Anja Overdiek, Liliya Terzieva, Katinka Bergema, and Christine De Lille
Over the past ten years, designers and design researchers have developed and practised diverse approaches and methods to work with multi-actor groups towards systemic societal change. While context (healthcare, circular economy, energy transition etc.) and place matter and tools help, this community has also developed basic theoretical perspectives, concepts and frameworks to lead and sustain their work. In this workshop, we would like to map this emerging field together. We’ll use the ISLE model (De Lille & Overdiek, 2022; Overdiek 2024), an abstraction of the co-design process towards system-shifting, as a starting point to inspire the conversation and discover together what different research fields (i.e. Participatory Design, Design for Sustainability Transitions, Systemic Leadership Theory, Systemic Design inspired by the theory of Complex Adaptive Systems) say about different phases or spaces a multi-stakeholder group might go through on their way to achieve systemic changes. Together we’ll map this ‘landscape’ and its demarcations. What are the different concepts and theoretical underpinnings describe the different phases of understanding the current system, engaging in local experiments or working towards a preferred or/and emergent future system? What other perspectives can be taken towards co-designing for systemic change? How do different approaches relate to each other, and how can this help us to develop the field further and strengthen each other and societal transitions?
KEYWORDS: social Innovation, living lab, systemic design lab, system-shifting design, participatory design, co-design