These are scholarly articles that have undergone formal academic or expert review processes.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Maria Davidová presents the Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance and concludes with their integration and synergy in a Real Life Co-Design Laboratory.
Maria Davidová relates human, social, and biotic behaviour with climatic and geographical data, addressing interactions in the performance of architectures and urban design.
Hannah Goss, Hendrik Schifferstein, Jotte de Koning, and Nynke Tromp propose and empirically test a conceptual framework for evaluating transition design to a portfolio of interventions aimed at reducing food waste.
Claudia Westermann’s editorial opens the new issue of Constructivist Foundations 20(2).
Exploring the relationship between scripts and life through six articles examining instruction manuals, genetic codes, algorithmic systems and AI-generated imagery. Claudia Westermann’s editorial is open access.
Congratulations Hannah Goss! This PhD dissertation advances transition design by exploring how designers can strategically intervene in the Dutch food system.
This document redefines the role of design in addressing contemporary polycrises by advocating for a human-nature engagement paradigm. Introduction by John Thackara.
A relational science working model for supporting Indigenous rights and reconciliation in research.
This book is for researchers and educators, and practitioners working to understand and achieve a better hybrid environment and who have been working in or with different types of boundaries, including technological, cultural, and physical boundaries in built environments.
Selected papers from the 60th Anniversary Meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics, “Living Cybernetics Playing Language,” edited by Claudia Westermann.
This research invites your review and feedback as we develop frameworks to help municipalities develop more integrative, collective and adaptive systems. Preprint paper.
Social Innovations Journal, Vol 29. An overview of emerging nonprofit management and employee ownership models to address economic mobility and racial wealth gaps.
Together, these authors reaffirm feminism’s enduring relevance in shaping just and inclusive futures.
Skye Smith: This article reflects our shared passion for exploring how systemic design can address complex, multi-layered challenges. I’m incredibly grateful to Eleni for her insights and collaboration throughout this journey.
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. The fertile ground of the 1960s consciousness revolution, the University of California at Berkeley, and what Nelson refers to as The Berkeley Bubble are central to the ideas in this essay.
Elisabeth Tschavgova et al. on systemic design’s impact on the company’s capabilities to address complexity, presenting a dual narrative, detailing both the client project and the six research methods employed: boundary setting, causal loop diagramming, leverage analysis, storytelling, quantitative research, and the development of insight cards.
Victor Udoewa delves into the harmful, context-specific system entanglements that justice workers encounter and encourages system healing-centered approaches and identifies 15 entanglements.
Audum Formo Hay and the research group aimed to integrate experiential and systemic perspectives in service design to support actors in transforming complex welfare systems and include three pairs of propositions for incorporating emotions into systemic approaches to service design.
Haley Fitzpatrick, Tobias Luthe, and and Birger Sevaldson explore methodological plurality and integrate quantitative scientific methods with participatory gigamapping and embodied practices. This longitudinal design inquiry engaged with communities undergoing sustainability transformations across three mountain regions: Ostana, Italy; Hemsedal, Norway; and Mammoth Lakes, California. The authors identify the need for contemplative and psychological practices in systemic design that focus on inner resilience.
Anja Overdiek’s exploration of the ISLE model as a lens for systemic innovation in urban living labs (ULLs) involves the study of a municipal ULL in the Netherlands (Citylab X). She observes that European municipalities increasingly use ULLs for complex situations, demanding a paradigm shift from service design to systemic innovation and a transition approach. The ISLE model is proposed as a process that might support co-creation, provide a heuristic process framework, and mobilise knowledge across ULLs and related networks. The findings include considerations for systemic design practice in ULLs.
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.”
Harold Nelson places 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 at the University of California at Berkeley.
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.
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.”
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.”
Danielle Lake et al. present an action case study of a social lab and interrogate the issues of scaling effective change in social design and 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.