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Somehow The Vital Connection is Made: The Sociocultural Role of Music in Music Cities
Get PDFWithin the last decade, the music city concept has been gaining traction worldwide. While acknowledging that the music city has primarily been valued as a vehicle for urban economic development, this project aims to present a more balanced approach to music cities using a sociocultural lens. Through the use of literature and popular media reviews, semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation, and discourse analysis, several under-explored sociocultural ideas critical to successful music city development are presented. Furthermore, by focusing on the social dimensions of space and place while using systems-focused design, this paper highlights the prominent impacts of music on communities and its role in building and enhancing social infrastructure. This leads to a design intervention aimed at creating more vibrant and enjoyable cities that improve the social health and social infrastructure of communities, specifically via free music in public spaces and the need for music to exist more freely
Deconstructing the Housing System: Understanding the Housing Affordability Crisis and Ways to Solve It
Get PDFCanada has been facing a housing affordability crisis for the last decade. However, housing has become unattainable for most markets due to multiple factors in the last five years. Though many believe the solution lies in building more homes, there may be more aspects of the system that continue to perpetuate problems like a housing crisis. In this paper, we will be analyzing housing as a system and deconstructing it to see its shortcomings of the system. In doing so, this paper hopes to address the complexity by understanding the different layers of the problem and understanding the different leverage points to change it
Guiding Strategies For System Change with a Futures-Led, Human-Centred Design Approach
Get PDFRSD11 highlights the tension between the profound, long-term changes we need to be working towards, against the demand for immediately achievable actions. As industry practitioners, we regularly encounter clients prioritising short-term economic benefits from design processes and solutions over potential long-term social or environmental harms and an orientation towards avoiding risk, which can inhibit more profound paradigm-shifting work. This tension is growing as designers with a desire to have more environmentally, and socially positive impact is increasingly addressing complex, strategic challenges in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) 21st-century world (Giles, 2018).
Historically, human-centred designers have proven well-equipped to develop new organisational strategies and solve current challenges within a narrow problem space and short timeframe (Bade et al., 2015). However, they are often less equipped to overcome the aforementioned tensions and design more paradigm-shifting, longer-term organisational strategies that contribute to more profound change, including positive social and ecological impact.
The authors are designers and strategists working at Futurice, an established Nordic design, strategy and technology innovation agency with branches across Europe. In our work advising clients on strategy, they often struggle to consider longer time horizons and, consequently, a broader set of possibilities for the future.
Based on case studies from collaborations between Futurice and client organisations, this paper posits that designers can support organisations to more confidently address longer-term, systemic issues and increase their positive social and environmental impact by incorporating futures thinking and systemic practices. Focusing on two cases, we describe how we combined tools and methods from these methodologies with human-centred design to achieve this. We explain the approach we developed and applied across strategic projects, integrating learnings from collaborating with a range of organisations across the public, private and third sectors. We highlight how this approach has led organisations to better navigate a wider set of possibilities and include a more diverse set of stakeholder perspectives. Subsequently, developing more paradigm-shifting and regenerative future visions and strategies.
This paper offers strategic advice to support human-centred designers to co-create preferred futures. It shares learnings on how to co-design action plans to move organisations towards their preferred future with more alignment, adaptability and confidence. This approach has been developed based on testimonials and evaluations with the organisations we have worked with and the tangible impact this mixed methodology has had in informing their strategic plans
Interdisciplinary Systemic Innovation for Healing and Creating Resilient Communities in the Post-COVID-19 era
Get PDFThe functioning mechanisms of society are encountered with enormous unexpected extreme problems and unanticipated butterfly effects, which are confronted with increasingly complex global challenges and faced with increasingly uncertain futures. The whole world operating system has been deeply influenced by the widespread COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic, social, and cultural catastrophes, and many individuals have suffered severe psychological pressure. Therefore, exploring systemic innovation to heal residents’ emotions, build resilient communities, and foster economic recovery and socially inclusive sustainable development is of great urgent and relevant importance in the post-COVID-19 period, which is challenging to be addressed by an isolated discipline or field. Therefore, this research will attempt to cooperate with uncertainty to reveal the potential for systemic innovation through a multidisciplinary analysis and research.
This research first presents three groups of stakeholders: the general public, vulnerable groups, and healthcare employees, to illustrate the systemic psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on various communities. Then, a multidisciplinary analysis containing psychology, medicine, sociology, and design was conducted to clarify the current approaches, practical impediments, and potential for system evolution. Finally, this research selects Chifeng Road as an experimental intervention location through a design thinking-oriented interdisciplinary systemic innovation. It then presents an emotional healing system that integrates multidisciplinary perspectives and knowledge to reduce the surrounding residents’ psychological stress. And fosters a resilient community that can adapt more quickly to post-pandemic life, while also carrying the potential for future innovation in social systems
Opening Possibility: Activating simultaneous multiple temporalities in the architecture drawing
Get PDFAs the contemporary condition of design research becomes increasingly more interconnected with neighbouring disciplines of inquiry in an emerging complexity of global systems, notions of temporality take on a more active and uncertain role in the process of knowledge generation and synthesis. Within architectural design practice, complex temporalities are interwoven in the predictive desires of emerging technologies, yet the temporal nature of the architectural drawing—a field (both physical and theoretical) that is rich with the possibility of experimental inquiry—conventionally maintains a linear, sequential time. This normative approach increasingly limits the capacity for the architectural drawing to reflect contemporary concerns, encouraging glossing over the more qualitative and challenging aspects of design.
Through a body of research that reflects both an analytical and creative engagement with complex temporal relationships, this presentation seeks to articulate methods of approaching architectural drawing that have the capacity to address the more elusive conditions often overlooked yet central to the practice of architecture. This presentation focuses on two of the main active agents in the research: the poetic construct, which allows for the neighbouring of conflicting notions, and sustained oscillation, which similarly suspends the need for resolution and has creative consequence. Each of these agents reflects a temporal and structural engagement relevant to systemic design thinking. The presentation refers theoretically to work by designers, philosophers, historians, writers and artists and seeks to give rise to new possibilities with regard to narrative, context and temporality. The presentation ultimately aims to encourage new conversations and ways of understanding that may activate the potential of simultaneous multiple temporalities (or temporal multiplicities) across disciplines and modes of inquiry
POL– AI: Leveraging urban ecosystem
Get PDFThe work-in-progress project relates ecosystems with socio-technological systems (STS) in urban environments. It focuses on the development of more-than-human cities of the post-Anthropocene. Through a prototypical urban intervention POL-AI built from responsive wood, we aim to support more-than-human edible and habitable landscapes on existing buildings, thus supporting urban connectivity for wild nature elements such as insects. The prototype covers elements that are often used in so-called insect hotels, pollinator gardens and artificial intelligence (AI) monitoring systems for pollination, garden ecosystems and responsive wood performance of habitats. Further on, this prototype will include QR codes, leading to its own Do-it-Yourself (DIY) recipe and a citizen-science mobile application, Spot-a-Bee, that informs the AI image recognition database when the pollinators are pollinating. Therefore, the project becomes generative. The prototype has been developed through gigamapping, which is a systems oriented design tool for synergising the multi-centred perspective of related stakeholders. It is being robotically fabricated. However, making its iterations in makers’ labs or even on a mitre saw should be easy. We have recently faced high extinction rates in wild species and their habitats. The “Planetary Boundaries” model clearly points to biodiversity loss as one of the most alarming global issues. Yet, for some species, urban environments can offer better habitats than poisoned agricultural land; however, the connectivity between urban habitats is often low. Therefore, urban adaptations for more-than-human architecture are necessary to counteract biodiversity loss
Systemic Design and Game Design: The equilibrium gameplay loop
Get PDFGame design is a recent design discipline concerned with the making of games, especially digital ones. Game designers must often tackle complex, wicked problems; Indeed, in game design literature, games are increasingly referred to as “complex systems” (Fullerton, 2008; Maiorana, 2020; Salen & Zimmerman, 2003; Sellers, 2017; Zubek, 2020). However, research in game design using a systemic approach is still in its infancy, and the visualisation of game systems poses certain challenges for game designers. Firstly, a mechanistic approach still dominates the field of game studies (Koenitz & Eladhari, 2021). Secondly, representing game systems visually is a daring task, as stressed in various works about game loops and game diagrams (Berube, 2019; Francillette et al., 2017; Guardiola, 2016; Palavalli & Harsha, 2020). Therefore, the present paper asks: how can a systemic approach help designers understand and visualise core game systems? The theoretical framework comes from the French systemic approach (De Rosnay, 1979; De Rosnay, 1979 [1975]; Le Moigne, 1977, 1990; Morin, 2008) and builds specifically upon the work of Joël De Rosnay. This author showed how systems maintain themselves over time in a dynamic equilibrium. The result of this study is a visual representation of game systems, namely the equilibrium gameplay loop. In the end, equilibrium gameplay loops can be used to better understand game systems—both existing and new—and further develop systemic design research and practice
Trapped in Complexity: Worlds and the methods they make
Get PDFAfter several years of working with industrial design as a tool for exploring the types of radical systemic change that climate change arguably needs, it now seems timely to discuss the systemic approach. Much at odds with current discourse, this article promotes disciplinarity per se and questions the systems oriented design (SOD) assumption, which seems to take for granted that there is an inescapable intimate relation between development and complexity. It is done by revisiting four seminal scholars within system thinking and cybernetics, which arguably were significant for giving rise to the current praxeology of SOD and its continued development. The article makes three brief explorations, covering (i) the ecologic worldview, having nature as a guiding metaphor versus the mechanical having a machine as a guiding metaphor, (ii) the expected turning point for radical climate action and why it has not turned up yet and (iii) the ecology of disciplines and its knowledge production, and how the modes of disciplinary cooperation tend to be, more or less, easy to control. These discussions intend to explore the tensions between the worldviews that direct our understanding and action. The article shows how the worldview makes the methods as much, if not more, than the other way around. Finally, the paper tries to establish a creative dialogue with the SOD community by both questioning its current main focus on the current system’s complexity and, at the same time, suggesting how the SOD praxeology could be potentially much more beneficial if its view instead were directed towards ways to transcend the current system
Shift Workers at High Risk for Type 2 Diabetes
No full textHow a lifestyle, controlled by work conditions, can increase the risk for Type 2 Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes is a worrisome problem for both individuals and the health system, especially as this chronic disease is preventable. As Switzerland is the leading country in diabetes patient expenditure in 2019, prevention is key to fighting this unfortunate and expensive disease. To understand the problem, the group did an extensive literature review, conducted user research, and did user interviews. A reality map was built to break down the problems along a typical process of activities in the daily life of shift workers. These were investigated in detail using the iceberg model. Eventually, an idealistic future scenario serves as an orientation device for identifying potential areas for design interventions
The Polyskooter[s]
No full textShort Documentary Film: A story of stories curated to explore the embodied kinship that’s centred on “skooting” (rollerskating, skateboarding, scooter-ing & similar), bicycling and other forms of urban road and street travel.
Cultural systems are expressed in the structural design of streets and urban roads: a most immediate public space. They are reinforced by social infrastructure; the common interpretation of inevitable grey areas within rules, displayed in split-second judgements and movements. Evidence for this lies in tacit, experiential knowledge.
When tension arises between conflicting judgements (or “habitus”), entrenched hierarchies are defended using politicised rhetoric; one example being the “bicycles v cars” divide. This research began by mapping the warm data of trust/mistrust, the antagonistic/agonistic, found in storytelling.
The research progressed beyond established strata – via critical modality — to understand the in-betweens. “Polyskooters” represents active travel at speeds in-between pedestrians and cyclists. The Polyskooter meanwhile, is a speculative design to generate experiential, embodied understandings of skate and scoot community, using Critical Jugaad (make-shift design).
These hard-wheeled modes like skateboards, push-scooters or roller-skates exist on the messy fringes – quite literally – between pavement and road! Systems of visual storytelling, such as films or advertisements, rarely include these in liminal depictions. Yet, areas on the edge of ‘normal’ provide fertile ground for insights around how urban travel systems could incorporate such diverse, non-dominant situated realities — including others like mobility scooterers or tandem cyclists