The annual anthology of reflexive contributors features articles by RSD chairs, speakers, and other influential voices whose work has shaped systemic design.
ARC is a curated collection of sightlines articles by individuals whose contributions have been foundational or influential in the development of systemic design.
The inaugural publication, ARC25, connects with RSD14: Arcs of Impact. As part of the RSD14 proceedings, the anthology was available as a limited-edition print monograph at the symposium. Contributors to this first edition offer insights, perspectives, and provocations on the RSD14 theme of relationality in complexity. Each contribution is also published as a standalone article on RSDsymposium.org. We also hope some authors will develop their ARC25 contributions into longer Viewpoints articles for Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal, offering deeper explorations of their ideas.
Calling all RSD alum
Former RSD speakers, chairs, advisors, and editors are invited to contribute. To participate, please get in touch with the editor (cheryl@systemic-design.org). Contributions are published on a rolling basis, and the ARC26 edition will be released at RSD15 in October 2026.
Sightlines
What if design embraced complexity by designing relationships and relationality itself?
Silvia Barbero: Talking about relationality means talking about life, systems, and identities in dialogue, and every dialogue is complex precisely because it is authentic and unique.
Mobilizing the Potential of Systemic Design Research
Peter Jones: Systemic design has learned from its contributing disciplines and has not foreclosed its potentials by defining a canon or narrowing our focus to the issues of the day (even given our continual interests in social change). I see systemic design as taking a long view, toward constructive reorganisation of social and service systems, without the need to address immediate (first horizon) change
Movement, Becoming, and the Cybernetic Archive
Kate Doyle: The modern archival impulse speaks to a very basic tendency toward collection and re-collection, categorisation, and creation. Photography has shown us two sides of the realisation (s) of this impulse: a ready access to creative archival artistry/an enabled pursuit of proof and fixity. We walk the line upon which a production of thingness can exchange experience into commodity and stasis.
An Egalitarian Systemic Design?
Birger Sevaldson: Systemic design needs to develop along both paths, the academic and the practice-oriented. We should turn energy from academic exercises to practice. There is no time to wait for the perfect theory. We need small steps of improvement on all frontlines. This implies nurturing “imperfect” practices on a very wide scale.
Stirring the Sediment: The material practices of systemic design
Chloé Oru: I considered that the river, as a natural system, offers an easy-to-grasp perspective to explore the definition of materiality and systemic outcomes, to explain the power of systemic design in practice, and to explain its strategic potential to support organisational change and fluxes in navigating complexity.
Redrawing the Arcs in Healthcare: On relationality, systemic design, and the weight of where we place our attention
Ng Yeuk Fan: And yet, when we speak with people—not as patients, but as human beings—they do not ask for services, nor do they ask for departments … They ask to make meaning of medical conditions they live with, and to hold onto their identities in the face of decline. These are not unreasonable things.
Systemic Design Inquiry—Open or Closed? Broadband Inquiring Systems
Harold Nelson: It is obvious that we need to reestablish new broadband designs of inquiry to supplement and balance the dominance of narrowband inquiring systems in a world recognized to be more complex and entangled than imagined, and more challenged by complex technologies than ever expected.
Crossing Algebra and Systemic Design
Louis Kauffman: What if one also knows a theory? How will that affect the process? Can new theory also evolve with the help of systemic design? What does it mean to creatively use theory and reasoning? Will not such use, if creative, go beyond standard logical reasoning into the use of dialogue and imagination? Will not creative use of theory lead both to new designs and to new theory? It is our contention that the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes.
Co-Creating Social Worlds in Relationship with Others
Abbie VanMeter: CMM has evolved into an important perspective and practice that foregrounds relationality as central to meaning-making, is increasingly applicable in everyday life, and remains rooted in a strong theoretical foundation.
Human Relationships in Complex Challenges—What can we design?
Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: I find human relationships incredibly fascinating, because they are so difficult to grasp and at the same time so important and meaningful to being human.
Three Layers of Systems Thinking
Gerald Midgley, Rachel Lilley, and Raghav Rajagopalan: Could we be approaching a tipping point when systems thinking will become business as usual in our organisations and communities?
Let’s be Abnormal
Karen O’Brien: When chaos, confusion, and cruelty become hypernormal, it’s time to challenge normality. Let’s be abnormal and embrace our quantum nature—relational, paradoxical, and entangled to the core.
The Complexity of Complexity and Relationality Unbounded
Tony Fry: Animate existence (including our own) is the consequence of relations within and between multiple intertwined ecologies.
Systems Leadership: Seeing the forest for the trees
Seanna Davidson: And so it becomes necessary to challenge the notion of leadership altogether and to make visible a relational, shared and dynamic leadership that more resembles a system than an individual role.
Living the Question: What RSD13 revealed about narrative weaving and relational reality
Sebastian Wolf Siebzehnrubl: When we approach systems as problems to solve, we create conditions for technical solutions. When we approach them as questions to live, we create conditions for relational transformation.
How are systemic design’s tools shaping the reality of systemic problems?
Evan Barba: What does it mean to exist in relation to something, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and systemic problems?