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Conference
DSGN - DIM

“Systemic Citizens: Equity, Power, and Relational Autonomy”

Citizen-led design approaches enable spaces for communities to explore and negotiate their priorities into actionable strategies. Digital technologies have played a paramount role in encouraging them to have a stronger voice in public services, local democracy and their wellbeing. However, these approaches might exacerbate barriers to equity and just participation. Moreover, in some domains (e.g., education, healthcare or urban planning), those stakeholders that "hold the power" are reluctant to partake in genuine participatory approaches. Given this situation, systemic design can transform citizen engagement practices to strengthen the connectedness among citizens and create awareness of the relational attributes of societal issues. This systemic lens could then help in the transition towards responsible communities that recognise themselves as part of the wider (problematic) system, be able to identify leverage points to face existing societal complex crises. This track aims to explore and reflect on the following questions: How to enable citizens to recognise themselves as interrelated actors that have an impact on collective wellbeing and flourishing? How can collective agency and relational autonomy be creatively and fairly embedded in individual decisions? How could systemic design be used to empower vulnerable groups to map out their future wellbeing in their local community? How can systemic inequalities become design principles to break perpetuated harming structures? How to explore efficient systemic design strategies to understand the complexity of social systems in an interdisciplinary research environment? How do we nurture societies to learn and strengthen bonds after negative consequences of a ‘failure’ community initiative?
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2024 DRS Cecilia Landa-Avila Shichao Zhao Sine Celik Pushpi Bagchi Nicolai Brodersen Hansen

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DSGN - DIM

“The Sciences of the Democracies”

The field of democracy studies—which includes democratic theory, democratization, and many traditional inquiries in political theory/science—is far more short-sighted than it needs to be or even should be. Democracy’s researchers, for all their insights, continue to study only fragments of democracy in isolation from each other. TheSciences of the Democracies proposes a means to study democracy more holistically. It begins by describing five sources of knowledge that can be tapped by researchers to better understand democracy & cognate terms—or, hereafter, “the democracies”. These sources are (1) individual people, (2) groups of people, (3) non-textual media, (4) texts, and (5) non-humans. This book details how pursuing the inclusion of these five sources across temporal, spatial, cultural, linguistic, and species contexts – or what we term the“ethno-quantic domain” – leads to the discovery of democratic practices and institutions hitherto unknown or unfamiliar to the conventional “Western” mind. It also promises to generate a new class of democratic theorist (the “Fourth Theorist”) and the potential for generating better-founded—that is, less arbitrary and more inclusive—democratic theories. The book takes pause to consider the philosophical, institutional, educational, and methodological difficulties of the scientific understandings and undertakings it proposes. The authors’ ambition is to offer a touchstone text for government/public officials; citizens, residents and visitors; researchers and practitioners; and philanthropists(big and small) who are participating in what is an already burgeoning global discussion on how to study and practice democracy equitably and differently.
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University College London Press (Chicago University Press in North America) Erica Dorn

Conference
DSGN - DIM

“Towards Relational Design Practices: De-centering design through lessons from community organizing”

Increasingly, designers seek to design in ways that more deeply involve those who are impacted by the very systems that design aims to repair, improve, or transform. Yet, despite its good intentions, the legacies of design practice often uphold entrenched systems of oppression. Fundamental components of systems change tend to be absent from most design training and practice: including the elements of power, relationships, and ownership in motivating and sustaining equitable change. Community organisers know what designers may not—that change happens through networks of relationships in a process of collective power building. This paper discusses systemic design’s current positionality and establishes an understanding of community organising principles, and finally translates several key principles for designers of systems-level change. It calls for designers to learn from principles and practices of community organising to adopt relational approaches that can sustain the promise that systemic design envisions and enables.
Details

182 pages 2022 Systemic Design Association Erica Dorn Tara Dickman