5 break­outs

working sessions

pwyc $40

pay-what-you-can suggested (CDN)

Context

At RSD12-Toronto, you will find yourself situated in cybernetics’ transdisciplinary space—in the company of others who share “a discipline for understanding systems that have a purpose” (Castelanos et al., 2022) and that designers have a duty of care.

It’s also a time to acknowledge 20 years of social innovation. Toronto is home to one of the first coworking spaces in the world, the Center for Social Innovation, established in 2004. CSI created a culture for changemaking in Toronto. MaRS, the world’s largest urban innovation hub, was a centre for social entrepreneurship and social purpose leadership from 2007–2022. The academic community stretches across Southern Ontario, including the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, OCAD University’s MDes, Strategic Foresight and Innovation, and Georgian College (Barrie), Canada’s first and only changemaker college. As an interdiscipline that joins systems thinking to design methodology, systemic design is relevant to human-centred design, UX/UI, design research, participatory methodologies, and more.

References

Castelanos, C., Xiao Fang, X., & Pangaro, P. (2022) Pandemic of ‘Today’s AI’ #NewMacy. https://newmacy.pubpub.org/pub/isss-studio-2-pandemic-ai/release/2

Pangaro, P. (2016). Designing Conversations for Socially-Conscious Design. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD11) Symposium. https://rsdsymposium.org/designing-conversations-for-socially-conscious-design/

Pangaro, P. ( 2016) Designing Conversations for Socially-Conscious Design [Resources] Pangaro.com. https://pangaro.com/rsd5/

RSD12-TORONTO Programme

Designers are trained to formulate innovation in the messy mix of high opportunity, hard challenges and accelerating complexity. We can envision audacious impacts when dealing with both future uncertainty and complacency of the moment. In the modernist world, design has led the continuous production of consumer products and high-tech platforms and services, delivering “value” to people—to customers. In a postmodern world, where matters of concern are more at issue in innovation than matters of fact (Latour, 2008), designers have sought to lead the way out of the consumerist and high-tech innovation traps. However, when we consider that our future foresight will always be critically limited and impeded by social bias, politics, and culture, are designers—even systemic designers—able to guide the way toward futuring rather than defuturing by default?

Over the past two decades, the design world has been infused with technological innovation, shifting toward possible (ostensibly positive) futures, and we are pushed to explore the edges of enterprises, services, and society. The field has been spiked with entrepreneurship and buffeted by emerging technology, and a chalk circle has been drawn with not-for-profit on one side and business on the other. Doubtless, designers have placed themselves into innovation, but according to Dulmini Perera and Tony Fry, much of our innovation results in defuturing, leaving designers with a paradox. Do we act now on a design-led vision and make the best of innovation opportunities? Or do we counsel patience, observe the unfolding of technology and use incremental interventions to shape a better, pro-social future outcome? Are we foreclosing on flourishing human and ecological futures if we ignore the consequences of unwitting innovation?

References

Perera, D. & Fry, T. (2022). Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning. Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal, 1. https://doi.org/10.58279/v1002

Latour, B. (2008). A cautious Prometheus? A few steps toward a philosophy of design. In Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society (pp. 2–10). https://www.academia.edu/download/38824970/Latour-Cornwall.pdf

SITUATION

Design briefs typically call for a prototype, product, or innovation and means of accelerating its entry into the economic or social system. Designers are generally given the job of problem-solving and delivering upbeat results on projects that can be commercialised or offer societal cost benefits. Setting design research apart from invention has established a norm where designers have little agency over the prototypes, products, technologies, and services they create. However, systemic design innovation is futuring—systemic design makes the effects of design evident, including undesirable effects and dire consequences.

PRE-READ

In the Contexts article “Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning,” Dulmini Perera and Tony Fry propose second-order design fiction as an “evaluative means of the futuring or defuturing agency of the object of innovation.” (Perera & Fry, 2022). Design fiction practice and designed artefacts—and the speculative, provocative scenarios they produce—are compelling narratives of possible futures that provoke thought and discussion and are generally initiated with the expectation of innovation. However, once detached from the futuring in which it was conceived, innovation can accelerate an unsustainable future, erasing other futures—defuturing.  Second-order design fiction differs from other modes of design fiction as it calls on designers to take a critical view of the tension between futuring and defuturing, the consequences of innovation, and to introduce contra-innovation frameworks.

Reference

Perera, D. & Fry, T. (2022). Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning. Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal, 1. https://doi.org/10.58279/v1002