Holistic teaching and learning activities

The Systemic Design Lab (SDL) initiative builds on established teaching in science, engineering, planning and design while introducing systemic design thinking and doing in innovative formats based on experiential didactics and outdoor creativity. A main aim is to develop and employ a set of hybrid tools for dealing with complex systems, for designing resilient regenerative systems, across disciplines.
We use bio-inspired design or design-as-nature principles, fabrication and prototyping with regenerative materials, urban and landscape test planning, and systems- or supply chain mapping of product/process/services to spur creativity, holistic thinking and critical reflection, visual dialogue and facilitation within a sustainability context. Students learn to inhabit the “view from above” – zooming out of the direct problem focus to see the underlaying structure and identify leverage hubs with systemic impact – and zooming in again with the needed focus on details that matter most.

Students acquire skills to apply scientific methods, such as life cycle analysis, supply chain mapping, resilience assessment, and circularity planning, to both quantify and minimize the undesirable negative environmental footprint while increasing the regenerative, net-positive contribution of their design solutions.

Students learn about designerly ways of reasoning, research by design, design thinking, visual dialogue, iteration, and different design disciplines. Part of this is a culture to research solutions of interventions with a conscious focus on the designer as an intervener, about being steered by interest, prototyping despite of lack of data.

Fabrication and material science are taught by actually designing and prototyping while engaging in transdisciplinary partnerships for societal impact and real-world experience. Students gain a whole-systems understanding of the relation between products, processes, services, economies, land use and lifestyles to up- and downstream flows of matter, energy and people mobility, within a spatial framing, designerly interventions, and a continuous zoom in zoom out practice.