Donella Meadows describes a system as ‘an interconnected set of elements that is coherently arranged in a way that achieves something’. In the case of UX Design we are often designing digital interactions that play out against a backdrop of technical infrastructure and a shifting socio political arrangement comprised of social media platforms, wifi provision, and physical devices. Designing with no awareness of how these systems relate to each other and how they are constituted through networks of power and control risks creating shallow and damaging designs that fail to consider prevailing conditions of production and consumption. Design itself constitutes its own system of practices and conventions. UX design in particular exists in complex relation to people, immaterial machines, software, code, and physical artefacts. Awareness of where a specific design is placed in this network of relations helps to determine how we could act as designers and what decisions we could make regarding our work.