RSDx and RSD11

Last updated Oct 27, 2022 | Originally published Oct 21, 2022

Recently I helped host a set of workshops and sessions as a part of RSDx, an online series developed as a part of the Systemic Design Association’s conference programming and as an addendum (or perhaps pre-dendum? I don’t understand Latin, I’m afraid) to RSD11 (more on that below).

I designed one of the sessions, a workshop addressing the question “How should systemic design’s scholarship system work?” The session featured provocations from my friends and colleagues Lewis Muirhead, Stephen Davies, Marie Davidová, and Birger Sevaldson before groups split up to develop some design principles for supporting scholarship in systemic design. It was based on one of the discussion papers I authored for the conference:

• Knowledge innovation is systemic and fractal and that should be reflected in our models of publishing

Then, the 11th Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium was the following week, held at Brighton University in the UK and everywhere you can connect to the Internet. I had a couple of contributions:

• A call for scaling literacy
• Leverage is Fractal, Relative, and what else? We need a theory of leverage in systemic design
• A Case Study of Systemic Theories of Change and Action: The Ecotrust Canada Home-Lands Initiative