A Method of Generating Societal Vision Based on the Social Systems Theory

In this paper, we propose a method of generating societal vision based on the social systems theory. When trying to generate innovation for the future society by some kind of new technology, we must have a vision of how the technology will spread in the society and change it. It is quite difficult to imagine how a new technology will spread to and influence the whole society, considering the high complexity and opaqueness of the modern society. To generate innovation and design a better future, some frameworks to understand society as a whole are necessary. In this paper, we first refer to some existing methods for thinking about the future and indicate how they are not appropriate to our research question due to the lack of a framework to understand the societal wholeness. Second, to create the framework, we (1) refer to the social systems theory that considers society as an autopoietic system whose elements are communication, (2) utilise the perspective of a functionally differentiated society and (3) refer to the functional method to analyse the social systems. Further, on the basis of the theory, we propose a method of generating societal visions, and also show the worksheet that is used to practice the method. Through this work, we enable a user to think about the network of the functional systems of the society and its change, and then to imagine the influence or spreading diffusion of the innovation to various areas outside the target domain of the innovation.