Submission guidelines provide a detailed description of how to prepare a document for all submission formats: papers, presentations, workshops, and systems maps and exhibits.
SDA Blog
RSD15: Call for Contributions
The RSD15 call for contributions is open.
Editorial Workflow
Details about peer reviews, author responsibilities, and the production process. Production schedules and key dates are also included.
FAQs—Contributors
A running list of questions and answers related to the call for contributions.
Forging Fridays Workshop Series
Elon University’s Design Forge organises events to meet and learn directly from acclaimed relational designers.
Politecnico di Torino hosts RSD15
RSD15 asks what it means to engage with the plurality of systemic design. Systemic design pluralism is proposed as the recognition and cultivation of multiple, coexisting ways of knowing and doing within systemic design.
RSDX Unbound: Call for participation
We invite colleagues who have presented, facilitated, or participated in RSDX or RSD sessions to join the pilot. The space will develop through the work brought into it and the range of contributions offered.
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.
RSD14 Downloadable Programme Guides
Seeking a straightforward document format that outlines all the sessions in a group?
Invitation from Peter Jones, RSD14 Chair
A warm welcome to the systemic design community and our SDA members.
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.
THIS IS NOT A CASE STUDY
MONDAY, OCTOBER 21. In the lead-up to RSD14, there was a collective sense that now is the time to formally recognise and track case reports. Do you agree? RSD14–RSDX is planning an exploratory inquiry into case reporting, held online on October 21. Join the ARC25 conversations.
All RSD14 Sessions (with filters)
A view of all RSD14 sessions that can be filtered by format or event.
Planning your way in—Getting to RSD14
A few suggestions for international travellers.
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.
The RSD online experience
With a bit of pre-planning, you can integrate the RSD online experience with your daily life.
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.
How does the whole programme work?
RSD14 runs from October 3 to 21 as a series of online and in-person events dedicated to systemic design.
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.
Anthology of Reflexive Contributors
The annual anthology of reflexive contributors features articles by RSD chairs, speakers, and other influential voices whose work is foundational or influential in systemic design.