RSD10 marked a decade of systemic design

Playing with Tensions: A springboard for the future

From November 2-6, 2021, RSD10 marked a decade of systemic design at TU Delft’s Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, one of the world’s leading design schools with over 2,000 students and 350 researchers. Industrieel Ontwerpen faculty bridge advancements in technology with the needs of people, organisations, and society. Fittingly, they advanced the theme, Playing with Tensions, as a provocation to embrace new complexity, collaboration and contexts in systemic design.

Moreover, the TU Delft team, led by Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer, grounded the program in the belief that the fate of all complex adapting systems in the biosphere – from single cells to economies – is to evolve to a natural state between order and chaos, a grand compromise between structure and surprise.

Complex systems do not lend themselves to much simplification. Systemic designers have no choice but to embrace complexity, and in doing so, embrace opposing concepts and the resulting paradoxes. It is at the interplay of these ideas that they find the most fruitful regions of exploration. – Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe

The TU Delft team skillfully managed a program representing 119 new contributions to systemic design, presented as keynote speeches, dialogues, practice case studies, systems maps, and long and short papers. Producing the most extensive symposium program to date, RSD10 was a fitting tribute to Birger Sevaldson’s vision for an interdiscipline to join systems thinking to design methodology.

The central conference theme explored design and systems thinking practices as mediators to deal fruitfully with tensions. RSD10’s guiding question was, “Can we embrace the tension, the paradoxes as valuable social feedback in our path to just and sustainable futures?” The response was a breadth of presentations and papers that look squarely at the post-Anthropocene. Further, the depth of work related to racism, oppression, and hegemony opened up a tenth RSD topic category, “Society & Culture”, and the archives will be re-catalogued to form a coherent set of articles. The RSD10 proceedings, complete with keynote videos, presentation decks, and sketchnotes, constitute a springboard for the next decade of research and inquiry defining systemic design.