RSD10 – Playing with Tensions: Embracing new complexity, collaboration and contexts in systemic design
Editors: Dr JC Diehl and Dr Nynke Tromp, and Dr Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer
Complex systems do not lend themselves for 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. The main conference theme explored design and systems thinking practices as mediators to deal fruitfully with tensions. Our human tendency is to relieve the tensions, and in design, to resolve the so-called “pain points.” But tensions reveal paradoxes, the sites of connection, breaks in scale, the emergence of complexity. Can we embrace the tension and paradoxes as valuable social feedback in our path to just and sustainable futures?
The RSD10 symposium was held at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, November 2-6, 2021. After a successful (yet unforeseen) online version of the RSD 9 symposium, RSD10 was designed as a hybrid conference.
RSD10 Symposium Proceedings
RSD10 proceedings are listed in the following order: introduction, keynote speakers, workshops, interactives, papers, systems maps.
RSD10 – Playing with Tensions
Editors Dr JC Diehl, Dr Nynke Tromp, and Dr Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Complex systems do not lend themselves for simplification. Systemic designers have no choice but to embrace complexity, and in doing so, embrace opposing concepts and the resulting paradoxes.
Cyber Chat: Klaus Krippendorff responds
Klaus Krippendorff responds to points of discussion raised by Peter Jones, Anja Overdiek, Jan Lelie, Elisa Giaccardi, Derek Lomas, and Ben Sweeting.
RSD10 Photo Gallery
Photos of RSD10 taken on-campus at TU Delft.
RSD: Where transdisciplinary discourses meet and contribute to guiding principles for systemic design
RSD10 Opening. SDA Chair, Dr Silvia Barbero, offers a warm welcome to delegates and charts the guiding principles for systemic design theory and future directions for the SDA.
Autonomous Technologies and the Challenges of Probabilistic Design
RSD10 Keynote. Dr Elisa Giaccardi unpacks what is uniquely human and uniquely artificial in the performance of agency, and how designers might attend to the ethics of this co-performance as a decentralised act of design.
Designing Transitions
RSD10 Keynote. Dr Derk Loorbach provides a transition perspective to address the complexities and uncertainty of change and presents development by design as a way forward.
From Uncritical Design to Critical Examinations of its Systemic Consequences
RSD10 Keynote. Dr Klaus Krippendorff suggests that designers become critical of what their work supports, and cognizant of and accountable for the systemic consequences of their designs.
Reflections on Design Practice at Dark Matter Labs
RSD10 Keynote. Indy Johar is an architect, co-founder of 00 (project00.cc) and a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation and Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield.
The Gigamap Interview with Birger Sevaldson
Jotte de Koning interviews Birger Sevaldson on the practice of gigamapping and how it has evolved.
RSD10 Sketchnote Gallery
Sketchnotes capture the big ideas within a complex conversation, are a rich source of signals, and capture the geist of the session.
Systemic Design PhD Students Fika
Hosted by PhD students of the TU Delft Systemic Design Lab with guest Dan Lockton
Beyond Good Intentions: Power literacy for designers
Maya Goodwill
Can systemic learning help make a safer world? Unraveling safety of mind and being in physical space
Swagata Naidu and Sucharita Beniwal
Codesigning Online Learning
Christine Mcglade
Designing Learning Spaces: Embracing playing with tensions
Frederick Steier, Tore Gulden, Pille Bunnell, Paul Pangaro and Flavio Mesquita da Silva
Embodied Complexity: Exploring complexity and playing with tensions through embodied experiences
Zlatina Tsvetkova
Exploring the Activity Network Tool: Understanding and embracing the tensions between systems
Kristel Van Ael, Alexis Jacoby, Moein Nedaei and Peter Jones
Ferris Wheel of Shifting Power Dynamics: Vocalizing experiences around privileges and societal tensions
Bidya Mishra, Chirag Bansal, Kopal Gangrade, Praveen Nahar and Sahil Thappa
From Conflicts to Controversies: Navigating stakeholder perspectives in smart city projects
Anouk Geenen, Deǧer Ozkaramanli, Julieta Matos-Castaño and Mascha van der Voort
Gaming Complexity: Rules, networks, and green economy
Shanu Sharma, Marie Davidová and Yashaswini Jayadevaiah
Interactive Playshop: Playing with tensions through improvisational movement and storytelling
Eve Pinsker and Mikal Giancola
Manifesting Worldviews
Justyna Swat and Dan Lockton
Off to New Shores! Sailing towards common ground
Maria Belén Buckenmayer, Milene Gonçalves and Ingrid Mulder
Participatory Narrative Inquiry: A methodology to understand complex systems and design interventions on multiple scales
Zlatina Tsvetkova
Powers of Ten: Mapping systems-level gaps using the SX Canvas
Luis Enrique Marines Hernández and Ana Lucía Ávila Alarcón
Reimagining the Futures Cone: Past, plurality, and perspective
Hillary Carey, Mihika Bansal, Chris Costes and Rachel Arredondo
Systemic Design as a Hegemonic Force
Alberto Soriano, Josina Vink and Shivani Prakash
Systemic Design for Healthcare Sustainability: Patients, consumers and “big box” healthcare
Peter Jones and Pranay Arun Kumar
Technology for Living: #NewMacy in the 21st century
Paul Pangaro, Tirelle Barron, Michael Munton, Eryk Salvaggio, Fred Steier and Mark Sullivan
Towards designing a process model for leveraging tensions in collaborations between the public safety sector and the creative industry
Thomas van Arkel
Transdisciplinary Teams: Researcher, artist and designer assemble!
Linda Meijer-Wassenaar, Diny van Est, Lizet van Tilburg and Marjorie Bakker
Transition Design: Framing for the protein shift
Anna-Louisa Peeters
Weaving a Collective Intelligence Systemic Design Tool
Fanjasoa Louisette Rasoloniaina, Patrice Ceccarini and Elizabeth Mortamais
Wicked Possibilities: Alternatives to taming
Ben Sweeting, Sally Sutherland and Tom Ainsworth
A systemic design approach to embedding systemic design in the Australian Taxation Office
Misha Kaur
Designing for the In-between – Facilitating resilient systems to foster community well-being
Johanna Tysk
Mapping productivity, energy and well-being
Joanna Boehnert and Simon Mair
SoulSound – Transferring learnings from the team dynamics of improvisational art forms to startup teams
Ojasvi Gupta and Jagrit Surisetti
Systemic Cycles – A novel, bio-regional, systemic service-experience design product prototype
Tobias Luthe, Schütz Martin and Justyna Swat
The analysis of an integrated project management
Sergio Degiacomi, Sofia Cretaio, Elena Cavallotti, Claudia Morani, Emily Derobert and Bastien Mayet
Ability to design in complexity
Berit Godfroij and Remko van der Lugt
Friends or foes? Theory of change, systemic design (thinking), and systems change(s) learning
Zaid Khan and David Ing
Redefining System Boundaries
Haley Fitzpatrick and Tobias Luthe
Singular and Shared—Exploring metaphors and systems
Palak Dudani and Dan Lockton
A Systemic Project for a Local Fruit Farm and the Valorisation of By-products
Enrica Ferrero, Giulia Ferrero, Elisa Ghignone, Martina Motta and Marco Ruffa
Acting on a Company to Relaunch a Territory: The application of the systemic design methodology
Alice Marchesi, Mariapaola Puglielli, Florina Denisa Moldovan, William Tonelli, Martina Troppino and Xinwei Wu
After Work: Questions concerning transition imaginaries towards a post-work society and the use of cautionary tales as frames that resist consensus
Dulmini Perera
Allopoietic Design: Designing of the not-thing
Tore Gulden
Antinomies in Systemic Design: Dilemmas, paradoxical tensions, and Werner Ulrich
Desmond Wong
Arctic Design: The systemic development of a new domain
Svetlana Usenyuk-Kravchuk and Nikolai Korgin
Balancing Acceleration and Systemic Impact: Finding leverage for transformation in SDG change strategies
Ryan Murphy, Nenad Rava, and Peter Jones
Between Heaven and Earth: Design tensions in the Book of Changes
Evan Barba and J.R. Osborn
Bottom-Up-Down Approach
Bruno Martins Rizardi and Daniela Gomes Metello
CO-DE|GT BETA: The 21st-century economy app for cross-species co-living
Marie Davidova, Shanu Sharma, Dermott McMeel and Fernando Loizides
Design by Doing in Louisiana Farmers Markets: Adaptive cycles, learning, and innovating in the time of the COVID-19 crisis
Mikal Giancola and Eve Pinsker
Design Circular Colours: A cross-sectoral project for the systemic design of regional dyeing value chains
Amina Pereno, Asja Aulisio and Silvia Barbero
Design-driven Industrial Reconversion during COVID-19 Global Outbreak
Eva Vanessa Bruno and Beatrice Lerma
Designing Against Oppression: A conceptual framework for an anti-oppressive design praxis
Jessica Jacobs and Hillary Carey
Designing Data-informed Intelligent Systems to Create Positive Impact
James Lomas, Nirmal Patel and Jodi Forlizzi
Designing for Pandemic Antifragility in Multimodal Transport Hubs
Alexander Nieuwborg, Suzanne Hiemstra-van Mastrigt, Marijke Melles, Sicco Santema and Jan Zekveld
Dilemmas and Conflicts in Systemic Design: Towards a theoretical framework for individual-system dialectic
Deger Ozkaramanli
Education as a Transforming Practice: Preparing together for complex, sustainable futures
Caroline Hummels
Enriching Synergies in Systemic Design: Hybridizing science, design and transformative action
Tobias Luthe, Justyna Swat, Haley Fitzpatrick, Tiphaine Mühlethaler and Abel Crawford
Exposing the Emotional Dynamics of Making Tensions Tangible in Systemic Design
Elin Engström, Matilda Legeby, Pia Mcaleenan, Josina Vink and Manuela Aguirre Ulloa
Field Notes: Tensions between systemic design and systems engineering
Evan Barba
From System to Local to System: Design principles to scale for a system in transition
Christine De Lille and Anja Overdiek
Fruitful Friction as a Strategy to Scale Social Innovations
Maria Belén Buckenmayer, Milene Gonçalves and Ingrid Mulder
Gleaning Racial Justice Futures: Confronting the past and incorporating plural everydays
Hillary Carey, Chris Costes and Mihika Bansal
Immunity Passports as Complex Systems: Applying systems approaches to explore needs, risks, and unintended consequences
Irma Cecilia Landa-Avila, Gyuchan Thomas Jun, Isabel Sassoon, Ozlem Colak, Tina Harvey and Panagiotis Balatsoukas
Infrastructuring for Social Innovation Inspired by Social Insects
Sojung Kim and Joon Sang Baek
Jane Addams and Systems Design: What might we learn?
Danielle Lake
Leveraging Creative Tension between Sustainable Development Targets for Developing Micro-macro Level Collaboration
Anshul Agrawal and Maya Narayan
Leveraging Indigenous Knowledge, Collaboration, and Emergent Technology
Twisha Mehta and Jenny Bentley
Making Metaphors Matter within Systems Oriented Design
Palak Dudani
Mapping Transition Readiness: A model for identifying how and where design can intervene in system transitions
Hannah Goss, Nynke Tromp and Hendrik N.J. Schifferstein
Metaphors and Systems
Dan Lockton
Mountain Water Management through Systemic Design: The Monviso Institute real-world laboratory
Francesca Carraro, Silvia Barbero and Tobias Luthe
Moving Toward Paradigms and Patterns of Transformative Innovation in Public Sector Labs
Lindsay Cole
MyWellnessCheck: Designing a student and staff wellbeing feedback loop to inform university policy and governance
James Lomas and Willem van der Maden
Option Evaluation in Multi-disciplinary Strategic Design: Using scenarios for system prototyping
Gerhard Glatzel, Mehdi Mozuni and Maren Ohlhoff
Relate Systems Archetypes and Collaboration: A case study in the context of DIY bio-based materials in design education
Louise Dumon and Francesca Ostuzzi
Reverberations at the Edges: Politics of designed im/materiality
Esther Kang
Simulations in Service Design Prototyping: Drone deliveries with society-in-the-loop
Cornelia Böhm, Mattias Arvola and Jonas Lundberg
Storytelling for Systems Design: Embedding and communicating complex and intangible data through narratives
Elise Talgorn and Monique Hendriks
Sustainability and its Paradoxes: The case study of a big coffee roasting company in the Turin Metropolitan Area on the lens of systemic design
Mariaserena Di Giovanni, Chiara Campolmi, Daniel Jaramillo Rueda, Tommaso Muzi, Domenico Devanna and Alisia Pellegrini
Tensions of Infrastructure Space
Ina Valkanova
The Failures of Prototyping: A call for a new definition
Thomas Maiorana
The Other Side of Design: Tension manifolds and collective action
Goran Matic and Ana Matic
The Question of Intimacy
Michael Arnold Mages and Stephen Neely
The Transition towards a Circular Textile Industry: A multi-level perspective
Jukka-Pekka Ovaska
To Slow Down or Speed Up? Uncovering the pace tensions in systemic design for social innovation
Suhaib Aslam
Towards Speculative Services for an Inclusive Society: Understanding the relationships between systemic-, service- and speculative design
Zijun Lin, Beatrice Villari and Birger Sevaldson
Transversal Design: Glimpsing the emergent whole, with the trouble
Cheryl Hsu
Triggering Spontaneous Self-Regeneration in Cities: Towards a systemic approach to spatial design
Elena Porqueddu
Troubling Care – A critical look at the systemic shift toward healthcare digitization
Shivani Prakash, Felicia Nilsson and Josina Vink
Value Metamorphosis: Investigating the impact of COVID-19 on Indian weddings as a system
Hemul Goel, Aditya Sharma and Sanika Harshe
When a Tree is also a Multispecies Collective, a Photosynthesis Process, and a Carbon Cycle
Emilija Veselova and Idil Gaziulusoy
Access to Healthcare in New York City
Designers can play a role in access to healthcare by combining research, design methodologies, and collaboration skills to reimagine how people interact with the system.
Anti-Black Racism in Pittsburgh
This gigamap puts forward six interventions for anti-Black racism: affinity space creation, white supremacy education, colour-aware work programs, addressing redlining, a reparations system, and universal basic income.
Air Quality in Delhi
Demonstrating strategic solutions and design thinking interventions in the problem of air pollution in Delhi.
Automation and the Value of Work: The effects of digital automation on job displacement in western Pennsylvania
A map depicting automation’s inverse relationship with the value of work as a wicked problem, in part because it is caused by and plays a role in the systems of other wicked problems.
Blockchain for Socioeconomic Impact
The systems map depicts a vision for an inclusive and sustainable economy by solving poverty and climate change in the agricultural sector.
Casually Cursed: Vocalizing experiences around casual discrimination amongst teenagers
This map is focused on teenage students who face discrimination in the form of name-calling, jokes and bullying. Casual discrimination almost always ends with the statement, “It was just a joke.”
COVID-19 Response in Pennsylvania
This map aims to capture and make connections between the challenges and opportunities in the domains of time and progress – this context highlights the transitional period of the pandemic.
Declining Bee Populations in Central California
Organized within a metaphorical honeybee graphic, the map includes bipartisan policies between nonprofits and government, technological improvements to the pollination process, activism and public awareness.
Designing an Interconnected Lexicon on Void to Support an Open-ended Architectural Vocabulary
The interconnect digital lexicon supports an open-ended architectural vocabulary developed via mapping software. It includes conceptual relations, clusters of concepts, visual images, and explanatory notes.
Designing for Ambivalence: Co-creating a resilient floating neighbourhood in rural Philippines
This visualisation presents value chains and quotidian needs brought together in the co-design for a floating neighbourhood in rural PI, based on an existing technical prototype of a single floating house.
Is the Greenest Building the One Already Standing?
This synthesis map explores the whole carbon profile of buildings to understand better the influences, challenges, and opportunities to reduce carbon emissions from the building sector in Canada.
Nutrition Access in Pittsburgh
This gigamap nests the issue of food insecurity in Pittsburgh within larger scalar levels to visualize and understand the interconnectivity of this wicked problem.
O’ahu and the Effects of Climate Change
The five-petal flower motif represents the delicate climate situation O’ahu’s flora and fauna faces and concludes that responsibility lands with global corporations and federal governments.
Plastic Wave – Plastic pollution is a result of who we are
This map builds interconnections between multiple layers to reveal deeper insights towards framing the problem correctly and working towards a massive change for shifting our patterns towards a circular lifestyle.
Synergetic Landscape
This gigamap demonstrates a systemic approach to urban environment performance for the future Post-Anthropocene communities and economies.
The Future of Work-Life Balance in the Tech Sector
A synthesis map showing leverage points to help support employee work-life balance and why moving towards supporting work-life balance in employees matters to the company.
There Is a Me in Us and We: Understanding Selfishness in Transdisciplinary Collaborations Among Design Students to Facilitate Sustainability Outcomes
The insight is a reminder for sustainability students and practitioners to acknowledge the role of their superiority and biases as a part of system dynamics in transdisciplinary collaboration for sustainability outcomes.
READ THE FULL INTRODUCTION TO THE RSD10 SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS
Delft, The Netherlands | November 2-6, 2021
The proceedings are published and available online as open access documents.
RSD10 online proceedings published by the Systemic Design Association
ISSN 2371-8404
Citation (APA)
Author. (2021). Article title. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design 2021 Symposium. https://rsdsymposium.org/rsd10-proceedings/
Playing with Tensions published by TU Delft
ISBN/EAN: 978-94-6366-507-0
Citation (APA)
Author. (2021). Article title. In J.C. Diehl, Nynke Tromp & Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer (Ed.) Playing with Tensions: Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD10) Symposium. Delft, The Netherlands, November 2-6, 2021. TU Delft.
