Dan Lockton, Lisa Brawley, Manuela Aguirre Ulloa, Matt Prindible, Laura Forlano, Karianne Rygh, John Fass, Katie Herzog, and Bettina Nissen
When is Systemic Design (SD) regenerative? When does SD contribute to the societal sustainability transition? Systems thinking is not inherently good.
For example, the practice of SD without ethical values and direction could be used to develop unsustainable land-use policies that are resilient against changing them towards becoming restorative, such as currently experienced in the accelerated destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Given the urgency of transforming our societies towards being more sustainable, just and fair, SD has untamed potential and responsibility to inform, incubate and accelerate such change towards regenerative systems.
Thus, we need to discuss and clarify the direction, values, ethics, boundaries of these pathways. As a stand-alone concept and practice, SD requires values, direction and currencies to disentangle its full potential. This paper reports from a social «fishbowl» open think tank harvesting session at RSD8 Chicago 2019, where we explored what kind of values, direction and currencies may advance the academic discourse and the designerly practice of SD.
This contribution to the RSD8 proceedings consists of two parts, the summarizing manuscript and a short movie giving insights into the social fishbowl.
