Silvia Barbero, Bruce Goldstein, and Anna Margolis
Global sustainability calls for a transdisciplinary approach to understanding and instigating change. The Systemic Design Association (SDA) and the Transformations Community (TC) have emerged as pivotal collectives, advancing knowledge and practice within their respective scholarly and practice communities. SDA’s focus on complex systems and an interdisciplinary approach to systems thinking and design methods intersect with TC’s commitment to action and reflection, aimed at catalysing systemic change and addressing historical injustices.
Bruce Goldstein (TC) and Siliva Barbero (SDA) discuss adjacency in conversation with Anna Margolis, whose RSD12 paper, The Boundary Object as a Prescriptive Framework, looks at boundary objects and cross-sector collaboration.
The session serves as a space to assess the cross-pollination of ideas and methodologies and identify collaborative pathways to leverage productive systems and stakeholders. This session creates space for a novel synthesis of perspectives and insights, acknowledges fruitful boundaries, and aims to chart a common path for tangible impacts in sustainability transitions and transformations.
An open discussion invites contributions from scholars, practitioners, and policymakers engaged with either or both networks, promoting a multifaceted exploration of how diverse approaches to sustainability can interlace to confront the pressing environmental challenges of our times.
Points of discussion
We share knowledge and expertise across our unique, individual communities of practice. What are some adjacent areas of expertise in systemic design and transformations, and how might we collaborate more easily and gain insights?
- SDA and TC share a commitment to sustainable, regenerative, just, and equitable socio-ecological systems. What might be the community boundaries that create productive adjacency?
- Shared identity and physical proximity can facilitate connection, knowledge transfer, and community cohesion. How might we create events and organisational structures that promote transdisciplinarism?
- Members of a community encounter and integrate learning opportunities that are closely related to their praxis—informed, reflective action aimed at achieving specific outcomes and inherently tied to the goal of transformation.
- Where might these synergies occur?
- What are the network nodes and links that can reveal patterns of collaboration and influence within the SDA-TC community?
Agenda
- Rationale for the session and aims—Anna Margolis (5 mins)
- Transformation as theory and practice—Bruce Goldstein (10 mins)
Systemic design theory and practice—Silvia Barbero (10 mins) - Boundary framing, overlaps and complementaries—Bruce and Silvia, moderated by Anna (15 mins)
- Plenary discussion (30 minutes)
ProfileS
Silvia Barbero is an SDA founding board member and served as Chair from 2018–2024. She is the Deputy Coordinator, Design Programmes and an associate professor at Politecnico di Torino (Italy), where she teaches in the Systemic Design graduate programs and Design and Visual Communication undergraduate program. Silvia leads systemic design research in local economies, policy design, environmental production, and innovation through collaboration with companies, research centres, and national and international networks. In 2005, she co-founded the Observatory of Eco-Packaging. She leads the Systemic Design Lab in Politecnico di Torino. Silvia is the scientific coordinator of many European projects about sustainable development and circular economy. She is the author of numerous books, papers in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters and reviewed international conference proceedings that you can find on her Politecnico di Torino profile. From systemic-design.org/board-of-directors/
Bruce Evan Goldstein serves as the Lead Weaver of the Transformations Community and Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Program in Environmental Design. His research and practice focus on supporting transformative networks and communities. He examines how can communities combine forces to adapt to social and ecological challenges and foster transformational change. He pursues this question through research partnerships with learning networks, which enable place-based learning and system-wide adaptation to innovate solutions that are site-specific and applicable network-wide. From experts.colorado.edu/display/fisid_147755
Anna Margolis is driven by a commitment to creating impact through meaningful interactions. She views impact as an iterative process of learning from failure and success, embracing systemic design and innovation. Currently, Anna is exploring how these approaches can be leveraged in cross-sectoral collaborations to drive transformation towards a circular economy. As an enthusiast of behavioural economics, she believes a compelling story or visual often resonates more deeply with stakeholders than raw statistics, although she holds a strong appreciation for data analytics. Anna’s career has focused on leading global projects in corporate transformation at Henkel, with experience in B2C marketing, culture and strategy, and B2B branding and customer experience. Today, she applies her skills as a researcher exploring systemic shifts towards sustainable and circular economies, as a facilitator supporting circular transformation programs, and as a social entrepreneur, trainer, and lecturer offering guidance on design thinking and career orientation for graduates and young professionals. linkedin.com/in/anna-margolis
The Systemic Design Association is a democratic, non-profit scholarly membership association that brings humanity-centred design to complex, multi-stakeholder service systems. Committed to the co-evolution of systemic design, the systemic design adapts each field’s preferred core disciplinary methods and mobilises knowledge across practitioners and scholars. The SDA supports the efforts of advanced design practice to lead programs of strategic scale and higher complexity, adapt systems thinking methods, and creatively push the boundaries beyond the popular modes of systems dynamics and soft systems.
The Transformations Community was founded in 2009 to champion a vigorous, action-centric research paradigm underpinned by participatory methods and transformative educational experiences. With its global conferences and workshops, TC fosters a platform for dialogue and action, where practitioners and researchers coalesce to exchange insights and catalyse change.