journal

Contexts vol1 Nov, 2022

Cosmotechnic Encounters: Designing with foodwaste, landscapes, and livelihoods

Cosmotechnic Encounters: Designing with foodwaste, landscapes, and livelihoods

Markus Wernli and Kam-Fai Chan consider circularity in organic waste, drawing on Daoist cosmotechnics, design research, anthropology, and diverse economies. They suggest cosmotechnic designing with the world, concluding that designing with shapelessness, integral to systemic design with situatedness and mutualistic care, “is essentially about symbiotic survivability or sympoiesis in cosmotechnics.”

Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix

Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix

Harold Nelson leads the collection with an invited essay, Contexts’ first article, that helps place the footers and foundation into the field that has grown from design for complex scale and generations of systems thinking from the fertile ground of the centre of the 1960s consciousness revolution, the University of California at Berkeley.

Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning

Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning

Dulmini Perera and Tony Fry present a powerful approach to enable systemic critique of innovation propositions and their potential outcomes. The paper takes the form of presenting three “historico-fictions” from the US, China, and Cuba to distinguish these value frames within selected histories of dominant systems. Perera and Fry suggest a “second order design fiction” to bring forth pluralistic expansions of meaning and enable participants in design conversations to recognize many possible positions that might challenge acceleration, defuturing, or sustainment.

Systemic Spatial Design: Enhancing the potential of spatial design disciplines to navigate adaptive cycles in cities

Systemic Spatial Design: Enhancing the potential of spatial design disciplines to navigate adaptive cycles in cities

Elena Porqueddu presents a spatial-architectural theory based on complexity theory and complex adaptation. She advances a systemic approach to mixed-discipline spatial design in urban planning, which she calls “systemic spatial design,” and introduces the “multi-scale atlas.” The paper presents a new approach to spatial design—the designer can intervene in the context, but the approach is adaptive and self-organizational, with no claim to control.

Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change: A systemic design research agenda

Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change: A systemic design research agenda

Ryan Murphy extends a body of work with an analysis of the function of intervention points that we understand as leverage and argues that the (theory of) leverage is crucial to understanding systems’ complexity, “Finding leverage means finding advantage: identifying the phenomena in a system with the greatest potential to multiply or compound a changemaker’s efforts to achieve the impact they want.”

The Power and Place Collaborative: Participatory strategies for scaling

The Power and Place Collaborative: Participatory strategies for scaling

Danielle Lake, David J. Marshall, Rozana Carducci, and Tracey Thurnes present an action case study of a social lab and interrogate the issues of scaling effective change in social design. This article is valuable for practical instruction on how to achieve diverse forms of scale via more participatory systemic design practices and offers a conceptualization of scaling as a meshy, stretchy place of emergence.

Cosmotechnic Encounters: Designing with foodwaste, landscapes, and livelihoods

Cosmotechnic Encounters: Designing with foodwaste, landscapes, and livelihoods

Markus Wernli and Kam-Fai Chan consider circularity in organic waste, drawing on Daoist cosmotechnics, design research, anthropology, and diverse economies. They suggest cosmotechnic designing with the world, concluding that designing with shapelessness, integral to systemic design with situatedness and mutualistic care, “is essentially about symbiotic survivability or sympoiesis in cosmotechnics.”

Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix

Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix

Harold Nelson leads the collection with an invited essay, Contexts’ first article, that helps place the footers and foundation into the field that has grown from design for complex scale and generations of systems thinking from the fertile ground of the centre of the 1960s consciousness revolution, the University of California at Berkeley.

Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning

Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning

Dulmini Perera and Tony Fry present a powerful approach to enable systemic critique of innovation propositions and their potential outcomes. The paper takes the form of presenting three “historico-fictions” from the US, China, and Cuba to distinguish these value frames within selected histories of dominant systems. Perera and Fry suggest a “second order design fiction” to bring forth pluralistic expansions of meaning and enable participants in design conversations to recognize many possible positions that might challenge acceleration, defuturing, or sustainment.

Systemic Spatial Design: Enhancing the potential of spatial design disciplines to navigate adaptive cycles in cities

Systemic Spatial Design: Enhancing the potential of spatial design disciplines to navigate adaptive cycles in cities

Elena Porqueddu presents a spatial-architectural theory based on complexity theory and complex adaptation. She advances a systemic approach to mixed-discipline spatial design in urban planning, which she calls “systemic spatial design,” and introduces the “multi-scale atlas.” The paper presents a new approach to spatial design—the designer can intervene in the context, but the approach is adaptive and self-organizational, with no claim to control.

Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change: A systemic design research agenda

Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change: A systemic design research agenda

Ryan Murphy extends a body of work with an analysis of the function of intervention points that we understand as leverage and argues that the (theory of) leverage is crucial to understanding systems’ complexity, “Finding leverage means finding advantage: identifying the phenomena in a system with the greatest potential to multiply or compound a changemaker’s efforts to achieve the impact they want.”

The Power and Place Collaborative: Participatory strategies for scaling

The Power and Place Collaborative: Participatory strategies for scaling

Danielle Lake, David J. Marshall, Rozana Carducci, and Tracey Thurnes present an action case study of a social lab and interrogate the issues of scaling effective change in social design. This article is valuable for practical instruction on how to achieve diverse forms of scale via more participatory systemic design practices and offers a conceptualization of scaling as a meshy, stretchy place of emergence.

additional/highlight content

here could be a brief introduction/compliment on an event/person’s special contribution/sponsor. you name it

  • RSD 10 is playing with Tensions Nov 3th-6th, 2021, Delft, The Netherland.
  • Proceedings on RSDSYMPOSIUM.ORG

Here could be a quote or something that SDA believe in/pursue

THe author who says it

The book name of the quote

CONTACT US

10 + 15 =

SDANEWSLETTER

The Systemic Design Association will send you quarterly updates on systemic design and activities in the SDA network. During the annual Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) Symposium timeframe SDA will send brief updates related to RSD keynotes, papers, and workshops.

RSD11 event updates, program content, and proceedings are posted on RSDsymposium.org.

Thanks!