Systemic design

Systemic design is an interdiscipline that integrates systems thinking and design practices. It is a pluralistic field, with several dialects including systems-oriented design. Influences have included critical systems thinking and second-order cybernetics. In 2021, the Design Council (UK) began advocating for a systemic design approach and embedded it in a revision of their double diamond model.

Systemic design is closely related to sustainability as it aims to create solutions that are not only designed to have a good environmental impact, but are also socially and economically beneficial. In fact, from a systemic design approach, the system to be designed, its context with its relationships and its environment receive synchronous attention. Systemic design's discourse has been developed through Relating Systems Thinking and Design—a series of symposia held annually since 2012.

Systems thinking in design has a long history with origins in the design methods movement during the 1960s and 1970s, such as the idea of wicked problems developed by Horst Rittel.

The theories about complexity help the management of an entire system, and the suggested design approaches help the planning of different divergent elements. The complexity theories evolved on the basis that living systems continually draw upon external sources of energy and maintain a stable state of low entropy, on the basis of the General Systems Theory by Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968). Some of the next rationales applied those theories also on artificial systems: complexity models of living systems address also productive models with their organizations and management, where the relationships between parts are more important than the parts themselves.

Treating productive organizations as complex adaptive systems allows for new management models that address economical, social and environmental benefits (Pisek and Wilson, 2001.) In that field, cluster theory (Porter, 1990) evolved in more environmentally sensitive theories, like industrial ecology (Frosh and Gallopoulos, 1989) and industrial symbiosis (Chertow, 2000). Design thinking offers a way to creatively and strategically reconfigure a design concept in a situation with systemic integration (Buchanan, 1992).

In 1994, Gunter Pauli and Heitor Gurgulino de Souza founded the research institute Zero Emission Research and Initiatives (ZERI), starting from the idea that progress should embed respect for the environment and natural techniques that will allow production processes to be part of the ecosystem.

Strong interdisciplinary and transdisciplinarity approaches are critical during the design phase (Fuller, 1981) with the increasing involvement of different disciplines, including urban planning, public policy, business management and environmental sciences (Chertow et al., 2004). As an interdiscipline, systemic design joins systems thinking and design methodology to support humanity centred and systems oriented design academe and practice (Bistagnino, 2011; Sevaldson, 2011; Nelson and Stolterman, 2012; Jones, 2014; Toso at al., 2012).

Numerous design projects demonstrate systemic design in their approach, including diverse topics involving food networks, industrial processes and water purification, revitalization of internal areas through art and tourism, circular economy, exhibition and fairs, social inclusion, and marginalization.

Since 2014 several scholarly journals have acknowledged systemic design with special publications, and in 2022, the Systemic Design Association launched “Contexts—The Journal of Systemic Design.” The proceedings repository, Relating Systems Thinking and Design, exceeded 1000 articles in 2023.

Since 2012, host organisations have held an annual symposium dedicated to systemic design, Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD). Proceedings are available via the searchable repository on RSDsymposium.org.

Academic research groups with a focus on systemic design include:

• Communication, Culture & Technology lab at Georgetown University, Washington DC, hosts of RSD12 in 2023.
• Policy Lab is a part of the UK Civil Service with a "mission is to radically improve policy making through design, innovation and people-centred approaches".
• Radical Methodologies Research Group at the University of Brighton, Brighton, UK, hosts of RSD11 in 2022.
• Relating Systems Thinking and Design a searchable repository of articles from the proceedings of the annual symposia.
• Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at OCADU, Toronto, Canada.
• Sys—Systemic Design Lab at the Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy.
• Systemic Design and Sustainability Research Group at Oslo Metropolitan University.
• Systemic Design Association the international membership organisation.
• Systems Engineering Design research group at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Academic programmes in systemic design include:

• Systems oriented design is an example of a systemic design approach being used at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
• Politecnico di Torino: Master of Science in Systemic Design.
• The Strategic Foresight and innovation master program at OCAD University Toronto.
• National Institute of Design (NID) India. Systems Thinking and Design is part of the academic programme at NID.
• At the University of Montreal, the Master's degree in Applied Science in Design, Design and Complexity (DESCO).
• The Kunsthochschule Kassel, in Kassel (Germany) offered the "Systemdesign" degree in the Product Design programme