Harold Nelson
This framing talk by Harold Nelson is based on the article, Systemic Design Inquiry—Open or closed? Broadband inquiring systems.
Establishing open systems inquiry through systemic design
The good news is that there are generalists and polymaths in the existing populations of professional and academic fields waiting for recognition and formal support and development. It is possible and necessary to design new academic programs for formally preparing open systems practitioners. Of course, there is also a need to introduce people in institutions, agencies, and businesses on the value of open systems inquiry and systemic designers who are polymaths who are excellent navigators in broadband inquiring systems in open systems. Every high-energy system needs a crucible.
Profiles
Harold Nelson
Harold Nelson LLC
Harold Nelson consults with public, private and military organisations on issues of systemic design competence. He has been a visiting scholar in the School of Computer Science at the University of Montana and was the 2009-2010 Nierenberg Distinguished Professor of Design in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Harold has been an occasional Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy and the Defense Analysis program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He was an affiliated Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington and worked in research for the NSF-funded Centre for Learning in Informal and Formal Environments at the University of Washington, Stanford University and SRI.
Harold is a past president and and, at present, a trustee of the International Society for Systems Science, the co-founding Director and President of the Advanced Design Institute (ADi), and the owner of Harold G. Nelson LLC, Systemic Design. As a consultant, Dr Nelson has worked with non-profits and corporations, state and federal agencies, international governments, and the United Nations, and continues to work as an educator, consultant, and scholar on systemic organisational design. Dr Nelson was the head of and faculty member in the Graduate Programs in Whole Systems Design (WSD) at Antioch University. He received his PhD in The Design of Social Systems, graduating with distinction, from the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Master of Architecture degree from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor of Architecture from Montana State University and is a licensed architect in California.
In 2004, The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World received the Outstanding Book of the Year award. The 2nd edition by MIT Press was published in 2012.
Harold also contributed the first article for the Contexts journal with an invited essay in 2023. Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix helps place the footers and foundation into the field that has grown from design for complex scale and generations of systems thinking.
In 2023, Harold launched Systemic Design Master Classes.
The master classes in systemic design are designed to be catalysts in the development of shared understandings of what systemic design is, can be, and is desired to be—some common ground for the place and space to have generable conversations about the aim and outcome of systemic design education and practices—preparation and praxis.
These Master Classes are precursors to the establishment of a formal venue—a Center for Advanced Systemic Design and concomitant Systemic-Design ‘Flight’ School—for the capacitation of emerging systemic designers and their allies.
