RSD11 Call for Contributions
Now open. RSD11 Call for contributions that challenge, extend, critique, and diversify established working methods in systemic design.
Category: RSD11 Program
October 13-16, 2022
RSD11
University of Brighton, UK
Possibilities and Practices of Systemic Design
11th Annual RSD Symposium
As designers look to address systemic challenges, they must wrestle with tensions and conflicting requirements within their practices and the situations they seek to change. Systemic questions cannot be approached one at a time in isolation. Yet, it is inevitable that design is partial in its engagements – to address everything is implausible or uncritical to implicit boundary judgements and the privileges of dominant perspectives. Unpredictable interdependencies require a cautious approach, yet incremental strategies risk entrenching underlying errors and injustices by making the status quo more palatable. Profound, long-term changes are needed, but the urgency of the present also demands immediately achievable actions.
Registration opens June 2022
BRIGHTON’S SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING IS BASED AT THE MOULSECOOMB CAMPUS.
Hybrid Event
Hosted by University of Brighton
RSD11 is a three-day symposium with a pre-symposium workshop day. The time frame is October 13 to 16, 2022, and will include both online and on-site programming. The preliminary plan is to live stream keynote and plenary presentations and coordinate a dedicated online program running parallel over the conference days. A space will be made available on campus for in-person delegates to gather for the online program.
BRIGHTON PALACE PIER PHOTO BY BENN MCGUINNESS ON UNSPLASH.
At RSD11, we look to expand further systemic design’s modes of working:
- Systemic design has thus far drawn primarily on methodological and organisational aspects of systems thinking as a way of handling complexity. In what ways might other perspectives augment systemic approaches?
- The systems field is open to the creative arts, countercultural movements, enactive cognitive science, family therapy, posthumanism, and others. How might these transdisciplinary connections further enrich and critique systemic design research and practice?
Info | + Program
Preparing an RSD submission
This article invites you to follow the RSD posting protocols and provides a detailed description of the basics to consider when preparing your submission.
Contributions to RSD11 focus sessions
Authors are invited to identify their paper or presentation as aligned to one of seven specific focus sessions. These have been developed as provocations for critical reflection, new topics, and different directions.
Focus: Design over time
Designers must navigate between the need for immediate action and maintaining long-term change. Yet, it is difficult to think of the temporality of design beyond the consideration of years or decades.
Focus: Products are systemic objects
In this focus, RSD11 is interested in contributions exploring: circular design, regenerative design, distributed design, and, more broadly, ways that designers of things act to shape the nature and legibility of economic, bureaucratic, ecological and cultural systems.
Focus: Architecture gone wild?
Now that the architecture discipline seems to be arriving at a period of digital sobriety in its modes of practice and generative methods, critical perspectives are needed.
Focus: Confronting legacies of oppression
A growing group of scholars and practitioners are confronting legacies of oppression in the systemic design domain.
Focus: Radical shifts in planetary health
Attending to health means fundamentally rethinking where (our) health comes from. The importance of considering global health and human health as intersecting is increasingly pressing.
Focus: Different stories in design
How may we use Bateson’s provocations to rethink the problematic stories around design and modernity as mobilised in contemporary design practices?
Focus: Methods and the worlds they make
Methods afford and perpetuate ways of understanding and organising the world much like any other artefact. Because conventions are assumed within the context of a methodological practice, they are difficult to question from within.
Guidelines for authors, facilitators, and exhibitors
Presenting at RSD has many benefits and RSDsymposium.org is a compendium of contributions from people working at the forefront of systemic design. Here’s how it works.
RSD11 in 2022: University of Brighton
RSD is off to the shores of Brighton in 2022. The University of Brighton’s School of Architecture, Technology and Engineering is the RSD11 host.
