I take the train almost every week. The Deutsche Bahn is maddening — and, for a designer, instructive.
"The non-functioning of German railways has damaged trust in our democracy more than all the enemies of the state ever could."
A quote that stuck with me — and one that holds a deeper lesson for us as designers.
🚆 I'm not here to bash Bahn. I travel long-distance by train every week. My company's no-fly policy is something I defend — out of conviction for sustainability, and the kind of mobility future we should actually be working towards (see our desirable future mobility work).
But yes, I've learned to be patient.
And I understand why, for many, the experience of something that important shapes how they perceive whether our state in general still works.
💡 The irony?
Some of the most passionate and talented designers I know work at Deutsche Bahn. They are modern, capable, and deeply engaged in making the experience better — I studied with some of them.
So if Design makes a difference, why does the system still feel broken?
Because even the best (design) processes fail when the goal is wrong.
👉 In the early 2000s, the Bahn was prepared for privatization. Suddenly, the mission shifted — from mobility for people to profitability for markets. That's exactly the failure mode a European design approach is built to prevent: long-term public value traded away for short-term market returns.
And with that came distorted KPIs: e.g. punctuality metrics that rewarded cancellations instead of reliability.
🎯 What can we learn from this as designers?
Systemic design is the practice of designing with the surrounding system in view: its goals, its incentives, its politics, and its stakeholders — and not only the surface of a single interface or service.
We must look beyond our own domain.
Design is always political — whether we acknowledge it or not.
To design with integrity means to understand and challenge the system around our work, not just make beautiful services, posters or accessible buttons. This is where [diversity of perspective]diversity of perspective becomes decisive — monocultures fail at exactly the wrong moment.
At SCHUMACHER, for example, when we design websites for public clients, we always co-design the processes:
with every larger website we train "content ambassadors" to ensure sustainability and ownership.
And as a company, we try to lead by example — our B Corp certification is one way we act on our values.
I'm encouraged that public administration is starting to recognize this and involve us more meaningfully.
It may take decades for the Bahn to rebuild what neoliberal reforms have dismantled – but as designers, we can already start shaping better systems today. It takes an [antifragile mindset]antifragile mindset — one that turns disruption into fuel, not just absorbs it.
FAQ
What is systemic design?
Systemic design is the practice of designing with the surrounding system in view: its goals, its incentives, its politics, and its stakeholders — and not only the surface of a single interface or service. It treats organizational structures, KPIs, and policy choices as legitimate objects of design intervention, not as fixed constraints.
Why is the Deutsche Bahn often cited as a failure of design?
Not because its designers are weak. Many of the most talented designers in Germany work at Deutsche Bahn. The failure is upstream: when the Bahn was prepared for privatization in the early 2000s, the mission shifted from mobility for people to profitability for markets. Distorted KPIs followed, including punctuality metrics that rewarded cancellations. Good design inside a broken goal still produces broken outcomes.
What can designers learn from the Deutsche Bahn case?
That the brief is never neutral. Every design brief encodes a system of incentives, and if those incentives reward the wrong thing, the design will too. The lesson is to interrogate the goal before polishing the surface: who set the KPI, what behavior does it incentivize, and what gets lost when the metric becomes the target.
How do distorted KPIs undermine good design work?
They redirect attention from the outcome the system actually needs to the outcome the system measures. In the Bahn's case, a punctuality metric that rewarded cancellations taught every team downstream, including design, to optimize for appearances rather than reliability. Once a KPI is misaligned, no amount of design excellence can correct the course, because the design is being asked to solve the wrong problem.
What does it mean to design with integrity in a broken system?
It means refusing to treat the surrounding system as fixed. It means asking whether the brief itself serves the people it claims to serve, and being willing to redesign the process, the KPIs, and the governance, not only the interface. At SCHUMACHER, this is why we co-design the workflows behind our public-sector websites (training content ambassadors, for example) rather than just delivering a polished front end.