Invitation from Peter Jones, RSD14 Chair

This year, RSD14 extends across three weeks in October, beginning online on October 3, culminating in Toronto from October 15 to 19, and shifting to a new phase on October 21.

• The RSD13-RSDX online festival features over 40 sessions from October 3 to 6 and returns with a special October 11–12 weekend edition, organised by presenting partners. The Coordinated Management of Meaning Institute hosts Relational Connectedness on the 11th, and the American Society for Cybernetics hosts Ecologies of Knowing on the 12th.
• RSD14-Paper Talks opens with a day of knowledge communities on October 7, followed by 38 one-hour sessions from October 8 to 10. Organised into thematic tracks, each session presents three peer-reviewed papers from authors across 27 countries.
• RSD14-Toronto starts on October 15 with a day dedication to workshops, followed by three days of symposium at OCAD University. The Sunday post-symposium retreat is dedicated to systems(ic) leadership. Held on the Toronto Islands, this is a calling for people who design and lead systemic leadership capability-building programmes.

OCADU is hosting for the first time since RSD5, so it really is our turn again. I am grateful to our Dean of the Faculty of Design, Lesley-Ann Noel, who was a keynote speaker at RSD11 Brighton, and she has been our champion for the systemic design conference for over a year. As with AHO’s RSD13 in Oslo last year, we are exploring creative approaches to the meeting style and presentations.

Greg van Alstyne is our co-chair for Toronto. He is a professor at OCADU, the director of sLab, with whom I have worked closely since the start of the OCADU Strategic Foresight & Innovation MDes. As I have moved to Mexico City as a professor of systemic design at Tecnológico de Monterrey, the opportunity to chair RSD14 with OCADU deepens and extends my own relationship with OCADU now and toward the future. As an SDA board member, a vision of mine is to see each of the regions where systemic design has emerged become exemplary network centres of research and practice, building a worldwide educational system with vital engagement and interaction within the regions and connected across the RSD world. The Greater Toronto Area is represented well in both intellectual vitality and relationality, with the all-OCADU (affiliated) organising team, and two of our keynotes, Melanie Goodchild and Frances Westley, hailing from the University of Waterloo.

With RSD14 celebrating the theme of relationality in complexity, we are opening the frame for a very wide range of systemic connections. Papers and talks explore our relations to the living systems of individuals and organisms (relating to each other and their ecologies), to social and purposeful systems (organisations, education, communities), and to the relationality of governance and second-order control systems. Perhaps only extra-planetary systems are not represented this year!

Now’s the time to visit the RSD14 hubs, review the schedules, bookmark sessions, and add them to your October calendar.

If you are travelling to Toronto, please confirm your arrangements and contact our team if you need assistance.

Yours truly,

Peter Hayward Jones
RSD14 Chair | Systemic Design Association Vice-President

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