Systemic Design Labs: RE:GENERATE Alpine-Urban Circularity

Abstract

Systemic design (SD) optimizes an entire system as a whole, rather than its parts in isolation. SD is iterative, recursive and circular, requires creative, curious, informed and critical systems thinking and doing, yielding radical resource efficiency. It systems mapping, design thinking, footprint assessment, network analysis, test planning, prototyping, fabrication, social experiments.

Objective

The teaching purpose of Systemic Design Labs (SDL) is to better tackle the complexity of today’s sustainability challenges. Often, in current education we learn to disassemble design challenges into their bits and parts for individual optimization. While being useful for developing topical expertise, this reductionism to parts with less emphasis on their interaction does not match with the growing complexity of today’s challenges. In contrast, systemic design approaches a task from a holistic perspective, zooming out of a system to reveal its structure and connections between its parts – to zoom in on the hub of influence that matters most. The objectives of the course are to introduce students to Systemic Design as theory, methodology and practice. This includes whole systems thinking, circularity, cross-scale design, Gigamapping, and many more. The course stimulates overall reflective eco-social thinking in design, planning and engineering disciplines.

Content

Design Challenge: How to re-design alpine-urban circularity? How to revive mountain livelihoods, focusing on local identity, resilient landscapes and a regenerative economy? What is a regenerative relation between the alpine and the urban? Covid has accelerated and intensified a traditionally challenging relation of the alpine (mountain livelihoods) and the urban. Both depend on each other, but there are as well many unsustainable elements in this relation, especially for the alpine. The specific design challenge is to identify and layout a holistic, partly quantified and visualized systems strategy for building a resilient community economy in relation to the actual Covid driven pressure factors in the relation of the alpine with the urban. We build upon former ETH SDL students who developed a systems maps for the community of Ostana, Italy, that embraces local identity, revitalizes cultural and landscape biodiversity, and creates alpine-urban circularity. This course will extend this systems map to more clearly understand the urban component, the source market, and design in new opportunities of urban-alpine regeneration, for circularity, for new ways of tourism, of mobility, in a creative economy. Recap of former SDL courses: In Ostana, a clear connection is between the local identity (culture, traditions, visions) which is formed by Occitan culture (food, music, dance, language), traditional stone building architecture which is under pressure to carefully evolve with new needs for carbon-neutral and net-positive buildings, and the Monte Viso landscape. How does a re-growing economy that should be regenerative and circular by design, correlate with innovation in architecture, with population growth and associated challenges in mobility, waste systems and supplies, with growing tourism, new agro-forestry practices like industrial hemp and Paulownia, while impacts of climate change are clearly visible? How does the community design a vision that is based on cooperation on different governance scales, balancing local identity and urgently needed international innovation? Deliverables & output: This SDL course RE:GENERATE builds upon related work from former courses hosted and lead by the MonViso Institute (i.e. on social innovation, mobility, architecture and local identity, tourism, circular economy, land use change) to develop and design foundations for an extension of the existing, visualized and partly quantified systems map, that will support ongoing and future innovation processes in this community. The focus now is on the urban integration into new, regenerative business models of the alpine, and in regenerative relation between both as a model for the future. This course will thus develop an extended graphical systems map from the alpine to the urban, backed up by a technical report, and connected with the existing systems maps of Ostana and the surrounding valley.

Resources