Systemic design for tackling complexity

SDC_illustration_unravel
START DATE
April 14, 2025
DURATION
8 weeks
WORKLOAD
6 - 10 hours per week
LANGUAGE
English
PRICE
EUR 1000.00 *
Join

If you are not yet a member of our online campus, this link will take you to the registration page. Membership is free but required to sign up for activities.

DESCRIPTION

We live in a world of continuing change that blends over time into interconnected supercomplexity. Organisations are forced to make decisions today for highly uncertain futures, with limited tools and available knowledge. Recent crises, including the COVID pandemic, have challenged decision makers with the interdependence of their problems with unexpected and unrelenting wickedness.

Also today's creative professionals, from leaders and strategists to practitioners, engage with ever more complex problem areas. Although it’s part of their work to empathise with, understand and contribute to tackling complex issues, and feel comfortable in fluid, chaotic times, it's also their duty to go beyond just individual creativity and actions to deal with connections, causes and consequences.

How to understand and design in ways that reflect the complex contexts of our industries, societies and the world we live in? How to tackle the challenges we face and make a sustainable impact at scale? How to design and co-create interventions with all stakeholders involved, far beyond our own organisations or even industry?

This course 'Systemic design for tackling organisational and societal complexity' focuses on how to learn to think, act, design, and organise for systems change, and practice supporting processes, tools and technologies. During the course’s 8 weeks you will use the book ‘Design Journeys through Complex Systems’ written by two of the teachers of this course. The book presents a full systemic design methodology, methods and tools,, with brief theoretical background and frameworks. With additional theory, exercises and case examples, the course aims at adding both a practical and theoretical layer to the book, on the practice hand by showing how to put the tools into use in stakeholder contexts, and on the theory hand by going into some depth into design science from underlying references.

In this course, you’ll discover, build and practice a transdisciplinary, collaborative, co-creational and multi-stakeholder approach, as well as an intervention mindset.

OUTCOMES

  • Understand the value of systemic design for your practice
  • Recognise and address complex problem contexts in service-system design with the use of systems thinking, transition, and complexity lenses
  • Build a vision on the strategic value of systemic design and get familiar with its underlying principles and frameworks
  • Build confidence and increase your ability to plan and organise for system-level transformation
  • Learn how to discover, enrol, and mobilise stakeholders for co-creation and co-adaptation
  • Learn specific skills and tools you can bring to the table and build hands-on knowledge of systemic design through practising with the core tools
  • Last but not least, acquire a way of thinking that makes it possible to make sense of complexity

FORMAT

  • 8 course chapters, each building upon unique lessons with inspiring content; theory, videos, references, tools & methods, and more
  • 6 live, interactive classes/lectures on systemic design
  • All lessons are online, and live sessions will take place via Zoom (recordings will be made available)
  • The Systemic Design Toolkit with actionable tools and methods
  • Daily access to the course coach/mentor
  • Weekly office hours for practical issues
  • Free copy of the eBook ‘Design Journeys through Complex Systems’

       Schedule live sessions

  • Friday, April 18, 2025, 15:00 - 17:00 CEST
  • Friday, April 25, 2025, 15:00 - 17:00 CEST
  • Friday, May 9, 2025, 15:00 - 17:00 CEST
  • Friday, May 16, 2025, 15:00 - 17:00 CEST
  • Friday, May 23, 2025, 15:00 - 17:00 CEST
  • Friday, June 6, 2025, 15:00 - 17:00 CEST

STUDY POINTS

This course is worth 40 SDC study points. You will receive a certificate of completion.

KEYWORDS

Strategic design, futures thinking, systems thinking, transformation design, design thinking

COURSE SYLLABUS

Download (pdf)

360° SERIES

SDC_illustration_360_degrees_series_ability_multiple_magenta

ABILITies 01, 04, 05 & 10
LEVELS - EXPLORE & EXERCISE

360° SERIES

SDC_illustration_360_degrees_series_ability_multiple_magenta

ABILITies 01, 04, 05 & 10
LEVELS - EXPLORE & EXERCISE

START DATE
April 14, 2025
WORKLOAD
6 - 10 hours per week
PRICE
EUR 1000.00 *
Join
DURATION
8 weeks
LANGUAGE
English

If you are not yet a member of our online campus, this link will take you to the registration page. Membership is free but required to sign up for activities.

* US$ 1060,00. Prices are exclusive of VAT. Non-EU citizens are exempt from VAT on e-services which includes online courses, workshops and talks.

Meet the tutors

SDC_peter_jones_new

Peter Jones (Canada) is an associate professor at OCAD University, Toronto where he teaches in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation and Design for Health MDes programs. He leads innovation research in new economies, cultural sustainability, healthcare system design, and complex social system design.

Peter is a co-founder of the Systemic Design Association, and its RSD Symposia series, and the Flourishing Enterprise Institute, a research community of practice formed around sustainable business models and policy design. He has published 'Design Journeys through Complex Systems' (2022), Design for Care, and two other books.
SDC_kristel_van_ael_new

Kristel Van Ael (Belgium) is a business partner at Namahn, a humanity-centred design agency based in Brussels. She is also co-teacher in product-service-system design and lead teacher in systemic design at the University of Antwerp - Faculty of Design Sciences.

Kristel is the lead author of the Service Design Toolkit and Systemic Design Toolkit, and co-author of the book 'Design Journeys through Complex Systems’. She's hooked by systemic design and believes that designers can and should contribute to systemic change by understanding how everything is interrelated and how products can be designed and deployed as leverages towards a better future.
SDC_people_bassam_jabry

Bassam Jabry (UK) is a seasoned designer, systems thinker, and managing director of Chemistry, an independent strategic design consultancy, that helps organisations deliver human-centred solutions that drive positive change.

He is passionate about uncovering what makes people tick and using design as a strategic problem solving tool. He has had the privilege of consulting across a wide range of industries such as healthcare, hospitality, fintech and public sector. His favourite topics are circularity and humanising tech.
SDC_people_noortje_kuppers

Noortje Küppers (The Netherlands) is a service design consultant at Livework studio, where she focuses on bridging urban design and service design. Her key driver is to design for wellbeing and a sustainable future.

Noortje has a background in industrial design engineering and design for interaction at TU Delft and has demonstrable experience in the media industry, developing digital products. However, her strength and interest lie in design research, deep-diving into the lives of the people to be served.
SDC_people_majid_iqbal

Majid Iqbal (India) is advisor, teacher and founder of Structural, a stealth startup building a platform for designing contracts and agreements, based on an expansive library of building blocks.

Designing new thinking and tooling for solving extremely hard problems in industry and government, is what Majid more broadly works on. He has also had fun writing the book 'Thinking in Services'.
SDC_people_maja_grakalic

Maja Grakalić (Croatia) is an independent foresight strategist, service designer and PhD candidate at Central Saint Martins in London. Her work merges strategic foresight with the human-centred collaborative approach.

Her academic work explores omitted histories of speculative and critical design. She believes design fiction can help us challenge the status quo and build desirable futures together. She worked at the BBC and co-facilitated the BBC’s Future Casting workshops with the aim to teach ethical innovation through speculative futures thinking. As a teaching assistant at MA Material Futures and MA Narrative Environments, she mentors students about future-facing design approaches.
SDC_people_koen_peters

Koen Peters (Belgium) is the leading information architect at Namahn, a humanity-centred design agency based in Brussels. His work is mainly in web and intranet projects for governments and other large organisations.

In the past couple of years, he has added systemic design to his repertoire and is one of the co-authors of the Systemic Design Toolkit. At the moment, he is exploring possible connections and common grounds between the fields of information architecture and systemic design, such as how skills and practices from IA can help you better apply the systemic design method and vice versa.
SDC_people_inge_keizer

Inge Keizer (the Netherlands) is a service design leader specialised in strategic design, creative leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

She is a conceptual thinker, and an experienced design researcher. In 2015 she co-founded the Service Design Days and later the Service Design College; growing a global service design network and supporting organisations, teams and individuals in becoming human-and planet-centric, with a primary focus on designing valuable and relevant services based on qualitative insights and successful business models.
SDC_people_koen_peters

Koen Peters (Belgium) is the leading information architect at Namahn, a humanity-centred design agency based in Brussels. His work is mainly in web and intranet projects for governments and other large organisations.

In the past couple of years, he has added systemic design to his repertoire and is one of the co-authors of the Systemic Design Toolkit. At the moment, he is exploring possible connections and common grounds between the fields of information architecture and systemic design, such as how skills and practices from IA can help you better apply the systemic design method and vice versa.

Enroll as a team?

Get in touch with us for a quote!

Related activities

Business design for sustainable growth and innovation (self-paced)

Business design for sustainable growth and innovation (self-paced)

Strategic foresight for positive change (self-paced)

Strategic foresight for positive change (self-paced)

Design for public services
NEW EDITION!

Design for public services

Co-design for societal impact
NEW EDITION!

Co-design for societal impact
SDC_menu_open_20pt
SDC_button_back_20pt
SDC_button_home

STAY IN TOUCH

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date. We promise not to spam you!

© Service Design COLLEGE. All Rights Reserved.

Back to top Arrow