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The Systemic Design Hub brings together posts by contributors who are co-evolving systemic design. The Hub is an aggregator website that gathers posts from the websites of contributing authors for distribution via a weekly email update. As such, the Hub provides a flexible forum for each field’s core disciplinary methods and contributes to collective efforts to mobilise knowledge across practitioners and scholars. By subscribing to the Hub mailing list you receive a weekly notification if there are new posts.
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Gather: Fashion and textile industry experiential event
DEC 5&6 | Proposals due SEPT 13. A participatory, embodied, and pluriversal gathering to move towards systems change in the fashion and textile industry.
RSD15 this week: Cybernetics with ASC
The American Society for Cybernetics continues the annual conference—held early August in Ouro Preto, Brazil—online from August 24 to 27. Eight sessions in all. The link takes you directly to the ASC hub. See you online!
Viable Confluences: Celebrating Stafford Beer’s centenary
MONDAY, AUGUST 24 | ONLINE. Following on from RSD15: São Paulo, the group discusses how Stafford Beer’s vision of freedom, viability, and autonomy continues to resonate within Latin American experiences of social, ecological, and institutional transformation.
American Society for Cybernetics Conference: Podcast live from Ouro Preto, Brazil
Conversational Confluences at the ASC Conference: Abbie VanMeter talks with 8 participants about their experience and what cybernetics means to them.
Viable System Model: VSM7 walkthrough
Mark Lambertz and Arseny Krasikov are co-designing VSM7 [Viable System Model] software and have released a walkthrough of the current prototype, showing how they are approaching the representation of the VSM in software.
Celebrating 100 years of Stafford Beer
SEPTEMBER 17–19, 2026 | Alliance Manchester Business School. Organised in collaboration with the World Organisation for Systems and Cybernetics, the Centre for Systems Studies (University of Hull), and the International Federation for Systems Research, with parallel events at partner organisations including the American Society of Cybernetics and the International Society of Systems Sciences.
Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm
Human Movie was screened in 2025 and can now be watched on Vimeo. The film considers AI as a filter for noise and asks what is being modelled?
Artificial Intelligence and Creative Human Capacity
Cameron Norman calls for creative products that matter to those who create them, not just those who consume them. What happens when we offload this work?
What if innovation needs us to slow down?
What if, in our rush to respond to the demand for action, we are overlooking something essential: the time it takes for good ideas to become better ones?
Bothering to Wake Up
Waking up as a process and perspective and being bothered as a sign of an unawakened self. If we are bothered, can we consciously choose to act as if we matter?
Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium launches
We are a bit RSD15 obsessed with the launch of programming starting this Wednesday. There are several event hubs—you can register for all of them at once or the ones you are interested in via Eventbrite (linked). Get rush seats for online sessions by joining hubs directly RSDX.online/join. As always PWYC/no fee community-led sessions.
Wednesday Workshop: Symbiotic Design Framework
THIS WED | AUG 19 | ONLINE. The RSD15 workshops series launches with the Symbiotic Design Framework, facilitated by Gonzalo Raineri. Explore the framework as a way to support a shift from extractive practices toward mutualistic configurations. REGISTER NOW (no fee to attend).
RSD15 THIS WEEK: Contexts of Brazil and Latin America
JOIN NOW. The programme for the RSD15–ESPM hub (on campus and livestream) is finalised. Sessions are an opportunity for conversations about interconnected conditions and work grounded in the particular contexts of Brazil and Latin America. [RSD15.INFO]
RSD15 NEXT WEEK: Conversational Confluences
AUG 24–27. ONLINE. This programme brings the ASC 2026 conference, with its overarching theme of Conversational Confluences, into the context of RSD15’s Designing within a Plural World. The two meet on shared ground as both view diversity as a source of collective learning and creativity. [RSD15.INFO]
The Death and Life of Professional Online Communities
Cameron Norman’s reflection is a timely and thoughtful consideration of online communities as RSD15 enters a few months of professional online encounters.
RSD15: São Paulo: Contexts of Brazil and Latin America
SEPT 20, 2026. The first RSD15 event brings the international systemic design conversation into dialogue with design research, education and practice in Brazil. On-campus at ESPM with livestream sessions via the RSDX platform.
Gathering to Rise: A Lineage of Care, Courage, and Collective Leadership
Application deadline: AUG 9, 2026. Gathering to Rise is a transformative leadership and resourcing space for Black, Indigenous, Latine, Arab, Middle Eastern, North African, Asian, and Pacific Islander women and gender-expansive leaders to reconnect with their gifts, build skills for navigating change, and find joy and solidarity in community.
Reality Strikes Back: A Cartoon Guide to Complexity
Virpi Oinonen: The trouble is that complexity is hard to explain to people who think in straight, causal lines. So I made it visible by drawing funny (and slightly irreverent) cartoons about it. Use the cartoons to understand the problem, explain it to others… or as therapy. Your choice.
Communities & Technologies 2027: Communities of Hope
CfP deadline: NOV 9, 2026. The biennial International Conference on Communities & Technologies 2027 theme is Communities of Hope. Hold the date: April 12–17, 2027.
Coordinated Management of Meaning: Fellowships
Application deadline: AUG 28, 2026. CMMi Fellowships are centred around a project or paper that apply CMM concepts (making social worlds together in communication).
Human Centering: Gaining focus and clarity
There is a large amount of verbal traffic around the term ‘human centered’ in modern discourses but little understanding or agreement on what the term actually means in practical terms.
Five Elements to Evaluate Systemic Change
Book launch series by Emily F. Gates and Pablo Vidueira (Post #5). Evaluation often feels overly technical and jargony. We simplify it into five elements anyone can work with.
A critical reflection on integrating AI in System Mapping
First impulses in a series on AI in system mapping. The series anticipates the roles AI can take, tools and approaches, and reflections on the potential of AI-enhanced mapping.
The Decline of Deviance 2
Is the decline of deviance actually an increase in tolerance? Part 2 of Adam Mastroianni’s article: art, the internet, being (un)cool, and bermuda shorts.
Impossible Futures and the Ethics of Hopelessness
Part III of Victor Udeowa’s Black liberation series has just been published in Frontiers in Sociology. Part I was presented at RSD12, Part II in Contexts. The link takes you to the full series and related RSD14 talk.
Metaphors for Reimagined Futures
Report on a masterclass in causal layered analysis, a futures methodology the explores issues across four inter-related layers. The participants/authors find it to be capable of integrating layered analysis with imaginative shifts in meaning.
Field Dialogue 3: Talking Salmon
The Patterning Collective, co-founded by Renilde Becqué, is creating a pipeline of exploratory and applied learning on repatterning. Whet your whistle with this dialogue on salmon as connectors of oceans, rivers, and forests.
Let’s Wobble!
Embracing the wobble and staying with the both/and space between opposing perspectives.
What makes a good vote
Goebey on participatory budgeting: It is worth looking at how the voting system used for elections map onto the specific context that is building out a budget.
What Pluribus Doesn’t Get Right
Jamborcic: The choice is not between individual and collective. The question is how to structure the space between so that groups can think well and act together.
On Collaborative Hardball as a new negotiation with Susan Coleman
Abbie van Meter and Susan Coleman discuss Susan’s new book, Collaborative Hardball: Using the Power of a New Negotiation as Women to Change the World and what a “new negotiation” looks like for women and everyone.
Field Dialogue 1: Listening for what is already speaking
A field dialogue with Almenara collaborator Joanna Crowson (Casa Gaia) about what it actually means to work with the more-than-human and how it shapes how we design, decide, and relate. Almenara is an outreach project dedicated to co-imagining and co-creating regenerative futures for the whole community of life.
The hundred-mile investment
Using our own insights into the unique assets our communities hold can allow us to develop approaches to thinking about community wealth in ways that benefit us individually and collectively.
Designing belonging
An interview with DESIS Social Innovator Fellow, Yuliia Barash, an educator, community builder, and social initiative organizer based in Lisbon, Portugal. Her work focuses on building supportive environments for families, strengthening migrant communities, and creating initiatives that combine education, creativity, and social integration.
A Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander (1936–2022), architect and theorist of pattern languages, shaped architecture, planning, and computer science through works including A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order, and through a lifelong commitment to living architecture.
Back from haitus
Cheryl May: The weekly collection of interesting systemic design and related stuff has been on hiatus as I hunkered down and wrote my PhD thesis. I’m back and it’s been lovely to catch up on everyone’s work. In memoriams for Edgar Morin and Peter Checkland bring reflection.
Peter Checkland (1930–2026)
Ray Ison: The systems community has lost a founding voice. What we carry forward is the practice of inquiry he spent a lifetime refining.
The Thinker the Century Couldn’t Hear
Richard David Hames in memoriam for Edgar Morin, French sociologist, philosopher, public intellectual, and theorist of complex thought. Photo Oliver Dion.
On Hope
Sophie Keiko Hope and reflections on remaining in relationship with the future when you cannot control the future.
Managing Organizations as Systems
James Stauch (The 55 Minutes) has completed a a three-part series on how systems thinking is (historically and still occasionally), is not (generally at present), and could be (no, must be) applied to the teaching and learning of management.
Reading “The Market in the Model”
Eryk Salvaggio offers a “very light gloss” of the paper, The Market in the Model, which extends dataset critique by examining the latent diffusion model’s internal mechanisms as a neural economy.
The real work of shared power
Lisa Gill: Why is sharing power so demanding, and how we can grow into it together. Lisa is host of the Leadermorphosis podcast and co-author of “Moose Heads on the Table: Stories About Self-Managing Companies from Sweden” with Karin Tenelius
Re-Thinking Capitalism
This volume, the last in THE NEW series, brings together people who rarely end up in the same conversation about how contemporary economic systems can be critically examined and pragmatically transformed.
Horst Rittel’s two matches inquiry
Horst Rittel’s matches—a reminder that categories or clusterings cannot substitute for, or stand in for, understanding and cannot assign value or meaning to assembled data.
SysPrac26 – Call for Contributions
Call for contributions for SysPrac26. Taking place September 21–22, 2026, Cranfield University, UK. If you have a story to share, a question to explore, an innovation to demonstrate or a practical challenge you’ve been working through, contact@sysprac.org
Realised Worth Newsletter
Newsletter for people who are researching or otherwise engaging in volunteering. RW Institute studies what makes a volunteer experience produce lasting change in how people see themselves, what they believe, and how they act.
Earth Day Issue: Our Power, Our Planet
This issue acknowledges Earth Day 2026 regenerative focus and a reminder that the RSD15 intent to submit is due APRIL 24 for papers and workshops. Geographies and ecologies is one of four topics of interest. SUBMISSION DEADLINE MAY 22.
Retreat: Systemic Design for Regenerative Practice
JUST IN | OCT 18–21. RSD15-Ostana focuses on systemic design for regenerative practice and makes time for deep embodied practice in a real-world design context
Design Education for Sustainability: Designing for planet and for life
Authors Joanna Boehnert and Emma Dewberry respond to the need to augment and expand Design for Sustainability and the ecological design thinking that supports it. The paper proposes a three-year program to embed sustainability and ecological literacy in undergraduate design education.
Moving Beyond Extractive Measurement: Introducing the Regenerative Evaluation Living paper
Unity Effect is a social enterprise that works with a network of freelancers who share regenerative mindsets. The paper is an open invitation to join the network. Lots to explore.
The Ultimate Reading List: bioregioning, regenerative patterns, myth and language
Tijn Tjoelker: With the joyful responsibility to “keep the gifts flowing,” I created an overview of my favourite articles. From The Mycelium on Substack.
An Axial Revolution
An axial revolution challenges unquestioned beliefs, assumptions, and paradigms to address challenges posed by global environmental change.
Design beyond iterative progress: Can we truly strategise our way to a better world?
Suyash Sinha: What must change is not how we uplift those left behind in our “march to progress,” but the very definition of progress, where it comes from and who it serves.
In Memoriam: Marie Davidová’s trailblazing work in systemic design
This issue is dedicated to SDA founder and chair, Marie Davidová, who passed away on April 10. Please contribute to an article about Marie’s influence on systemic design by adding your remembrance in the comments section.
Multi-Scale More-than-Human Atlas-Gigamapping
Elena Porqueddu, Marie Davidová, Hanane Behnam, and María Claudia Valverde explore synergies between different mapping approaches—the multi-scale atlas and gigamapping—in this project funded by the German Research Foundation.
NetWall: The more-than-human ecosystemic socio-technical intervention codesign
Marie Davidová, Hanane Behnam, María Claudia Valverde Rojas, and Kateřina Lagner Zímová collaborate on a pioneering project focused on creating sustainable urban habitats through the development of biocorridors.
POL– AI: Leveraging urban ecosystem
Marie Davidova, Leonie K Fischer, and Martha Teye relate ecosystems with socio-technological systems in urban environments, “more-than-human architecture are necessary to counteract biodiversity loss.”
BioDiveIn Intervention Meets GoCOLife Urban Game
Marie Davidová reports on a prototypical urban intervention. The BioDiveIn and GoCOLIFE gigamaps serve as a process tool for co-designing with multiple actors, and linking social systems and technology to the ecosystem.
Generating Urban Connectivity Systemic Interventions
Danjian Wang and Marie Davidová explore how to generate urban bio-corridors within the framework of the Synergetic Landscapes Project. The paper proposes a prototype called Possible Fabrication as one of the more possible leverage points for the urban proposal.
COLreg: The Collective Regenerative Region
Marie Davidová and Kateřina Zímová’s introduce COLreg, a synergistic post-Anthropocene model, generating a bioregion for and with all.