Our Approach

At the heart of Soft Systems Lab is a simple belief: the arts are not an optional extra to healthy communities. Arts engagement is necessary for good public health.

Many deep-rooted challenges facing communities are not problems that can simply be fixed with hard technical solutions alone. They are complex human situations, shaped by histories, values, environments, lived experience, and different ways of seeing.

There is, of course, a place for hard and technical systems with clear right and wrong measurements — for engineering bridges, designing some types of infrastructure, and solving problems where precision and certainty are essential. But the totality of human systems is rarely so straightforward. You can design for connection, but trust, belonging, and community cannot be engineered through technical solutions alone; they emerge through softer systems and require participation, attention, imagination, care, and time.

Soft Systems Lab takes inspiration from systems thinking, in which situations are seen as connected wholes rather than isolated parts - exploring patterns and feedback loops. A particular influence in this area is Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology, which recognises that situations can be understood differently by different people.

This way of seeing is not new. While systems thinking is a relatively recent Western framework, Aboriginal and other First Peoples have practised deeply relational ways of knowing and being for tens of thousands of years, understanding people, place, culture, and environment through relationships, responsibilities, and reciprocity.

Why “Soft”?

For us, soft means responsive, curious, relational, and adaptive. It means holding complexity rather than immediately reducing it to something simpler and easier to manage; listening more, asking better questions, considering multiple perspectives, and learning our way forward together.

As an artist-led practice, we use interdisciplinary arts-based methodologies; play, movement, storytelling, and collective art-making to sense and create the conditions for change — bringing forward embodied, tacit, and lived knowledge and reveal relationships, possibilities, and potential futures that can be difficult to access through discussion, documentation, or conventional problem-solving alone.

We use art to co-create ethical, equitable social, health, and cultural futures.