Contexts is edited by dedicated volunteers and is financially supported by members of the Systemic Design Association, a Norwegian non-profit organisation. Peter Hayward Jones is Editor in Chief.
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.
Peter Jones describes the emerging voices, complex challenges, and inventive approaches evident in the second volume, which comprises six extraordinary articles representative of the authors’ larger, ongoing research directions.
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.
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.
Victor Udoewa delves into the harmful, context-specific system entanglements that justice workers encounter and encourages system healing-centered approaches and identifies 15 entanglements.
The spiral encourages scholars to create their pathways, recognizing that the development of the field takes shape through studies in adjacent field journals and partner societies, with conferences and journals in design research, systems sciences, interdisciplinary studies, and relevant fields.
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.”
The editorial for the inaugural volume by Editor in Chief Peter Jones and Deputy Editor Silvia Barbero. They provide a brief on the emergence of systemic design as an interdiscipline.
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.