Thomas Maiorana
This workshop invites participants into an immersive, escape-room-style challenge designed to evoke the lived experience of navigating complex systems. Adapted from a series of pedagogical interventions used with undergraduate design students, this hands-on session uses narrative, physical clues, and team-based problem-solving to surface core capacities in systemic design: curiosity, multi-scalar thinking, embodied cognition, and collaborative sensemaking.
Participants work in small teams to progress through a sequence of challenges that mirror the ambiguity, boundary tensions, and emergence found in real-world systems work. A structured debrief follows the experience, connecting gameplay to systemic design theory and pedagogical practice. This session offers both a playful encounter with complexity and a generative model for those exploring embodied approaches to systems education.
KEYWORDS: experiential learning, serious games, complexity, escape rooms, embodied cognition
RSD TOPIC(S): Learning & Education, Methods & Methodology
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The RSD14 workshop folder contains a downloadable brief with each workshop's context and background, agenda, facilitator profiles, and key references.