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Xichong Holiday Resort Resource Flow Map: Towards a circular economy in Shenzhen, China
No full textLocated in Longgang District of Shenzhen City, Xichong Holiday Resort offers a multi-functional beach resort for both local citizens and tourists. Besides water sports, the resort provides accommodation, dining and various outdoor activities such as camping. In peak tourist seasons, the resort not only needs to deal with large crowds of people, but it also needs to handle waste collection and disposal.
This systems map documents preliminary research conducted by students in the School of Design, Southern University of Science and Technology. It examines the resort’s current approach to sustainable operation and management and forms the basis for new proposals to help improve it. In response to our findings, we aim to propose feasible and effective responses to the resort’s current waste generation and disposal challenges.
Our research and design focused on the restaurant and beach area of Xichong Resort, including the popular camping area, restaurants and the beach. Based on on-site observations and interviews, we systematically examined where waste comes from and goes to and how different crowds of people generate different kinds of waste. Through this preliminary analysis, we hope to contribute to the sustainable future development of the resort.
One of the biggest problems related to current waste disposal strategies in the resort is the microplastics problem, particularly noticeable on the beach. Local visitors, as well as tourists, carry large amounts of plastic products to the beach. While most are collected after being discarded for disposal in landfills or burnt for power generation, some amount of plastics still washes into the ocean. Much of this waste consists of either plastic bottles or plastic bags. Once plastic bottles are thrown into the ocean, they will degrade into microplastics through the sun, wind and water. This leads to microplastics being consumed by marine animals and eventually accumulating throughout the food chain. Soon enough, they will also accumulate in human bodies
Gregory Bateson and the Political
Get PDFFred Turner and Phillip Guddemi join Jon Goodbun—whose recent work cross-reading Bateson and Deleuze and Guattari presented in an RSD11 paper session—to discuss the question of Gregory Bateson’s relationship to the political
Sensemaking Workshop: Applying systemic design practice to generate new insights
Get PDFThe RSD Symposium attracts a diverse constituency of systems thinkers, designers, academics, and multi-disciplinary leaders and practitioners from across the world. They join RSD to experience and make sense of emerging areas of interest to systemic design and the world at large, engaging with its complexity and looking at the big picture and its implications for their own organisations, operating contexts and practice.
The CHÔRA Foundation’s sensemaking process is an engaging, situated, and socialised experience that accelerates collective learning and helps to make sense of experience collectively. It is a proven and tested facilitated process which engages people, extracts insights, maps connections, and forms intelligence as the source of impact and action. Robust and effective sensemaking is the key to social system transformation, organisational learning and to strategic leadership in complex problem spaces.
This workshop will apply the CHÔRA Foundation’s Sensemaking Protocol as a structured and facilitated approach to making sense across the panels, conversations and events of RSD11. It is designed to create a collective learning experience. Participants will collaborate to share, layer, connect and combine various expertise and experiences they have gained from the event to actively generate contextual and emergent collective intelligence. It will enable open and curiosity-driven conversations building a shared sense of emerging opportunities, shifting paradigms and disruptions.
Our unique approach to sensemaking lends itself to being situated in a conference context. The Protocol that we draw on has been developed and has been tested across multiple problems and sectors, including social development, climate, innovation, urban resilience and renewal, financial services, governance and public and private sector organisations, for over two decades and is currently deployed globally by the UNDP (United Nations Development Program)
Systems Works: Building capability to think in systems by understanding daily problems
Get PDFAs design practice has expanded into complex, interconnected problems (Buchanan, 1992), termed Wicked Problems by Horst & Rittel (1973); new ways of seeing may be required to address complexity. Systems Thinking is one methodology to approach this, working to understand the elements and the relationships between them.
However, many resources that exist to explain Systems Thinking are highly theoretical, academic or lack application to a commonly understood problem. Due to this, Systems Thinking as a methodology may prove inaccessible for a layperson to develop their own ability to think in Systems; and therefore may be unable to understand how to effect change on a Wicked Problem.
This project aims to reduce complexity by focusing on a localised context, in daily problems we all face; such as how to get a good night’s sleep. This example has been utilised as we are all citizen designers in this respect, and would be able to identify elements that potentially affect our sleep quality individually; and from there identify past, present and/or future systems interventions to positively impact our sleep quality.
By paring back this complexity to an individual challenge, we can reflect on our systemic design practice outside of existing methodology, also allowing those new to systemic practice to develop understanding of concepts such as causality, and understand the consequences of their action in a localised setting. In understanding causality and consequence of our actions, we can also further develop understanding through reflexive loops (Richmond, 2018) and move up the Ladder of Inference, as proposed by Argyris (1990).
This workshop will employ both individual reflection and a group reflection to explore our own relation to sleep and its quality, and in doing so demonstrate the overlap between our own individual circumstances; allowing us to develop a cumulative perspective that may help envision possibilities outside of our own perspective and/or bias(es)
The Book of Iteration: Workshop and introduction to the method
Get PDFThis workshop will introduce participants to the process and content of The Book of Iteration. For some time, we have been using the Chinese classic the I Ching (or Book of Changes) as a resource for systemic design in both professional and classroom settings. The unique method of consulting the I Ching sparks novel insights, which can be usefully applied to overcome creative obstacles. Our research has found that the 64 passages of the I Ching correspond to the stages of a design cycle that apply to any creative process. We therefore adapted the passages into prompts for design thinking and creative practice. The adapted passages, and the various methods of consulting them, provide an intellectual lever that can help move any project toward its next iteration
Welcome to the Village—Developing transformative literacy through embodiment
Get PDFAcquiring transformative literacy skills is a complex challenge that requires an understanding of the world’s complex interconnectedness and relational co-construction in which human agency acknowledges its co-evolutionary pathways with each other and the Earth. It requires an understanding of present and future systems and of the processes required to bring about transformations in those systems (Künkel & Ragnarsdottir, 2022).
Forrester’s word to describe complex systems was “counterintuitive” (Forrester,1971), and indeed looking at policy making arena’s patterns, it seems that comprehending interconnectedness is not only counterintuitive to most decision-makers, but the system of decision-making is at large counter-transformative. Acknowledging the counterintuitive character of complexity and interconnectedness brings about an epistemological question about how we know and alternative ways of knowing.
Forrester assumed that complexity is counter to common sense, the rational mind, and the cognitive function of our brains. Luckily, we are not brains nor minds- we are humans, carrying our brains at the top part of our body – a complex living system inside a complex social system. Grasping complexity requires us to counter our mind’s intuition and to connect to other intuitions that are more fertile for the grasping of and designing in a complex-social system arena.
To tackle this counterintuitive challenge of transformative literacy, we have an accessible, safe, free-of-charge tool: our human body, a complex system through which we can practice interconnectedness individually and collectively
How does service design tackle sustainability challenges properly?
No full textThe sustainability space is complicated to navigate, hard to understand, and at times contradictory in its information.
It requires a more sophisticated tool kit than traditional design thinking offers. It is much more complex than an average service design project.
So, how to navigate this space and create solutions?
We’ve been working for the past year on a process that blends systems thinking, design thinking, business transformation methods, and sustainability science and practice to create a new process that helps designers facilitate a step-by-step transformation of companies towards sustainability.
Activity Description
This ‘Strategic Sustainability Design’ process is essentially a new design discipline but is very much a work in progress. And that is part of the continuous journey.
We’d love to show it to you and get your feedback, critique and questions on our process, prototypes, and workshops.
Outline of timings
10 minutes – Opening, including introductions and scene setting
15 minutes – Activity, with participants getting the chance to interact
5 minutes – Conclusio
A Practice for Sympoietic Thinking
Get PDFDesigning for isolated entities can lead to unintended consequences, as nothing can exist entirely on its own. There is an urgent need to recognise the interconnection and entanglement of life on Earth. Many cultures recognise these entanglements in deep knowledges learned across many generations, but some cultures with industrial practices have developed worldviews based on ideologies that separate humans from the rest of nature.
Dualist ideologies that seek to understand through establishing specialist areas have revealed a paradox; we may gain insights into the functioning of a specific component, but in doing so, we lose sight of how it exists in the wider world. How might recognition of entanglement affect approaches to the multiple predicaments we and all beings of the Earth face, such as the effects of climate change, physical and mental wellness, equity and how wealth is quantified?
My MA in Sustainable Design masterwork explores sympoiesis, which means to “make-with.” How do we learn to “make-with” the other beings, forms and forces we are entangled with but speak a different language to? I propose a sympoietic thinking practice as an exercise to encourage designers and researchers to consider the interconnection and interdependence of the beings, forms, and forces within their project and to challenge anthropocentric thinking. The tool is influenced by a diverse range of ontologies. It has been designed for use in industrial cultures, and I acknowledge that it might not be relevant to all people or cultures
A Systemic Design Framework for AI-enabled Healthcare: Improving health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities
Get PDFThe aim of this presentation is to present a systemic design framework developed by a research team for a project funded by the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), DECODE – Data-driven machine-learning aided stratification and management of multiple long-term conditions in adults with learning disabilities. DECODE will analyse healthcare data on people with learning disabilities from England and Wales to find out what multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs) are more likely to occur together and what happens to some of these MLTCs over time. The end goal of DECODE is to utilise the AI-enabled new knowledge and develop actionable insights for effective joined-up social and health care for people with learning disabilities. The framework we are proposing consists of four steps: i) context analysis to understand the context of AI application; ii) AI output visualisation to develop user-friendly visualisations to display the outputs of AI analysis in a meaningful and accessible way; iii) actionable insight exploration to explore leverage points to improve join-up care coordination; iv) change process planning to evaluate the feasibility and ethical/legal risk of the usage scenarios. This framework will be of interest to many systemic designers who aim to develop a safe, ethical and cost-effective AI in healthcare