News blog

The Call for Abstracts for the RSD9 are now out.

After eight very successful Relating Systems thinking and Design (RSD) conferences we are travelling the first time to Asia.

The conference will take place in Ahmedabad at the Indian Institute of Design, 13^th to 15^th October 2020

Read more about NID 

If you are not familiar with the RSD conferences you can check out the proceedings from former conferences to see films of keynotes and to read working papers and presentations.

Please notice that we are asking for contributions form academic research as well as from systemic design practice

The RSD conferences offer a low entry threshold to share your thoughts on how we might align and meld systems thinking with design. We ask for abstracts which are peer reviewed. Later we ask for working papers and at a third stage we offer the opportunity for people to develop full papers to be published in academic design research journals most notable Formakademisk and She Ji. You will find the proceedings as well as the special issues and books published as an output from RSD at www.systemic-design.net

The RSD conferences are providing an open and friendly atmosphere yet with high level presentations and sharp discussions.

We also have a membership organisation, the Systemic design Association (SDA) that has a democratic elected board. The purpose of the SDA is to help organising the RSD conferences with the local hosts and to maintain the social network.

Read more details about the call 

We hope to see you in India!

Palak Dudani

Master thesis AHO 2020

The challenges of our time are increasingly complex, housing being one of them. While housing is a basic need closely intertwined with our well-being, it also sits at the centre of strong economic, political and cultural forces. In the homeowner nation of Norway where the housing system was set up to promote homeownership, the meaning of ownership itself has seen a dramatic shift since the 80s. What was initially conceived as a tool to create stability and welfare, housing now has increasingly come to mean profit and wealth-building. While homeowners are still able to create welfare for themselves, less and less people are able to become owners now.  The obvious solution then is to push more people towards ownership, but how sustainable is that? This is a system that has made owning a home extremely expensive, but still is trying to create ‘affordable’ housing – and that is the heart of the problem. Housing can not be expensive enough to be profitable and cheap enough to be affordable at the same time.

This is an exploratory project which reframes the problem of housing and reimagines the system in the near-future – one where the focus of our housing system has moved away from supporting wealth-building to supporting long-term well-being. I propose a conceptual housing model set within a larger public social infrastructure which supports the new values in form of self-governance, participatory budgeting and informal service exchange. Using the three horizons model as a framework, I position this near-future speculative model within the third horizon, representing a favourable direction going forward. As the seeds for the near-future already exist in the present day/first horizon, this project hopes to inspire critical reflection on the fundamental nature of our housing system and imagine hopeful alternative near-futures - ones where everyone can be taken care of.

Susanne Ringdal from HALOGEN made me aware of this wonderful deep lecture lecture by Dr. Joseph Tainter, the author of the book Collapse of Complex Societies. 

Very thoughtful lecture for all working in public sector and governance and even complex private companies.

The lecture is devided into five parts that should start automatically.

The project of the week is a study into adult education by the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Service, NAV. The project is by master students Michael Kassostakis and Eva Hugenschmidt from the design education at Oslo Met.

They write: "People are unable to use, contact or keep up with public services due to language problems, digital illiteracy and amount of information channels and the complexity of the system. This prevents and discourages people from being able to register themselves in the system, ask help or have complete understanding of their obligations and opportunities, thus creating a gap between them and the public system. This gap may enhance feelings such as isolation, discomfort and vulnerability, towards the public services, especially for people with additional problems.

Our purpose is to bridge the gap between people and the public services by creating a fun and interactive platform for communication, conversation and self-improvement, whilst offering an overview of the whole system. A tool, that can be used by both the people and the public system to communicate, review build trust and plan the future together."

Tutor was professor Tore Gulden

Read their report below