work on something that matters!
A master’s course for designers, architects, landscape architects, and urban designers working together on real-world complex challenges. Open to AHO students, domestic Norwegian students and international exchange students.
| Course Code | 70 504 |
| Credits | 24 ECTS |
| Semester | Autumn 2026 |
| Duration | Mid-August to December |
| Level | Master’s |
| Cohort | 24 students |
| Exchange | Erasmus+ welcome |
| THE COURSE |
Eighteen weeks. Two modules. One living watershed.
The course runs from mid-August to December and enrols up to 24 master’s-level students from design, landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design. You work in interdisciplinary teams embedded in a real-world context, Oslo and its watershed, with external partners who help shape the brief alongside you.
MODULE 1 · WEEKS 1–4
INDIVIDUAL
Culture-based Solutions at Losæter
An introduction to SOD methods, grounded in Losæter, a multi-functional farm in the heart of the city where practices of cultivation, harvesting, cooking and eating converge. You explore how cultural practices and community engagement can address the socio-ecological challenges Oslo faces.
→ Course kickoff + co-mapping workshop
→ First solo Gigamap
→ Cabin field trip to Gressholmen island
→ Individual presentation
MODULE 2 · WEEKS 5–18 ·
TEAM-BASED
REGENERATE THE OSLOFJORD WATERSHED
The main module. Working in interdisciplinary teams, you take on the Oslo Watershed, a complex socio-ecological system under pressure from urban runoff, agricultural pollution, and governance fragmentation. Your work contributes directly to ongoing efforts by our collaborating partners.
→ Four watershed field excursions across the Oslo region
→ Stakeholder mapping and co-design workshops
→ Futures, leverages, and intervention portfolio development
→ Final exhibition + AHO Works showcase
Course schedule overview
| IN THE FIELD |
Learning happens outside the studio
As part of Module 2, you take at least five outdoor teaching trips into the Oslo Watershed to observe, engage, and meet stakeholders on site. Fieldwork is integral to SOD, you build knowledge through direct encounter with the system and it’s people.
Click the image to enlarge
SEPT. 18
Akerselva Walk
Trace Oslo’s most iconic waterway through it’s urban fabric. From headwaters to fjord, to understand
SEPT. 23
City Fjord Promenade
Follow the coastline and understand the fjord’s relationship with the city’s water, waste, and ecological systems.
SEPT. 28
Sub-Urban-Elva Walk
Follow a typical river running through a suburban landscape, a mosaic urban and rural land use
OCT. 2
Rural Walk
See how upstream agriculture land use affects local storm-water management and impacts the fjord
OCT. 6
VEAS Visit
See how upstream land use shapes the fjord, then tour the VEAS wastewater treatment facility, a critical system node.
| LEARNING OUTCOMES |
What you will be able to do
Conduct and synthesise research:
Plan, gather and synthesise both field and desk research data, qualitative and quantitative, rapidly from experts, communities, and site visits, building a picture of a complex situation from the inside out.
Understand the whole:
Create multi-layered system models that make complex systems and relationships legible to your team, to stakeholders, and to decision-makers.
Identify key challenges and opportunities:
Analyse a complex system to locate its leverage points, the underlying causes, structural tensions, and latent potentials that most interventions miss. Distinguish between symptoms and root causes, and identify where designed action can have real effect.
Conceptualise transformative interventions:
Design, develop and evaluate holistic portfolios of interventions to catalyse change and address underlying causes, working with the tools of your own disciplinary background.
Facilitate for participation and stakeholder engagement:
Plan and run participatory co-design processes with diverse stakeholders, from domain experts to local communities, building shared understanding of complex problems and collective ownership of possible directions forward.
Envision, evaluate and visualise future risks and possibilities:
Construct and communicate compelling future scenarios, both desirable and undesirable, to evaluate the consequences of inaction and the potential of intervention, and to orient your team and stakeholders toward shared goals.
| WHY THIS COURSE|
The world is complex, problems are interconnected
The challenges reshaping our world, from ecological breakdown to urban resilience, governance failures and social inequality, are not technical puzzles with neat solutions. They are interconnected, evolving, and resistant to the methods designed for simpler problems. Acting on them requires more than expertise. It requires the ability to read the full system, locate where change is actually possible, and assemble a portfolio of interventions that reinforce each other.
ONE DISCIPLINE CANNOT DO IT ALONE
A diagram by systems innovation network on the limited thinking that can happen with a single discipline when looking at a system [Image: Systems Innovation Network, 2024]
No single discipline can tackle these complex interconnected problems alone. Each discipline brings its own lens and its own blind spots. SOD gives you the techniques to combine perspectives, so that practitioners from different backgrounds can read the same systems together, each sharpening the others’ understanding. The full range of interventions, spatial, ecological, social, policy-based, narrative, organisational, stays available rather than predetermined by disciplinary habit.
DESIGN RELEVANT THINGS
One group proposes a Fjord Watch information portal as part of their intervention portfolio targeting the discovered issue around awareness and information [Photo: Abel Crawford, 2025]
Most design education trains you to do things right: to craft, to resolve, to deliver. These are indispensable skills. But they rest on an assumption rarely questioned, that the brief is the right brief, that the problem is the right problem. This course asks a different question first: before you design anything, how do you know where to focus your energy?
Real stakes, real briefs
Stakeholders from DOGA, NMBU, NIVA and Pådriv reflect during a mid-term review at a team’s project work space [Photo: Abel Crawford, 2025]
Your work here is anchored in real organisations actively working to change real systems. They co-define the brief, follow your team from first week to final exhibition, and have a genuine stake in what you produce. There is a real chance your work influences how they act, and through them, the system itself.
| WHAT IS SOD |
What is Systems Oriented Design
Systems Oriented Design (SOD) is a practice that fuses systems thinking with the action-orientation of design. Developed at AHO, it is now practised globally as a way to tackle the kinds of wicked, interconnected problems that no single discipline can solve alone.
Where systems thinking excels at describing complexity, SOD goes further, using the very act of designing as a way to investigate and transform systems. At the core of SOD is Gigamapping, a flexible visual methodology for capturing the dynamics, relationships, and layered complexity of a system. Combined with stakeholder co-design and futures thinking, SOD equips you to find effective leverage points and develop portfolios of interventions that address root causes, not just surface symptoms.
“If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.” — Kurt Lewin
| INTERDISCIPLINARY CRAFT |
Your discipline is your contribution
Spread from PostSOD newspaper from the Ny Skog group in 2020. They developed a portfolio of 7 interconnected interventions to shift the Norwegian forestry from clear-cutting to selective logging, from production of low quality timber to production of high quality timber. The type of interventions are diverse from a new market for forests (4) timber (5) to new products (2,6) to rethinking saw-mills (7) among others. Image by Johanna Sofie Brämersson, Oskar Jeremiasz Jasiczak, Simen Bergsnov Lorentzen, Åse Lilly Salamonsen, Bendik Ola Hauge Vestre
Disciplinary craft is not set aside in this course, it is put to work. All teams share the same systems-oriented processes and tools, but each discipline contributes its distinct lens, techniques, and ways of making to the intervention portfolio.
At the same time, SOD makes no assumptions about what kind of intervention a situation calls for. A complex problem rarely calls for a single type of response. The intervention portfolio your team develops should be holistic, drawing on the full range of what the system needs: built proposals, ecological designs, services, governance strategies, spatial frameworks, public narratives, organisational shifts. Disciplinary background shapes how each intervention is developed and executed with rigour and craft. It does not predetermine which interventions are on the table, or licence proposing a building where a policy change is what is needed.
The course welcomes international exchange students. AHO students are also encouraged to explore outbound exchange at partner universities working within the same SOD framework.
DESIGNERS
Services & Interactions
Develop service concepts, interaction frameworks, and communication artefacts that shift behaviours and bridge actors within the system.
ARCHITECTS
Built Structures & Systems
Propose structural interventions, building typologies, and infrastructure strategies grounded in systemic analysis of the context.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS
Ecological & Topographical Interventions
Design with the layered dynamics of geology, hydrology, soil, vegetation, and microclimate, shaping landscapes and ecological systems that are both responsive to and generative of systemic change.
URBAN DESIGNERS
Spatial Planning & Policy
Develop spatial frameworks, governance proposals, and policy interventions that reshape how places function at urban and regional scale.
OTHER BACKGROUNDS WELCOME
Other Disciplines Welcome
SOD has been enriched by practitioners arriving from well outside its home disciplines, including nurses, engineers, IT professionals, and natural resource managers. If you bring a genuine stake in complex real-world problems and a willingness to work across disciplines, we would like to hear from you.
| PARTNERS |
Partners who have a stake in the outcomes
The problem field for this course is co-defined with organisations actively working on the Oslofjord watershed. They follow the student teams from kickoff to final exhibition and have genuine access to the work produced.
Interested in collaborating with the course as an organisation or as an individual?
CONTEXT NAVIGATOR
Norway’s largest multidisciplinary engineering consultancy, with the country’s biggest water and sewage consulting environment. Norconsult’s water infrastructure division joins as Context Navigator, helping frame the brief and following student teams throughout the semester.
SUPPORT PARTNERS
A cross-sector network platform for sustainable urban development in Oslo. Their fjord-restoration initiative Fjorden Vår will be directly contributed to through the student work.
The Norwegian Institute for Water Research connects the course to key data resources and subject matter experts across the watershed system, and brings their own research expertise.
Vestby municipality is home to the Hølen river basin, a key case for this course and previous SOD unit collaborations. The Nature Management team from the Planning, Building and Geodata department is supporting this course by hosting our excursion to the Hølen river basin and bringing their practice based knowledge and experiences to the table, as well as connecting us to relevant stakeholders and desktop resources
Andersen Farm
The Andersen family farm sits upstream of Vestby sentrum in the Hølen river basin, where a generational shift from conventional to no-till agriculture is underway, including reopening 900 metres of piped waterway and restoring riparian vegetation. They are hosting one of the stops in our field excursion into the Hølen basin, contributing with practical knowledge of financing and navigating Norwegian bureaucracy to make waterway renaturalisation and regenerative agriculture work.
Design and Architecture Norway is the national centre of expertise for design and architecture. They will bring inputs around how disciplines of architecture and design can contribute to better water quality and how the system of developing built urban environment can be influenced to contribute to a better fjord
