
Category: RSD11 Programme
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.

In-person & online
Hosted by the University of Brighton
RSD11 was a four-day symposium, available in-person and online. The core programme ran October 13-16, with pre-symposium workshops, events, and the Systemic Design Association’s general assembly on October 12. #NewMacy also ran a dedicated track at RSD11. The focus was “ontogenesis,” developing new ways of becoming. #NewMacy sets ontogenetic resilience as the framing intention — and cybernetics as key.
RSDX preceded the symposium, October 3-9, as an online programme of panels and workshops that explored systemic design directions and offered opportunities to apply methods in a systemic design context. RSD11 participants could access RSDX sessions at no additional cost and some of the sessions were open to all.
BRIGHTON’S SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING IS BASED AT THE MOULSECOOMB CAMPUS.
#NewMacy #RSD11
RSD11 and #NewMacy presented a track dedicated to catalyzing conversations for action across disciplines, geographies, and generations through systemic principles, processes, and communities. #NewMacy creates conditions for enacting productive responses among individuals and communities that bring about change in the near term while planning for and committing to the timespan required to effect lasting change. The current focus is a new framing for “ontogenesis,” specifically that of developing new ways of becoming. To survive in a changing world, we must embrace resilience in lieu of security, interpreted as constancy. Hence, #NewMacy substitutes ontogenetic resilience as the framing intention — and Cybernetics as key. Introduction to #NewMacy

OCTOBER 12 | UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON, MOULSECOOMB CAMPUS

OCTOBER 13 & 14 | IRONWORKS STUDIOS

OCTOBER 15 & 16 | UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON, CITY CAMPUS
RSDX Series | October 3 to 9 | online
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD11) 2022 Symposium
RSD10 – Possibilities and Practices. Held online and in person Ocotober 3-16, 2022. Hosted by University of Brighton, UK.
RSD11 – Possibilities & Practices
Editors Goran Matic, Cheryl May, and Ben Sweeting: 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.
#NewMacy: Becoming
The #NewMacy Studio construct is to enable deep participation through activities such as prototyping, play, exploration, enactment, and improvisation.
#NewMacy ACT I: Redefining Stability
Re-defining Stability. A contextual framing for #NewMacy and the #NewMacy “Acts” at RSD11.
#NewMacy ACT III: Reintroducing Stability
Reintroducing Stability – #NewMacy conversations construct an ever-inclusive and participant-directed platform for dynamic stability and growth.
RSD11: Confronting legacies of oppression
A growing group of scholars and practitioners are confronting legacies of oppression in the systemic design domain.
RSD11: 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.
RSD11: 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?
RSD11: 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.
RSD11: 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.
RSD11: Radical shifts in planetary health
My health depends on your health, which depends on networks, systems, and webs of planetary health. Attending to health means fundamentally rethinking where (our) health comes from.
RSD11: Reimagining the intentionality of architecture
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.
National Institute of Design RSD11 Programme
National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India special RSD11 programme including a virtual walk-through of NID campus and maps exhibition.
#NewMacy ACT II: Studios
At RSD11, six #NewMacy Studios created opportunities to engage with interdisciplinary approaches to systemic design through conversations for action.
Possibilities and practices of systemic design
As RSD moves into its second decade, it is possible to question systemic design’s emerging shape.
RSD11 Sessions: Key info
The RSD11 programme includes keynote speakers, paper tracks (papers & presentations), activity sessions, workshops, and exhibits. Most will be available both online and in-person.
RSD11 review process
Current RSD11 updates on Calls for Contributions and acknowledgements.
Focus areas: the RSD11 seven
Seven specific focus areas have been developed as provocations for critical reflection, new topics, and different directions.
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.
