The board of the Systemic Design Association and our Publications team have published Volume 1 of Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal. Now available online. Executive editor Cheryl May and I have finished our build and test sufficiently to soft launch the journal and maybe get some early feedback.
- Harold Nelson, Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix
- Dulmini Perera, Tony Fry Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning
- Elena Porqueddu, Systemic Spatial Design: Enhancing the potential of spatial design disciplines to navigate adaptive cycles in cities
- Ryan Murphy, Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change
- Danielle Lake, David Marshall, Rozana Carducci, and Tracey Thurnes, The Power and Place Collaborative: Participatory Strategies for Scaling
- Peter Jones and Silvia Barbero, Editorial: Engaged Design Scholarship in Contexts
We have a small collection of five articles and an editorial, in online and PDF formats – which is not huge, but the very first set on a new platform does take some work.
We first announced the journal project at RSD10 and showed the first articles in press at RSD11, and its live as of this week. The following titles and authors are included:
Find the journal site page on the SDA platform, and the articles at the Volume 1 Table of Contents.
The journal was a system design from the beginning, and has taken us until the first month of the 2023 to finalize the content, design, editorial, and production. We now have the web and PDF formats, editorial processes, and (WordPress) production worked out, with DOI links. Soon we will be exploring author metrics as a next step, including for the current articles. We are actively seeking articles for Volume 2 (2023). Contexts is a continuous publishing process, and includes everything published within the year as the next volume. We are open to receiving articles from the RSD11 proceedings papers, that might be extended, revised and peer-reviewed. These can be submitted online via the familiar process of EasyChair conference submission.
Special thanks to the SDA Publications team (Silvia Barbero, Josina Vink, Amina Pereno, and Cheryl May) for support and guidance throughout the development period. Especial gratitude to Cheryl, the Managing Editor, who has led the development of the WordPress-based platform, which is a distinctive value for the association. Cheryl and Peter collaborated for months on the infrastructure, including style, design and formats. The logo design resulted from a collaboration between Peter and James Caldwell.
There is much to say about the purpose and potential of the new journal in advancing knowledge and practice in the systemic design field.
Designing communications for emergent scholarship
At the close of RSD10, October 2021, we announced plans for a society-published journal, initially named the Journal of the Systemic Design Association. A working group developed a publishing strategy and assessed the options for a publishing platform. We investigated options to determine the best overall “system” for our needs, with a decision to self-publish on the SDA website. This is a small operation—we formed a publishing team as a small editorial board with several experienced colleagues. The journal platform was built within the SDA WordPress website as part of a comprehensive publishing concept. The startup goal was to publish a small number of articles, with high quality and reflecting a variety of issues and ideas. During the curation and review process, hundreds of decisions and trade-offs were necessary for the inaugural collection, resulting in a longer period to launch than hoped. Contexts —The Systemic Design Journal is the resulting platform for systemic design studies. The journal will publish articles continuously, in annual volumes (not issues), allowing collections to expand or adapt as necessary.
Systemic design as a field will benefit from a new journal where discourses raised within research and advanced practice communities can exchange and debate over long periods of time. Systemic design has developed as an expansive learning ecosystem of practices and collaborative research, to address complex concerns that cross disciplines, knowledge, and as often mapped, types and levels of “systems.” Following the themes and studies represented by the RSD symposia as referents, a decade of field development has contributed to many significant design contexts not covered well in other sources: collaborative design for landscape and territorial ecologies, complex interfaces and distributed networks, urban and societal ecologies, expressive architectures with entailment of humans and nature, business models and systems for organizational strategy, complex health practices and healthcare systems, theories of systemics, culture, and change, design labs for public value and engagement, policy design, and new methodologies for mapping, dialogue, facilitated systems practices, and toolkits. Perhaps the only common touchpoint among these areas is that of transdisciplinary design for systemic complexity.
One of the weaknesses of a symposium model of scholarship is that the evolution of work presented in conference is not traceable in impact on future discourse, not only with referring articles and case studies, but implementation in practice. Contexts aims to channel the development of systemic innovation and continuing scholarship into timely, validated, well-communicated dialogues. Read more at Contexts Editorial
