Navigating complexity for real-world challenges with the Certificate of Advanced Studies ETH in Systemic Design

Systemic design: Scientific, designerly, and embodied methods and practices

The emerging field or "sphere" of systemic design is not a discipline but a post-discipline, a hybrid combination of science, design, and systems thinking-sensing, a set of challenge-based navigation processes, techniques, and cultures. In systemic design, we ask questions to enact complexity through reflexive processes.

Navigating in complexity

Systemic design combines quantitative scientific methods, such as social network analysis, life cycle assessment, or land use mapping through geospatial data, qualitative scientific methods such as interviews or design workshops, designerly methods like visual dialogue or systems narratives, with embodied practices specific to enact the individual setting, such as the didactic systemic cycles or forms of deep listening.

In this systemic design CAS, we train both directly relevant scientific methods and designerly methods in the context of navigating living systems and their applied relevance to real-world challenges.

Self-reflexivity by the researcher(s) is key, through consciously curating a meta-perspective "view from above"/"meta-design"/"mental scaffolding", with recursive processes of guiding the systemic design research: based on the identified real-world challenge, repetitively asking questions by sensing the systems, remaining flexible to activate various types of hybrid methods and practices, from "hard" science to "soft" embodiment.

Field design trip to Mallorca, Spain

Part of the virtual-physical course setup is the one-week real-world immersion trip to the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, where we explore and embody hidden facets of bioregional regenerative weaving of the Balearic archipelago.