Hannah Jones and Mathilda Tham
This workshop explores the tension between diversity and coherence in systemic design. On the one hand, there is a maturing field, with possibilities to thicken, nuance, and make more plural the understanding of what this diverse community does. On the other hand, arguably the need in the world has never been greater and more urgent for what systemic design can offer—which requires coherence and clarity of communication. The workshop invites participants on a journey of invigorating and nuancing our respective and collective systemic design identities and positioning to, in turn, enable us to arrive at situated, radically meaningful and powerful ways of sharing what systems design can be and do.
We will be working with the concepts of Awkward Space and Lucky People, our respective PhD topics (Jones, 2014 and Tham, 2008), to draw longitudinal and messy positioning for working with frictions, tensions, fears, agencies, and optimisms in systemic design. We will invite participants into making and cross-fertilising longitudinal systemic design biographies. We will use a mix of textile materials and clay to materialise and combine ideas and methods in a rich way, pushing systemic knowing beyond verbal articulation.
The workshop builds upon our keynote presentation from last year’s RSD14X, ‘Retrospective & Prospective Storytelling of Metadesign Impacts: A 60-Year Arc’, which explored both the legacy and potential of systemic design and emergence work. In this workshop, we turn our attention to the double focus of what this work can mean for its practitioners—diversifying understandings of systemic design, and how as a community we can come together, cohering, to offer systemic design to the outside world in exciting and relevant ways.
Keywords: metadesign, emergence, pluralism, awkward space, lucky people
FACILITATORS
Hannah Jones
University of Wales Trinity St. Davids
Hannah Jones is a design educator and researcher with nearly 20 years of experience in co-designing sustainable and inclusive futures. She currently supervises PhD students with a focus on metadesigning at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and teaches design research methods to landscape architecture master's students at the University of Greenwich.
Previously, she taught regularly at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford University, where she was a teaching fellow from 2015 to 2016. She continues to collaborate on research at Stanford, exploring intersectional approaches to designing socially and environmentally inclusive products and technologies.
Mathilda Tham
Linnaeus University | Goldsmiths, University of London
Mathilda Tham is a feminist activist and metadesigner whose work creates thought and action spaces outside the economic growth logic. She is a Professor in Design at Linnaeus University, Sweden, where she has pioneered degree programmes focused on change-making and is affiliated with Goldsmiths, University of London. Her visionary work in research, activism, transdisciplinary co-creation, and fashion as futures making has been published internationally. She is the co-author of Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan (2019) with Kate Fletcher. The Earth Logic project has led to policy initiatives for the global fashion sector (European Environment Bureau), new media platforms, and a series of dialogues with industry and governance. Mathilda Tham is a co-founder of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion.
She was a member of the Board of Mistra Future Fashion, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research. At Linnaeus University, Mathilda Tham serves as the scientific leader for The Bridge Collaboration Arena. She leads the Forest Meetings project, hosted by the Linnaeus Knowledge Environment's Green Sustainable Development initiative.
From 2023, Mathilda Tham leads the project, Cultural Entrepreneurship, Earth Logic Design, which systematically evaluates the values that design based on a new logic can create. This project is part of the larger project InKuis, PI Anders Högberg (Kamprad Foundation), with the aim of exploring and strengthening the opportunities for cultural entrepreneurship in Småland.