Systemic design

Systemic design is an "interdiscipline" that integrates systems thinking and design practices. It is a pluralistic field, with several "dialects" including systems-oriented design. Influences have included critical systems thinking and second-order cybernetics. In 2021, the Uk Design Council began advocating for a systemic design approach and embedded it in a revision of their double diamond model. Systemic design's discourse has been developed through Relating Systems Thinking and Design - a series of symposia that has run annually since 2012. Systems thinking in design has a long history with origins in the design methods movement during the 1960s and 1970s, such as the idea of wicked problems developed by Horst Rittel. The theories about complexity help the management of an entire system and the suggested design approaches help the planning of different divergent elements. The complexity theories evolved on the basis that living systems continually draw upon external sources of energy and maintain a stable state of low entropy, on the basis of the General Systems Theory by Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968). Some of the next rationales applied those theories also on artificial systems: complexity models of living systems address also productive models with their organizations and management, where the relationships between parts are more important than the parts themselves. Treating productive organizations as complex adaptive systems allows a new management model to emerge in economical, social and environmental benefits (Pisek and Wilson, 2001 ). In that field, Cluster Theory (Porter, 1990 ) evolved in more environmentally sensitive theories, like Industrial Ecology (Frosh and Gallopoulos, 1989 ) and Industrial Symbiosis (Chertow, 2000). In 1994, Gunter Pauli and Heitor Gurgulino de Souza founded the research institute Zero Emission Research and Initiatives (ZERI), starting from the idea that progress should embed respect for the environment and natural techniques that will allow production processes to be part of the ecosystem.