Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems
About
Design, Resilience, Regeneration, Systems
This innovative Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) hybridizes sustainability science, systemic design and transformative action. It provides you with worldviews, tools, illustrations and transformative networks to build your capacities and engage in systemic innovation of complex systems.
Climate change and pandemics like Covid-19 are some of today’s most pressing complex challenges we as a society have to address; much of our economies and societies prove to be not resilient and regenerative, but exhaustive, vulnerable, and unfair. Scientific knowledge and reasoning are the fundamental tools to base policy and management decisions on, especially in times of crises. But we currently as well experience the limits of science alone when it comes to dealing with highly complex systems that are self-emergent, unpredictable, span across nested scales, depend on societal behavioral transitions, and lack data.
The increasingly fast-changing world requires as well skillsets of relational holism and creative weaving of effective solutions in cooperation. Such solutions need to strengthen regional bio-economies and local communities, while increasing cooperation on a sub-national scale, across national boundaries, still making us less dependent on global supply chains.
Tobias Luthe, program director
A new cohort of “weavers”
A MOOC series about creating positive impact in complex systems as part of learning communities
You will find different entry points to connect with this MOOC series: deep philosophical discourse, insights into the latest state of science on sustainability and resilience, designerly practice, hybrid methods, concrete design principles, real-world illustrations, and a motivating community.
Exciting real-world illustrations will take you to Hemsedal Norway, Annecy France, Ostana Italy, and Mallorca Spain – from material supply chains, to products, buildings, communities and their services, to landscapes, bio-regions, and transnational cooperation. This offers a comparative understanding of communities and regions undergoing sustainability transitions across different contexts, cultures, climates and geographies.
The prominent methods you will learn are systemic design and systems-oriented design, social network analysis, resilience assessment, life cycle and footprint analysis, circularity mapping, visual dialogue, cross-scale design, “view from above” perspectives, biomimicry, transdisciplinary research, real-world elaboration, and more.
The MOOCs’ didactics are designed to combine time and place independent virtual learning through pre-recorded conversations and presentations, both accessible as movies and audio files, readings, and practical engagement outside in nature. Virtual content is meant to stimulate physical and social interaction in the bio-region where the participant lives. Systemic Cycles takes the participant on a conscious exploration of place and regional supply chain actors on their bicycle, to playfully learn systemic design methods, to weave together local and regional networks and to explore the inner self through physical activity. An accompanying visual mapping process called Gigamapping acts as a designerly way to co-create your own learning journey and connect across the MOOC series to your final transformative design project. Your personal QUEST guides you through your learning journey. Weekly live tutorials in an online forum offer opportunities to discuss and brainstorm with teachers.
You will learn together with diverse experts in their field – sustainability scientists, systemic designers, consultants, local and European politicians, book authors, builders, mountain guides, self-compassion trainers, and together co-create and connect communities of practice for learning and engagement opportunities
Time to invest will be about a minimum of 2-4 hours per week, with each MOOC taking three weeks of time.
A new learning community you will be part of – Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems (DRRS), a virtual place to co-create the Now and the Next, to deep dive into themes that a MOOC may trigger, to engage and create further learning opportunities. Check out DRRS.
Watch the trailer
Syllabus
The MOOCs’ structure
This MOOC series is about creating positive impact in complex systems in times of nested crises. It is about navigating complexity and uncertainty with new tools and practices, such as “organic emergence.” Complex systems are inherently dynamic and unpredictable: their properties are emergent. An organic way to engage with emergence is to trust in having the right tools and techniques to adaptively cope with sudden surprises or challenges, and to reveal hidden opportunities.
The four consecutive MOOCs aim to address these urgent and complex challenges. Participants are invited on a learning journey that includes emphasis on new holistic worldviews, concepts like regeneration and resilience, befriending complexity and uncertainty, methods and hybrid practices of science and design, connecting more with our inner self, and becoming bio-regional weavers within communities of transformational learning and praxis.
Download detailed schedule
Faculty
Who is teaching these MOOCs?
Diverse experts in their fields who walk their talk. University professors, designers, builders, politicians, mountain guides, consultants, entrepreneurs, architects, visionaries, PhD students – and yourself, as participant, in the form of learning tandems with regionally close colleagues.
MOOC production team and lead instructors
FAQ
What is the aim of this series ?
This MOOC series is about creating positive impact in complex systems. It is about navigating complexity and uncertainty with new tools and practices, such as “organic emergence:” Complex systems are inherently dynamic and unpredictable: their properties are emergent. An organic way to engage with emergence is to trust in having the right tools and techniques to adaptively cope with sudden surprises or challenges, and to reveal hidden opportunities.
It is about dancing with systems, about befriending uncertainty, and about finding community to co-learn and become joint weavers in weaving new connections, new cooperations, new circularities, new bio-regional economies.
What are the objectives ?
One objective of these MOOCs is to familiarize different disciplines with each other by language, value and impact – in order to cooperatively co-create systemic innovation to wicked problems. It can complement academic training from non-design disciplines to expand on creatively dealing with complexity, and use this based on worldview values and directions. It can also expand the training of design field students by gaining knowledge on systems thinking, conscious worldviews, scientific reasoning, and other methods.
These all are skills and cultures of and from the emerging field of systemic design.
READ MORE about Systemic Design
For whom is this MOOC (series) ?
Really, for anyone who is curious and open to do the best we can to cope with crises, to navigate complexity, to co-create more livable futures. If you are a student or a practitioner, if you learned science, engineering, design, architecture, landscape or urban planning, if you are a politician or an entrepreneur, an employee in public services or an accountant: systems are relevant to anyone, and anyone is part of designing resilient regenerative systems. Are you ready to take full responsibility for your own creative agency in how we co-create a regenerative future? Join us!
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