OCT 3–21, 2025. Given the importance of relations in systems, RSD14 explores relationality in complexity. How can we approach relating as designing to understand the arcs of impact that would make systems more beneficial for all the groups comprising them? RSD14.ca.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Abbie VanMeter: CMM has evolved into an important perspective and practice that foregrounds relationality as central to meaning-making, is increasingly applicable in everyday life, and remains rooted in a strong theoretical foundation.
Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: I find human relationships incredibly fascinating, because they are so difficult to grasp and at the same time so important and meaningful to being human.
Gerald Midgley, Rachel Lilley, and Raghav Rajagopalan: Could we be approaching a tipping point when systems thinking will become business as usual in our organisations and communities?
Karen O’Brien: When chaos, confusion, and cruelty become hypernormal, it’s time to challenge normality. Let’s be abnormal and embrace our quantum nature—relational, paradoxical, and entangled to the core.
OCT 3–21 2025 | ONLINE. Announcing two RSD14 keynotes by Gerald Midgley. #1 RSD14-RSDX (online) Beyond Systemic Design Methodologies: Systems thinking as an everyday practice. #2 RSD14-TORONTO (also livestreamed) Tackling Marginalisation in Systemic Design.
Tony Fry: Animate existence (including our own) is the consequence of relations within and between multiple intertwined ecologies.
OCTOBER 19 2025 | Toronto, Canada. A day on Toronto Islands for people who design, fund, lead, and participate in systemic leadership capability-building programmes.
Seanna Davidson: And so it becomes necessary to challenge the notion of systems leadership altogether and to make visible a relational, shared and dynamic leadership that more resembles a system than an individual role.
Sebastian Wolf Siebzehnrübl: When we approach systems as problems to solve, we create conditions for technical solutions. When we approach them as questions to live, we create conditions for relational transformation.
Call for case reports. In the lead-up to RSD14, there was a collective sense that now is the time to formally recognise and track case reports. Do you agree? RSD14–RSDX is planning an exploratory inquiry into case reporting, held online on October 21.
Evan Barba: What does it mean to exist in relation to something, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and systemic problems?
Peer-reviews start May 1—check out the resources or drop us a line rsdeditors@rsdsymposium.org. Submissions for workshops, maps/exhibits, and special sessions are ongoing.