive—not rigid. They create room for care, not just compliance. In cities, this looks like neighbourhood assemblies shaping zoning laws. In design, it looks like co-creation with the communities most impacted—not just “stakeholder feedback” after the fact.

Moving Beyond Optimization

The most powerful systems aren’t always the most complex—they’re the ones people trust. And that trust is earned not through speed or scale, but through shared meaning.

Many of the most promising system innovations today are surprisingly simple:

• Community broadband initiatives are putting digital infrastructure in public hands.
• Public libraries are becoming hubs for digital access, civic learning, and climate resilience.
• Participatory budgeting gives residents direct influence over how public funds are spent—rooting financial systems in lived priorities.

These models don’t aim to optimize people—they aim to amplify them.

This shift—from extraction to exchange, from optimization to orientation—is essential if we want our systems to support long-term well-being, not just short-term outputs. It’s a move from designing for compliance to designing for connection.

As Donella Meadows wrote in Thinking in Systems, “We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what it tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to create something much better.”

In a time of climate urgency, AI acceleration, and global instability, this isn’t just good design. It’s a survival strategy.

Systems That Care

We don’t need smarter systems. We need systems that care.

That means systems designed not just to function, but to feel. Systems that don’t just calculate risk, but cultivate trust. Systems that don’t just organize people—but are organized by them.

As designers and city planners, we have the tools to shape not only how systems operate, but how they relate—to people, to land, to time. That’s a powerful responsibility. It means resisting the allure of optimization when it comes at the cost of dignity. It means embracing feedback, context, and slow growth. It means designing with humility.

We have enough platforms. What we need now are patterns—systems rooted in reciprocity, in culture, in care. This is what human systems look like. And this is where the future of meaningful design lives.