Enlivenment—A Systemic Design Community Publication

This content is republished from the Enlivenment publication. Please refer to the canonical when sharing https://medium.com/enlivenment.

Enlivenment is a systemic design community publication. This is a place for practitioners to contribute and share their ideas, reflections, and experiences in order to foster systemic design as a versatile and powerful methodology. Although systemic design is the main watercourse, topics related to systems thinking, futures thinking, sustainability, regeneration, as well as inner dimensions of systems transformation are very welcome. What we are particularly interested in is place-specific stories that reveal local peculiarities. We’d like to foster diversity among the voices of practitioners from different parts of the world and facilitate the exchange of ideas and experiences from around the globe. Enlivenment refers to the German philosopher Andreas Weber’s book, where he contends that “we may have forgotten what it means to be alive” and that “we have to reconsider ‘life’ and ‘aliveness’ as fundamental categories of thought and of practical actions.” Ažycciaŭlennie is an approximate translation into Belarusian, Alexander Pryšyvałka’s (editor) native language.

Why publish with Enlivenment?

To participate, exchange, and stay alive in and as a community. As Weber puts it, aliveness is “the desire for participation and connection”. Life unfolds through participation, exchange, and reciprocity; we are “alive-in-connectedness”. We invite you to contribute by sharing and publishing your stories.

What stories do we publish?

Although we admire the proverbial saying “variety is the spice of life”, there are certain restrictions as to the stories that we publish:

• The topics covered can be as follows: systemic design, systems thinking, future thinking, complexity, sustainability, and regeneration. It could be something emerging that is not tangible and well defined currently. The story might shed light on interdisciplinary realms involving, for instance, art or self-development.
• The topics can belong to any layer: society (macro), community or organisation (meso), and individual (micro).
• The topics can be explored in detail through any dimension: psychological, ecological, economic, and social.
• Stories should be written by humans. If part of a story was generated by means of AI, please mention it explicitly in the disclaimer at the beginning of the text.
• Stories are supposed to reflect a personal perspective, not a vague corporate point of view. For this reason, we accept stories made by individuals, not business profiles.
• Stories should not sell anything.

We do not have limitations on the format; rather, we encourage authors to use any that seems appropriate: article, essay (both written or visual), interview, open letter, something in the middle of those, or even experimental. Big genres—such as monographs—are also appropriate.

We are open to publishing free stories and those submitted to the Medium Partner Program. Authors can decide whether to place their work behind the metered paywall, and we respect this decision.

How to prepare your story?

To help readers grasp your idea, please consider the following recommendations:

• Provide a short lead of the story to help readers to grasp the main idea right away.
• Break text into sections and use headings for them.
• Provide references to all sources used, whether quotes or research.
• In the case of images, the author must be indicated.
• Be sure to add an alt text for images as a brief description for readers with visual impairments.
• Add a clear concluding section as a synthesis of your thoughts.

How to publish with Enlivenment?

There is a simple process we invite you to follow:

• Send a link to your Medium story via email at apryshyvalka@proton.me
• We’ll take 3–5 business days to peer-review a story.
• If needed, we’ll get back with reviewers’ remarks.
• If a story is a good fit for publication, it gets accepted and added to the queue to be published. We’ll keep you informed along the way.

Important remarks

Finally, a few remarks that we’d like authors to bear in mind:

• Publishing stories with Enlivenment is voluntary; we do not offer any reward.
• Once published, a story is still available for editing, updating, and deletion. However, we kindly ask that you keep a story published for at least one year.
• The author remains the only owner of his or her story.

If you have any questions or proposals, do not hesitate to reach out via email: apryshyvalka@proton.me

Editor & Author

Alexander Pryšyvałka

Systemic designer, community weaver, artist.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-pryshyvalka/

Editor at https://medium.com/enlivenment