New Conference Track & Call for Participation: Systemic Design
Systemic design is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary design discipline oriented toward transformation of complex public services, social change, and complex services. Systemic design has evolved from a theoretical approach to design thinking based on systems theory to an advanced design school that employs systems thinking methods for programs of strategic scale and higher complexity (e.g., social policy, healthcare, education, urbanization). It is responding to contemporary societal forces and demands for organizational transformation, impelling the requirement for “better means of change” through integrated design practices of systems and services.
By integrating systems thinking and its methods, systemic design brings human-centred design to complex, multi-stakeholder social systems. Across all its various fields design is characterized by its richness of methods, its object-oriented privilege for making, an iterative refinement toward ideal states that do not yet exist, and abductive reasoning. But while design theory can often appear thin or inapplicable across design disciplines, when informed by systemic theories and systematic practices we can discover new value in its applicability to many contexts and problem areas.
Systems theories enjoy a deep canon of literature and with strong roots in science and research method. Every system theory or model – social systems design, living systems, anticipatory systems, adaptive systems, ecosystem theory, information ecologies, critical systems, and complexity theory – is a point of view which we can adopt in designing. Systems theories provide rationale and even guidelines for understanding individual and social human behavior, interaction with environments, and positions for representing futures. Systems theories can co-evolve with a new school of design theory to resolve informed action on today’s highly-resilient wicked problems, and deal effectively with challenging, contested and high-stakes challenges.
Participation: May 15 to July 15
For ISSS 2015 we are proposing a paper / presentation track with up to two sessions. We plan to include a workshop on systemic design as an inquiry for social and organizational change, and a facilitated dialogue on emerging practices. More information will be provided on the workshop as the program is announced.
We are accepting abstracts and paper proposals from May 15 to July 15 for contributions to the Systemic Design track. For questions please contact the Systemic Design coordinator and Special Integration Group lead Dr. Peter Jones, pjones@ocadu.ca
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