Designing
Resilient Regenerative
Systems

ETH CAS in Regenerative Systems MOOC Series

The DRRS learning system

ETH CAS in Regenerative Systems
MOOC Series

MOOCs, CAS, MAS, community – become part of the DRRS tree, an analogy for the DRRS learning system. The tree’s crown is the large-scale, highly accessible and cost-free entry to DRRS, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) series, available via the ETH Zurich channel on edX. The MOOCs will serve as standalone virtual course offers, and as entry to the tree trunk funnel into its root system, the DRRS professional program. 

CAS alumni get the chance to feedback their learnings into the continuously evolving MOOC – like nutrients taken up through the root system and transported back up toward the tree’s crown.

This DRRS program builds on and expands the qualities of excellence in disciplinary science, such as ecosystem functions, biogeophysical cycles, cell regeneration, bioengineering, artificial intelligence, agent-based modeling, life cycle analysis, social network analysis, circular economy, nature finance, social-ecological resilience (…). To adequately deal with emergent, unplannable, adaptive systems, DRRS adds the meta-perspective, epistemological plurality, cross-scale linking, worldviews, organizing ideas as narratives and personal inner development to our learning portfolio and cultures.

The DRRS program is about creating positive impact in complex systems as part of learning communities. Participants find different entry points to connect with this DRRS program: deep philosophical discourse, insights into the latest state of science on sustainability and resilience, designerly practice, hybrid methods, concrete design principles, real-world illustrations, inner personal development, and a motivating community.

Initially included exciting real-world, living illustrations take participants to partnering real-world labs and bio-regional learning centers, i.e. Ostana Italy, Hemsedal Norway, Annecy France, Mallorca Spain, and Venice Italy – embodying complex systems from governance scales of material supply chains to products, buildings, communities and their services, to landscapes, bio-regions, and transnational cooperation. This offers a relational understanding of communities and regions undergoing sustainability transitions across different contexts, cultures, climates and geographies.

Some of the prominent methods participants 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, design as nature, transdisciplinary research, real-world elaboration, personal inner development, and more. A main innovation is that such diverse methods, practices, tools, cultures, are taught and learnt in synergies, in relation, challenge based, to form new cultures of “dancing with systems”, of dealing with complexity, science-based and designerly with direct practical impact.

The cost-free MOOC series is, from its second iteration on, a purely virtual program with pre-recorded content, student paced, without live sessions, but backed up by the DRRS online community with rich dialogues and a help forum.

The costly professional program offers in-depth personal, live, physical teaching and learning, live discourse, extended content, practicing methods in application, individual QUEST project coaching, personal access to teachers and further leading experts in the field, curation of physical peer-learning, and the field design trips as main learning element with direct practical real-world experiences.

The DRRS community is our learning and support network, and market place in the virtual world, as well as in the physical, in person world. You benefit and contribute to the growth of this rich professional network.

Weaving relations and participating in a joint journey towards co-creation for resilience and regeneration as part of learning communities is at the core of DRRS program participation benefits. Each participant already comes with their own rich network. With DRRS, you connect your network with those of your fellow students, of alumni, and with the DRRS virtual community with more than 1600 members.

Enter the DRRS network
“One is of course, we all were educated in one specific what we call thought-style, in one specific way, looking scientifically at the topic, at an issue. And you need to bridge that, you need to understand the perspective of a physicist, you need to understand the perspective of an architect, and they are fundamentally different. And you need somehow to find some common ground. And the second challenge is more like I would call it personality related, because for that, to make it happen so that it works, you need to be open, you need to be flexible. You need to be able to listen. It’s much more listening than actually talking.“
Prof. Dr. Michael Stauffacher
Transdisciplinarity Lab, ETH Zurich
“So creating not only communities for the sake of sustainability, but also learning communities, for the sake of sharing our experience. And this dancing with complexity, as you say, is much easier if it is done in a community sharing the same values and sharing similar experiences. Because what happens is that as we explore conceptual relationships, which is largely what systems thinking is all about, as we do that in a community, we simultaneously experience human relationships, which means that the conceptual relationships get invested with an emotional dimension of the human relationships.“
Fritjof Capra, PhD
author of “The Systems View of Life” 
“For me, the entire shift towards a regenerative way of working on sustainability is very aligned with this because at the core of the notion of regeneration is basically the evolutionary dynamic of a complex nested system, evolving as a whole, not as species and individuals competing against each other. This dynamic whole is not an additive whole, where all the parts are put together to make the whole. That’s the reductionist mechanistic framing. But we are speaking about the participatory involvement in dynamic nested complexity. The whole process we emerge from is in constant dynamic motion. And that changes the proposition of science from prediction and control to appropriate participation in the face of uncertainty.”
Daniel Christian Wahl, PhD
author of “Designing Regenerative Cultures”