Salon: Systemic Education for Systemic Change

Ray Ison, Spyros Bofylatos, Zowie Broach and Savithri Bartlett and Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Veneranda Carrino, Aniek Draaisma, and Andrianos Pappas

RSD12-Salons are sessions dedicated to exploratory work that have been grouped to create an interdisciplinary space for researchers to talk together and generate collective input from an interested audience.

Systemic design has many roles in educational contexts. In many places, it is taught as a subfield of design itself, where students are offered methods to explore ecosystems of products and services holistically and with an eye toward their emergent and unintended consequences. Other times, the eye of the systemic designer can be turned toward educational systems themselves—examining the dynamics of a classroom, a school, or an educational system as a whole to understand how education is accomplished and how or where to design interventions are all examples of where systemic design can impact learning when applied at different scales. 

Moderated by Ray Ison, this session considers systemic design as a lens to examine the best practices of other disciplines and the potential for educators to achieve new understandings and design and develop new ways of teaching old material based on updated and systems-informed perspectives. This group represents forward-facing ideas in a conversation framed as systemic education for systemic change and follows the panel hosted by RSD12-Loughborough, Educating Systemic Designers: Negotiating epistemologies and purposefulness with Ray Ison,  Gyuchan Thomas Jun, and Rebecca Cain.

AUTHORS

Spyros Bofylatos offers a perspective on how reimagining design education through a systemic lens can move design away from an emphasis on industrial products and consumerism and toward a more equitable future by creating designers attuned to the practice of systems change. Collaborating researchers: Carla Amaral, Elise Hodson, and Robert Phillips.

Zowie Broach and Savithri Bartlett and Delfina Fantini van Ditmar provide a systemic lens on design education in the specific context of the fashion industry and the garment lifecycle. Like the other authors in this session, they also conclude that a more systemically informed pedagogy can produce more ethically-minded students that will inevitably change the fashion ecosystem in the long term. Collaborating researchers: Gabriela Farias Zurita.

Similarly, Veneranda Carrino describes how first-year Master’s Students used a systemic lens in their thinking around the design of public gardens in urban spaces. The result was a new focus on relations and interactions that offered new possibilities for the future. 

Aniek Draaisma identifies a shortage in knowledge and skills of how to implement alternative educational practices to meet the needs of society in transition in the educational system and proposes metaphorical campfires as places for micro-phenomenological interventions, inspired by the principles of regenerative education. Collaborating researcher: Bas van den Berg.

Andrianos Pappas introduces four design ethics approaches (Morality of Things, Value Sensitive Design, Responsible Research and Innovation and Participatory Design) and considers their potential to inform the design ethics approaches.

MODERATOR

Ray Ison draws on 50+ years of experience of preparing and delivering systems and design education at the Open University, UK, and is interested in exploring the issues that have made it difficult for design and systems academics and practitioners to arrive in this present moment in RSD12 conversations framed as systemic design.

PAPERS

#45 Veneranda Carrino
Full Project for Human Settlement, the Care of Interdependencies, the Responsibility of the Common Good

#70 Bas van den Berg and Aniek Draaisma
Campfire Sessions as Contemplative Intervention to Facilitate the Redesign of Education for Regenerative Systems Change

#85 Spyros Bofylatos, Robert Phillips, Elise Hodson, and Carla Amaral
Design, Systemic Change and Navigating Sustainable Impacts

#86 Rafail Andrianos Pappas
Towards a Systemic Design Ethics

#100 Zowie Broach, Savithri Bartlett, and Delfina Fantini van Ditmar
Entanglements of the Wastelands of Fashion: Furthering understandings