We need to fundamentally redesign our societies, our economies, our lifestyles, our human-nature relation.
Oganized by: Systemic Desing Labs, ETH Zürich
MOOC 1: WORLDVIEWS - from Sustainability to Regeneration (9.5.-27.5.22)
MOOC 2: Beyond Systems thinking (6.6.-24.6.22)
MOOC 3: Systemic Design (5.9.-23.9.22)
MOOC 4: Real-World Transformative Design Praxis (3.10.-21.10.22)
This MOOC series is about creating positive impact in complex systems in times of nested crises. It is about navigating complexity and uncertainty with new tools and practices, such as “organic emergence.” Complex systems are inherently dynamic and unpredictable: their properties are emergent. An organic way to engage with emergence is to trust in having the right tools and techniques to adaptively cope with sudden surprises or challenges, and to reveal hidden opportunities.
The four consecutive MOOCs aim to address these urgent and complex challenges. Participants are invited on a learning journey that includes emphasis on new holistic worldviews, concepts like regeneration and resilience, befriending complexity and uncertainty, methods and hybrid practices of science and design, connecting more with our inner self, and becoming bio-regional weavers within communities of transformational learning and praxis. Discover the detailed schedule.
You will find different entry points to connect with this MOOC series: deep philosophical discourse, insights into the latest state of science on sustainability and resilience, designerly practice, hybrid methods, concrete design principles, real-world illustrations, and a motivating community.
Exciting real-world illustrations will take you to Hemsedal Norway, Annecy France, Ostana Italy, and Mallorca Spain – from material supply chains, to products, buildings, communities and their services, to landscapes, bio-regions, and transnational cooperation. This offers a comparative understanding of communities and regions undergoing sustainability transitions across different contexts, cultures, climates and geographies.
The prominent methods you will learn are systemic design and systems-oriented design, social network analysis, resilience assessment, life cycle and footprint analysis, circularity mapping, visual dialogue, cross-scale design, “view from above” perspectives, biomimicry, transdisciplinary research, real-world elaboration, and more.
The MOOCs’ didactics are designed to combine time and place independent virtual learning through pre-recorded conversations and presentations, both accessible as movies and audio files, readings, and practical engagement outside in nature. Virtual content is meant to stimulate physical and social interaction in the bio-region where the participant lives. Systemic Cycles takes the participant on a conscious exploration of place and regional supply chain actors on their bicycle, to playfully learn systemic design methods, to weave together local and regional networks and to explore the inner self through physical activity. An accompanying visual mapping process called Gigamapping acts as a designerly way to co-create your own learning journey and connect across the MOOC series to your final transformative design project. Your personal QUEST guides you through your learning journey. Weekly live tutorials in an online forum offer opportunities to discuss and brainstorm with teachers.
You will learn together with diverse experts in their field – sustainability scientists, systemic designers, consultants, local and European politicians, book authors, builders, mountain guides, self-compassion trainers, and together co-create and connect communities of practice for learning and engagement opportunities
Time to invest will be about a minimum of 2-4 hours per week, with each MOOC taking three weeks of time.
A new learning community you will be part of – Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems (DRRS), a virtual place to co-create the Now and the Next, to deep dive into themes that a MOOC may trigger, to engage and create further learning opportunities. Check out DRRS.
MOOC production team and lead instructors include Tobias Luthe (MOOC program director and lead of the MRI Mountain Resilience Working Group), Justyna Swat (MOOC production team) and Daniel Christian Wahl (MOOC production team).
Cover image by Adam Kool.
