Mexican World Model: Rethinking Mexico’s future by understanding deep systemic challenges Mexican Model: a structured, systems-based framework that identifies how social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental forces interact to shape the country’s long-term trajectory. Mexico faces complex challenges that cannot be understood in isolation.Using a systemic methodology inspired by the “problematique” and Logosofia models, this project maps the interdependencies behind the country’s most pressing issues. Our goal is to create a shared, accessible understanding of Mexico’s structural dynamics one that can inform better decisions, policies, and future scenarios. Mexico has its own unique history, institutions, inequalities, and cultural structures. This work aims to build a model rooted in Mexican realities, one that speaks from within. Logosofia can be used by small research groups like ours to build models of problem systems (challenge maps) and solution formation (cross-impact maps). The Mexican world model follows this methodology and the interactive map demonstrates …
Emergent Fusion of Systemic Service Design
Recently Routledge published the edited volume titled Systemic Service Design, co-edited by me and Mari Suoheimo, Birger Sevaldson, and Sheng-Hung Lee. The 14 chapters cover a extreme range of emerging areas of study, many with fuzzy boundaries into applications that would never have been conceived as service, unless taking into account a bigger containing social system. As systemic design has expanded to develop and publish new service design studies, transition design research, socioecological, sociocultural, eco-territorial, and even spiritually-emergent design, the boundaries between these knowledge practices are blending and rhizomically connecting. From power relations to system mapping, criminality to care systems, from aging to urban planning – I would say these studies are not defining a new field, so much as mediating a conversation that enriches the design for complex service needs with a deeper understanding of the systems in which they have developed. Our schools were happy to support the …
The RSD Movement | Moment
OK, it’s been said—RSD is like a movement. Maybe it is such a moment now. After 15 years of continuous growth and with the creative vitality of hundreds of converging studies and proposals, we might consider that design-engaging-complexity has a social movement quality. OK, it’s been said—RSD is like a movement. Maybe it is such a moment now. After 15 years of continuous growth and with the creative vitality of hundreds of converging studies and proposals, we might consider that design-engaging-complexity has a social movement quality. Wait, I’m not saying systemic design is a movement— at least I see it as a dynamic interdiscipline and practice field. And we do hold the symposium to high levels of academic quality. Yet the creative expression of the methods and learning has spread everywhere with the unrestrained innovation of a movement, with the energy gained from a constant flow of new ideas and …
System Mapping – Practice & Research Cases from #RSD12
Spring 2024 has felt like an extraordinary warp in time and space. For me, setting up a second home in Mexico City’s Coyoacán colonia has been a major life change, as I fully dive into the new appointment as a Distinguished Professor at Tec de Monterrey. I have continued to lead the student final research at OCAD University’s Design for Health MDes, which is primarily via online advising. (Graduate presentations will be live at the Health Design Studio May 10). Summaries of the 2024 projects will be shared on Circulate Health soon. One of the emerging stars starting on the horizon this year has been the RSD Symposium’s post-conference series Mapping Mondays. Organized by Cheryl May with hosts including SDA board emmebrs Evan Barba, Ryan Murphy, Tom Maiorana, with facilitation by colleagues such as Inclusive Design grad Aakash Bhadra, the series has covered audacious territory, with 7 mapping seminars and …





