Systemic design is an interdiscipline that joins systems thinking to design methodology to bring humanity-centred design to complex systems.
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!
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.
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.
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]
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Impact investing is supposed to have social and ecological impact while generating investment returns; charitable giving is supposed to have social and ecological impact without generating investment returns. From one lens, there is an emerging sector finding its footing. From another lens, there is a product so confusing it can’t be given away.
Victor introduces an approach that reframes the role of the designer and deepens community involvement in every part of the process—from choosing methodology to making decisions and facilitating change.
Edited By Michael R. Gibson and Keith M. Owens. Of interest to scholars and designers working in design studies and design research, and design practitioners who are increasingly called upon to understand and act on data gleaned from evidence-based research.
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.
Silvia Barbero, is associate professor at Politecnico di Torino (Italy), founding Chair, the Systemic Design Association, and is this year’s RSD15 Chair.
MARCH 27 | ONLINE | Forging Fridays workshop. Exploring the practice of creating a simple experimental prototype, we will spark imagination around strengthening trust in emergence through presence in relationships and trust in your own capacity within “unknown unknowns.”
Sean Geobey’s on Substack. In this post he writes “Your governance structure positions you strategically. Who owns you determines whose interests you serve, which determines how you compete.”
Our scepticism about political truth claims and the implications of cultural diversity lend added weight to the need for restorying what we might call truth.
This paper comes from inside the practice of public innovation, at a moment when many practitioners are trying to understand what has shifted beneath their feet. States of Change was initiated by the UK Foundation Nesta to help governments become better problem-solvers.
Several new articles—If you haven’t found it yet, follow and contribute on Medium. Alexander Pryšyvałka curates a systemic design community publication, including systems thinking, futures, sustainability, regeneration, transformation.
Mari Suoheimo, Jonna Hakkila, and Ravi Mahamuni are editors of this broad-ranging collection the highlights the role that technology can play in increasing community engagement in participatory design, now and in the future. Print copy info (open access will follow).
Here is the tension in Carney’s Davos speech: calling out a rupture is recognition. But when the language stays anchored to the same dominant frame it quietly limits what we are willing to question next.
JUNE 2026 | ONLINE. A new course from Emma Blomkamp & Co., Leading Co-Design in Complex Systems is for purpose-driven professionals who want to co-create better outcomes with their colleagues, clients and communities.
OCT 12–16 2026 | Valentino Castle, Torino, Italy. Sys_Lab (Politecnico di Torino) hosts RSD15. Pluralism foregrounds multiple ways of knowing and practising within a maturing global field, where shared challenges intersect with diverse epistemologies, methods, and vocabularies.
JAN 21 2026 Americas | JAN 22 2026 Australasia | ONLINE. Say hi to Seanna! the systems leadership program is a place for … folks who are trying to be good humans, committed to contributing to the health of the whole while taking care of, and sustaining self.
JAN 30 2026 | ONLINE. A laboratory for practising & implementing relationality—explore how to implement the five principles of relational politics (contingency, emergence, radical uncertainty, non-normativity, and heart-based epistemology).
RSD14 TALK. The Systemic Design Wheel of Inquiry is a didactic and practice-oriented framework developed to support systemic designers in navigating complex, evolving systems.
Expression of the relationships between people and their created technologies, known in various fables or narratives, is essentially some variation of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
New on the feed! GertyGordie substack posts by Lorraine Randal. Let’s start with “Systems rely on convivial rebels to stay alive and responsive… but struggle to admit how much they need them.”
Systemic design research aspires to an understanding of whole system contexts, cycles of change, and to account for the effects on non-humans and actants in designed environments. There is no centre in systemic design research—it is not system-centred.
Catch up on Harold Nelson’s September posts on systemic pedagogy, think differently, and proactive designing (a fourth category of jobs).
Two postdoctoral researcher positions open in The School of Architecture, Art and Design (EAAD) in Mexico City, with preference for locating in the city to collaborate in Dr Jones’ lab.
OCT 3 2025 OPENS *ONLINE* *OPEN ACCESS* RSD14-RSDX is a dynamic community-led festival of systemic design, inviting us to explore with colleagues how systems interconnect and how design can contribute to more just and sustainable futures.
OCT 2025 | ONLINE. Over the past few years, Snowmelt has deepened involvement in RSD, recognising it as a vital platform for developing and refining systemic design approaches. For RSD14, they are hosting a series scheduled in time zones friendly to areas from the west side of the Pacific to east America.
Image: Snowmelt Co-Founder and Principal, Dr Tim Thompson.
Zaid Khan’s TEDx talk is a good prelim to Humbling Systemic Design: Learning when not to intervene in complex social systems with Samah Kamalmaz at #RSD14 on OCT 9.
TEDx talk is 9:44 min on YouTube.
Infusing or integrating AI technology into the functioning of teleological systems, replacing or augmenting human strengths, depends on the activities supported by concomitant degrees of freedom in each conjunction space.
Don’t miss Harold Nelson’s #RSD14 framing conversation on OCT 3.
Six very excellent tips from David R. Garcia, US legislative staffer, state policy director, statewide political candidate, and professor.
Universities are designed around analysis and reductive inquiry. Businesses function around departments of specialization. Governments are reductive in both stance and approach. These dominant strategies have all worked well for large numbers of people, but there is a growing unease about the dominant strategy.
OCT 2025 | ONLINE & Toronto, Canada. PETER JONES: As this year’s RSD chair, I would like to extend a warm welcome to the systemic design community and our SDA members to the 14th Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium, hosted online and at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada.
OCTOBER 3–8 2025 | ONLINE. RSDX is guided by the community-led chords that run across systemic design, connecting points that might not otherwise meet. Framing conversations, peer-to-peer discussions, and workshops—all online.
OCTOBER 3–11 2025 | ONLINE. This UTC+ time zone-friendly series starts on October 3/4 and runs through October 10/11. That’s evening for Americas East, mid-day for Americas West, and morning the next day for UTC+8 to UTC+11.
OCTOBER 8–10 2025 | ONLINE. Paper Talks feature over 90 peer-reviewed papers presented online by their authors in curated sessions that bring together related or contrasting contributions. A subject matter expert guides each session, allowing for direct dialogue and feedback, with a particular emphasis on inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to systemic design.
OCT 11, 2025 | ONLINE. A space for designers to explore the question of how we would go about designing better social worlds through our communication, relationships, and the larger systems in which we are a part.
OCT 12, 2025 | ONLINE. The cybernetic takeover begins with a speculative address on language-in-action hinged on uncertainty, moves through questions of design ethics and pedagogies, and ends with organisation and modelling of viable systems. In a world where our actions create a ripple effect, we ask: how can systemic design become a living ecology that catalyses conversation?
OCTOBER 15–18 2025 | Toronto, Canada. Returning to OCAD University as host for the first time since 2026 (RSD5), the symposium has earned a reputation as a high-quality academic forum for discussing the significant impacts and outcomes of research. However, systemic design has also evolved as a praxeology, and the programme reflects the many practices, cases, and lived experiences from which to learn.
OCT 19 2025 | Toronto, Canada. A retreat on Toronto Islands for people who design, fund, lead, and participate in systemic leadership capability-building programmes.
OCT 3–21. The RSD14 online hub is your gateway to understanding relationality in complexity. The first event is posted: RSD14-RSDX will run from October 3 to 6. Get ready with bookmarks and calendar integration. Online access is pay-what-you-can.
Harold Nelson: It is obvious that we need to reestablish new broadband designs of inquiry to supplement and balance the dominance of narrowband inquiring systems in a world recognized to be more complex and entangled than imagined, and more challenged by complex technologies than ever expected.
RSD14-RSDX book talk | The 55 Minutes | OCT 6. Author James Stauch highlights how designers can still benefit from hanging up their solutions and journeying deeper into understanding the dimensions of the problems they are seeking to address.
Harold Nelson: New technologies in general, such as personal computers, and more recently the emergence of so-called artificial intelligence, have become, or are becoming, prosthetics fitted to modern humans. But how well do these new prosthetics fit human nature?
Louis Kauffman: What if one also knows a theory? How will that affect the process? Can new theory also evolve with the help of systemic design? What does it mean to creatively use theory and reasoning? Will not such use, if creative, go beyond standard logical reasoning into the use of dialogue and imagination? Will not creative use of theory lead both to new designs and to new theory? It is our contention that the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes.
OCT 12 2025 | ONLINE. A full day of cybernetics at RSD14. The programme includes a range of cybernetic enactments considering how effects unfold in ever-expanding time and scale through a dynamic interplay of components with wholeness emerging from relationships.
Katie Krummeck’s exciting kickstarter for DreamUP development. Katie is a social impact designer and thought leader in leveraging the power of design to drive change in social systems.
This is an insightful piece by Neil Meka, supported by several case studies that exemplify systemic design not as a method to be applied, but a sensibility to be cultivated.
OCT 11 2025 | ONLINE. Relational Connectedness. CMMi at RSD14-ONLINE is day for designers to explore the question of how we would go about designing better social worlds through our communication, relationships, and the larger systems in which we are a part. Check out the CMMi articles featured below.