systems thinking & design symposium deadline expanded

Relating Systems Thinking & Design 2013

Emerging Contexts for Systemic Design

Symposium Deadline is expanded

The Deadline for abstract submission to the RSTD2 symposium is expanded to 15th May

We are looking forward to your contributions!

Please visit the Symposium website on www.systemic-design.net 

systemic design call for abstracts

Relating Systems Thinking & Design 2013

Emerging Contexts for Systemic Design

AHO – Oslo School of Architecture & Design                   Oslo, Norway                   9th-11th October 2013

Relating Systems Thinking and Design is a free and open symposium over two days with a preceeding full day with diverse workshops and a subsequent special issue in FORMakademisk. We encourage you to submit your abstracts and to concider joining the workshops. We are interrested in both work in progress and more developed contributions.

9th October: Workshops

1oth – 11th October: Symposium

Call for abstracts

The emerging renaissance of systems thinking in design responds to the increasing complexity in all challenges faced by designers and transdisciplinary innovators. Our worlds have become too complex for linear and goal-driven management, resulting in hopelessly complicated social, economic, and political systems. The global demand for sustainability, democratic economies, and the emerging social arrangements for better education, employment, and development have become too complex for conventional thinking.

The interrelationship between systems thinking and design action was the theme of last years RSD seminar at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. In re-examining the relationship of systems thinking to design we believe it possible for systems thinking and design praxis to develop the foundations for new, interrelated practices. This synergistic relationship will launch a new generation of systems-oriented thinkers empowered with the creativity and perspectives of design thinking. As educators and researchers, we also seek better theoretical foundations and rigor in design thinking.

We areare interested in proposals that draw from recent case studies from fieldwork, design inquiry and research, and mixed methods in systems-oriented design.

Sociotechnical, service, and activity systems are characterized by highly complex and emergent human-system relationships, and benefit from nonlinear and creative design practices and engaged research perspectives. Design practices found effective in fields such as healthcare, governance, environmental stewardship, organizational management and social change, are of particular interest for cases and discussion in the conference.

Systemic Design has been suggested as a term for this emerging movement in design with its multiple expressions including e.g. Systems Oriented Design, Whole Systems Design, and is closely related to Dialogic Design. What binds systems related theories and practices together with design approaches may be the desire to reintroduce systems approaches with design toward a more effective integrated praxis, becoming more useful to designers (and stakeholders and clients) than evidenced by past performance. This implies the reshaping and design of systems approaches and the related practices so that they are better integrated into design processes.

We invite you to submit an abstract of maximum 1000 words within the following themes:

• ¥ New systemic practices in design
• ¥ Rethinking systems approaches from a design perspective
• ¥ Relating Design Praxis and Systems Thinking
• ¥ The role of systemic design when developing design practices in new areas
• ¥ Teaching (systemic design or), systems thinking in design. (or design in systems approaches)
• ¥ Relating systems and design theories, conceptually and pragmatically

Deadline for abstracts is 1st May

Accepted abstracts will be asked to submit a presentation.

The best presentations will after the symposium be invited by the program committee to submit a full paper to be published in a planned special issue in the Norwegian bilingual scientific design research journal FORMakademisk. These papers will go through a blind peer review evaluation process as normal for this journal. See the journal website for details.

Email questions to:

birger.sevaldson@aho.no

Design's expanding domains

Recently an excellent article by Tom Fisher, the Dean of the School of Design at the U. Minnesota, titled Design's Invisible Century, provided an exceptional frame for understanding the evolving nature of design. The article makes a contrast with science's 'invisible' century, the 20th Century, when scientist thought they had 'seen' everything and suddenly the sciences of the 'unseen' realms of physics, chemistry, and psychology et. al. exploded into 'view' resulting in a scientific renaissance. The case is made in the article that design is now facing the same sort of renaissance in the 21st Century, in the realms of the 'invisible', as did science in the last century.

Most formalized design fields are defined by their domains of 'visibility' but design is expanding into more 'invisible' domains. An example is design's expansion into other professions such as management. A seminal conference was hosted at Case Western's business school titled 'Managing as Designing' which resulted in the publication of a book by the same name published by Stanford University Press. Another example is the Rotman School of Business in the U. Toronto, which has made a serious commitment to design. Around the world there are university programs combining business and design in the planning or implementation stages.

Design is moving into the domains of public policy, business and military strategy, and other 'invisible' domains of human activity. New forms of designing and new types of designers are emerging as well. Some designers from the 'visible' traditions of design are forming up to 'design behavior' or other interventions into 'unseen' worlds but that of course is dangerous without them making changes in their design practices and character. Ones that are a better fit for the task of making the 'invisible' 'visible'.

Two thoughts about science in relationship to design.

Two thoughts about the relationships between design and science. First, most scientist have essentially become design critics. Second, many scientists have become design consultants without acknowledging they have done so.

In reference to the first point, scientists have begun to refer to the present day era as the Anthropocene era < http://www.economist.com/node/18741749> —the age of man (sic). It seems that the earth is no longer predominantly natural. It is more and more a manifestation of the unforeseen consequences of human activity; an entanglement of intention and accident. Scientists describing and explaining the world are observing systems that have been effected by and changed through human agency—they are critiquing the effects of designs more than the consequences of natural processes. Understanding design behavior—intentional change—would seem to be something that needs to be put high on the priority list along with advancing science and improving technology.

The second point deals with the growing complaint that scientists and science have become politicized. Witness the recent acrimonious debates on global warming. The conflict arises because facts may be based on good science but description and explanation do not—cannot—prescribe action. Also prediction and promises of control (the domain of technology) do not justify action. Action and agency emerge from the domain that design occupies.

When scientist call for specific actions based on their clear and accurate scientific descriptions and explanations they have taken on the role of design consultants. Designers are by definition agents of change, responding to the needs and desires of clients and stakeholders. Designers are not considered inappropriately political when they prescribe certain courses of action based on the intentions and purposes expressed by those they serve. When scientists cross the line between science and design by advocating for specific actions, without acknowledging they have done so, they become the focus of criticism in part because, unlike designers, scientists do not contract with others to serve their (the clients et al) interests. Science is based on good, disciplined processes of observation and reasoning not on achieving good, desirable outcomes.

This does not mean that scientists cannot act as designers. It means they need to acknowledge when they have taken on the role of designer and left the role of objective observer and scientific expert behind. They then need to enter into service contracts with clients and stakeholders, as any professional designer is obliged to do.