For the first time we bring together everybody in Norway interested in Systems Oriented Design, or other forms of systemic design. People from abroad are welcome too.

We establish the Norwegian branch of the Systemic Design Association through a gathering where we exchange experiences, build connections and engage in systemic serious play.

Bring a snack and / or a bottle for a joint food factory activity.

Detailed program to come. We are working to build community related to systemic design and continue our learning.

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Congratulations to Maria Våge Traasdal for her project Aligning Public Services winning the AHO AWARD January 2020 for her project Aligning Public Services.

Master project autumn 2019 SOD AHO

The public sector is complex and multifaceted. Not only is the public sector complex in itself, they are also responsible for managing a complex society. When it comes to growing up, for example, many different policy areas meet.

Families are also complex. A family life is influenced by a number of factors, which differ in each family. For example, this is about how living conditions, health status, social belonging and care situation are. Some families are more vulnerable than others, and this often results in the involvement of public assistance.

Read more about this project here (report in Norwegian)

The Call for Abstracts for the RSD9 are now out.

After eight very successful Relating Systems thinking and Design (RSD) conferences we are travelling the first time to Asia.

The conference will take place in Ahmedabad at the Indian Institute of Design, 13^th to 15^th October 2020

Read more about NID 

If you are not familiar with the RSD conferences you can check out the proceedings from former conferences to see films of keynotes and to read working papers and presentations.

Please notice that we are asking for contributions form academic research as well as from systemic design practice

The RSD conferences offer a low entry threshold to share your thoughts on how we might align and meld systems thinking with design. We ask for abstracts which are peer reviewed. Later we ask for working papers and at a third stage we offer the opportunity for people to develop full papers to be published in academic design research journals most notable Formakademisk and She Ji. You will find the proceedings as well as the special issues and books published as an output from RSD at www.systemic-design.net

The RSD conferences are providing an open and friendly atmosphere yet with high level presentations and sharp discussions.

We also have a membership organisation, the Systemic design Association (SDA) that has a democratic elected board. The purpose of the SDA is to help organising the RSD conferences with the local hosts and to maintain the social network.

Read more details about the call 

We hope to see you in India!

Palak Dudani

Master thesis AHO 2020

The challenges of our time are increasingly complex, housing being one of them. While housing is a basic need closely intertwined with our well-being, it also sits at the centre of strong economic, political and cultural forces. In the homeowner nation of Norway where the housing system was set up to promote homeownership, the meaning of ownership itself has seen a dramatic shift since the 80s. What was initially conceived as a tool to create stability and welfare, housing now has increasingly come to mean profit and wealth-building. While homeowners are still able to create welfare for themselves, less and less people are able to become owners now.  The obvious solution then is to push more people towards ownership, but how sustainable is that? This is a system that has made owning a home extremely expensive, but still is trying to create ‘affordable’ housing – and that is the heart of the problem. Housing can not be expensive enough to be profitable and cheap enough to be affordable at the same time.

This is an exploratory project which reframes the problem of housing and reimagines the system in the near-future – one where the focus of our housing system has moved away from supporting wealth-building to supporting long-term well-being. I propose a conceptual housing model set within a larger public social infrastructure which supports the new values in form of self-governance, participatory budgeting and informal service exchange. Using the three horizons model as a framework, I position this near-future speculative model within the third horizon, representing a favourable direction going forward. As the seeds for the near-future already exist in the present day/first horizon, this project hopes to inspire critical reflection on the fundamental nature of our housing system and imagine hopeful alternative near-futures - ones where everyone can be taken care of.