Explore, Understand and Create
Systemic design (SD) optimizes an entire system as a whole, rather than its parts in isolation. SD is iterative, recursive and circular, requires creative, curious, informed and critical systems thinking and doing, yielding radical resource efficiency. Systems mapping, design thinking, footprint assessment, network analysis, test planning, prototyping, fabrication, social experiments and outdoor experiences empower students as change agents for sustainability.
Coping with Change and Complexity
Climate change as a major societal challenge is hugely complex and interwoven with various ecological and socio-economic systems. Solutions to tackle challenges such as climate change are systemic by nature. Transitions to enhance resilience require Systemic Design approaches based on systems thinking and creativity, using inter- and transdisciplinary methods.
Systemic Design for Sustainability
Systemic Design (SD) combines systems thinking and design for the understanding of complex systems. Systemic Design for Sustainability provides tools and techniques to (re)create regenerative systems that continuously restore, renew or revitalize their resources and energy. SD is a holistic approach for addressing complex challenges; it should combine quantitative and qualitative methods with creativity techniques in a holistic way.
Systems Types and Scales
Systemic Design addresses socio-technical-ecological systems from a whole-systems-view: from materials to products to built infrastructure to communities, services. landscapes and entire economies.
This encloses circular flows from the extraction and growth of natural resources, the production/distribution/use of energy, industrial design of products, architectural design of buildings, engineering of roads, restoration of river beds, urban design of cities, landscape planning, and design of services, experiences and communication.
How can such diverse systems be looked at as a whole?
The View from Above
When confronted with complexity, it often helps to take a bird eye’s view – to zoom out, get a structural overview, and zoom in on the actual point of most influence, of leverage, for solving the problem. Systemic Design provides methods and techniques to zoom out and identify structure and leverage in complex systems
Nature-based solutions
Nature has been designing regenerative systems since 3.8 billion years, called evolution. No waste exists, all resource and energy flows are infinite and self-restoring cycles. The model of success in Nature is that of cooperation, from the material to the landscape level. Nature-based solutions and bio-inspired design are used in learning and practicing Systemic Design.
Field Course in autumn 2019
RE:GENERATE alpine-urban circularity
The 2019 edition of the Systemic Design Labs offers a real-world learning experience on the complex challenge to revive mountain livelihoods, focusing on local identity, the built environment, resilient landscapes and a regenerative economy.
The specific design challenge is to identify and layout a holistic, partly quantified and visualized systems strategy for building a resilient community economy that embraces local identity, revitalizes cultural and landscape biodiversity, and creates alpine-urban circularity.
The compact block course runs from Sept 13th (introduction) to Oct 29th (final presentation) at ETH in Zurich. The main field work period is Sept 26 – Oct 1st in the Italian Piedmont Alps at the MonViso Institute.
Former Systemic Design Lab courses
Former Systemic Design Lab courses focused on building skis skateboards, kite boards, knives, and educational snowshoe toolkits.
Outreach
Systemic Design Labs experiment with innovative didactics, themes, study disciplines, systems boundaries and place settings. Experiences and evaluations are continuously shared, discussed and published in order to advance education on creatively addressing complex sustainability challenges.
