Introduction

The workshop explores how design thinking and systems thinking can be brought together in transdisciplinary settings to enable students to grow beyond what is expected of them in academia and to make the contribution to society that they long to do. The deployment of such an approach also aims to bolster the problem-solving capacity of the community in which students’ learning takes place. In bringing design and systems thinking together, students learn not only to analyse the complexities and interconnections of system they are studying, but also to act within the system given these complexities. The iterative approach in design thinking also allows actors’ perspectives to be incorporated into problem framing and the co-design of prototypes. For transdisciplinary learning approaches, this enables students to empathize and value different ways of knowing through concrete actions rather than intention only.

Relating systems thinking and design is not a new idea, as the label “systemic design” has been adopted by a growing number of scholars and practitioners. Starting from Buchanan’s (1992) “design thinking for wicked problems”, to Norman and Stapper’s (2015) “DesignX” and the development of the Systemic Design Toolkit – identification of conceptual links has led to concrete tools and methods for realizing this integration. While acknowledging and incorporating the inputs of actors and stakeholders has been implicitly important to many systemic design approaches, references to transdisciplinary mindsets, processes and practices have not been made explicit nor have they been fully explored.

This is the chasm we aim to cross in developing a textbook for complex problem-solving integrating systems thinking, design thinking and transdisciplinary approaches. The context of our work is to guide Master’s students with engineering and policy backgrounds to work through wicked problems within complex socio-technical systems (i.e., energy, transportation and ICT). The approach builds on both innovative curriculum that was developed at TU Delft for the Master’s programme on Complex Systems Engineering and Management and for the Bachelor’s programme at ETH Zurich on Environmental System Science (Pohl et. al 2020). However, the new developments take previous learnings and implements them for complex, socio-technical systems and taking into account both policy and engineering perspectives.

Goal of workshop

The aim of the workshop is to share an integrated systems and design thinking methodology that could be adapted for a variety of transdisciplinary contexts. Together with a community practitioner working at the interface of the university and communities, we share lessons learned about applying this approach. We look forward to receiving feedback from participants who will themselves experience specific methods and tools from an upcoming book for integrating systems and design thinking. As an outcome of the workshop, we hope to initiate a network of people who are interested in future collaborations in further developing design, systems thinking and TD approaches for education.

Target group

Our target audience are for all who are interested or curious about incorporating systemic design approaches in their educational activities, as well as practitioners who would like to provide insights into how to improve these activities with the communities in mind.

We would like to broaden our point of view by inviting other educators and practitioners through three specific explorations:

- How might an integrated systems and design approach enable students to develop skills for joint problem framing?

- How might this approach be used to help students develop knowledge for implementation of transformative solutions?

- How might this approach help students to consider the unintended consequences of designed actions?

The proposed format of the workshop:

15 min Introduction to Integrated Systems and Design Thinking

10 min Educational context from a community practitioner's perspective

50 min Exercises on joint problem framing and exploring unintended consequences. Then, debrief of exercises: What are your insights about these exercises and their intended purpose?

15 min Next steps for collaboration and feedback

Key readings:

Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511637

Pohl, C., Pearce, B., Mader, M., Senn, L., & Krütli, P. (2020). Integrating systems and design thinking in transdisciplinary case studies. GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 29(4), 258–266. https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.29.4.11