RSD3 Proceedings

Relating Systems Thinking and Design 2014 Symposium Proceedings

Editors: Birger Sevaldson, Peter Jones

Published by The Oslo School of Architecture and Design
ISBN: 978-82-547-0263-5

The Third Symposium of Relating Systems Thinking and Design was held at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design 15-17 October, 2014.

The third Oslo symposium engaged over 200 participants and over 50 authors, and we found a much broader range of contributions across related fields of design and systemics. The 5 keynote speakers established a significant presence.

The emerging renaissance of systems thinking in design responds to the increasing complexity in all challenges faced by designers, strategists, and transdisciplinary innovators. We are facing deeply entangled problematics in natural, social, economic, and political systems. Our professional and organizational worlds have become too complex for linear goal-driven management, and the solution of conventional design thinking is insufficient to address complexity across domains, scales, and networks. New thinking, new knowledge, and new forms of intervention are required to take on this web of interconnected challenges.

The core planning team of the RSD symposia established the Systemic Design Research Network organized as a collaborative research group shared between AHO and OCAD University and independent researchers. Last year Peter Jones also initiated a Systemic Design track and interest group at the Washington ISSS conference, which continues into 2015 with the Berlin conference. European participants of RSD3 might be encouraged to know that we are planning a one-day special track for ISSS Berlin, preceding the conference.

Papers and presentations were organized for the following themes:

Social Design
Education
Service Design and Design for Public Services
Theories and Methods of Systemic Design
Business and Enterprice Design, Sustainability and Economic Policy
The Built Environment
Systems Oriented Design

These proceedings are the result of a dialogue and discursive process within the community of practice, more than that of a traditional scientific publication process. The process contains five steps, creating long term engagement, low entry threshold as well as high level final output:

1) the submission and peer reviewing of abstracts,

2) the presentations and dialogues at the RSD3 symposium,

3) the postproduction and submission of a working papers,

4) the publication of the symposium proceedings with AHO as publisher

5) the publication of selected fully developed and peer reviewed scientific papers in an external publishing channel.

This process was tested with RSD2 and worked very well resulting in two special issues of the scientific design research journal FORMakademisk.

RSD3 is following the same process with fully developed and peer reviewed selected publications in a new speciall issue of FORMakademisk and a volume of collected papers on Systemic Design for the Springer series in Translational System Sciences.

In addition to the originally submitted abstracts the RSD3 proceedings contains the working papers and presentations. These were submitted after the symposium by most, but not, all authors. Special thanks to Patricia Kambitsch of Playthink and Daniela Olsen for the sketchnotes.

Editorial Board: Birger Sevaldson, Peter Jones, Harold Nelson, Alex Ryan, Linda Blaasvær, Manuela Aguirre