Introduction to the Proceedings of RSD5—Systemic Design for Social Complexity

Peter Hayward Jones

RSD5–Systemic Design for Social Complexity was held October 14-15, 2016, chaired by Peter Jones and hosted by OCAD University. RSD5 was organized as a joint program between Peter’s OCADU team and the MaRS Solutions Lab at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, Ontario. RSD5 was held over a 3-day period with a plenary day at MaRS on Day 2 to increase the meeting capacity to 300 persons for three keynotes, a panel discussion and two parallel paper tracks. The Toronto design firms Bridgeable and Pivot sponsored the reception and the Eric St. Laurent jazz trio, respectively.

Joeri van den Steenhoeven, Jerry Koh, and Vanessa Toye collaborative research group, hosted at OCADU’s Strategic Innovation Lab, provided significant support for the group and proceedings.

The RSD5 editorial board was Birger Sevaldson, Alex Ryan, Silvia Barbero, and Jerry Koh. Thanks to Patricia Kambitsch, Pupul Bisht, and Maggie Greyson for the live sketchnotes. Thanks to Skyler Perkins and Macy Siu for proceedings publication development.

Editorial Process

The Systemic Design Research Network (SDRN) continues to maintain the planning team of the RSD symposia established as a collaborative research group shared between AHO and OCAD University and independent researchers. SDRN maintains a collaborative research group hosted at OCADU’s Strategic Innovation Lab, which significantly supports the group and proceedings.

Proceedings result from a dialogue and discursive process within the community of practice. While they follow peer review within an extended reviewer panel, they differ from the traditional scientific publication process. The process contains five steps, creating long-term engagement, a low entry threshold, and a high level of final output:

1) the submission and peer reviewing of abstracts,
2) the presentations and dialogues at the RSD symposium,
3) the post-production and submission of a working paper
4) the publication of the symposium proceedings with SDRN as publisher
5) the publication of selected fully developed and peer-reviewed scientific papers in an external publishing channel.

This process has been used consistently in RSD and for an annual special issue of the design research journal FORMakademisk.  RSD has contributed to several other peer-reviewed journals and publications.

The RSD5 proceedings provide final papers, presentations, live sketchnotes, and a proceedings citation for gigamaps and posters. Proceedings papers were developed and submitted after the symposium by most authors, following the evolutionary mode of RSD publication.