Systemic Cycles

A cycling journey towards resilient regenerative futures:

Systemic Cycles (SC) was protoyped by Martin Schütz and Tobias Luthe of ETH Zurich in 2021, hosted by MonViso Institute, IT. SC currently is both further conceptualized as a Swiss-based research project, and as part of this research practically developed in different bio-regional contexts.

cycle-explore-connect-map-weave-transfer-enjoy

Systemic Cycles is a (multiple-) day bicycle tour combined with a regional exploration of supply chain systems. It mainly serves two functions:

  • Offering a playful experience of a moving social adventure as alternative didactics on learning systemic design
  • Nudging processes of bio-regional weaving towards more circular, regional supply chain systems and ultimately regenerative cultures

Idea Why just travel as a classic tourist, for leisure only, as a guest? Why not become part of a joint journey into a liveable future? To combine enjoyment and the useful? Systemic Cycles is joyfully exploring new areas with engagement; with content, learning about local, circular, sustainable interventions and practices in the region where we travel., We move within nature, relax, enjoy local food and drinks, and interact with local people. To connect with place, to learn with each other, to enact (visual) dialogue, and to co-design more resilient regenerative systems.

Concept We are exploring places, people, companies and organizations acting in the fields of circularity, sustainability and systemic design in a given region. We use the bicycle as a tool to explore and connect these players, learn what they do, analyze their processes and supply chains, sum up our findings and try to figure out future opportunities for a sustainable local development of people, companies, and areas.

Goal Openly interact and exchange with people in the region we explore. Understand peoples’ motivation, learn about their inspirations, ideas, achievements, and future goals. Capture the current state of practices, map and visualize the findings, develop possible future steps with and for these actors, and reflect such learnings ourselves. Weave people and processes across the regional scale to exchange knowledge and experience, and to co-design resilient regenerative systems.

Relation with Systemic Design Labs Systemic Cycles is a lead didactic in the upcoming ETH MOOC Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems and thus continuously developed as experiential didactics and part of basic research on methods development in systemic design.

More info: systemic-cycles.org

The protoyped first iteration of Systemic Cycles in the Italian Piedmont

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