What do systemic designers do?

Systemic designers integrate systems thinking and theory with advanced design methods. We are actively co-creating an interdisciplinary field that promises to effect anticipatory change in complex environmental, social, technical, and policy systems. Ours is a worldwide community of advanced practitioners leading pragmatic approaches to systems-oriented design for complex organizational and systems change programs.

The Systemic Design Research Network, a cooperative educational group, operating since 2012, founded the Systemic Design Association in 2018. As a not-for-profit association, SDA is committed to advancing systemic design and reflecting a membership comprised of professionals who are putting systemic design theory, methodologies, and methods into practice worldwide. Their work is represented annually at the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) Symposium.

So systemic designers bring human-centred design to complex, multi-stakeholder service systems by integrating systems thinking and methods. They adapt known design competencies – form and process reasoning, social and generative research methods, and sketching and visualization practices – to describe, map, propose and reconfigure complex social systems.

Directory of Systemic Designers

The SDA Directory of Systemic Designers represents members who have opted to share their contact details and profile with others and who share SDA’s aims:

• To advance the practice of systemic design as an integrated discipline of systems thinking and systems-oriented design.
• To convene an annual international symposium, Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) Symposium.
• To advance the knowledge, theory, and publications in systemic/systems-oriented design and industrial and social systems design methods in systems practices.

Together, we are committed to the co-evolution of systemic design, adapting each field’s preferred core disciplinary methods and mobilizing knowledge across practitioners and scholars. SDA members support the evolution of advanced design practice. We manage complex projects, including social policy, healthcare, education, and urbanization, and adopt systems thinking methods to creatively push the boundaries beyond the popular modes of systems dynamics and soft systems.