70 504 Systems Oriented Design: “Design for Very Complex System“ (Autumn 2025)

This is a course for master students in their 3. semester, and it is open to design, architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture students. Furthermore, we welcome guest and exchange students from a variety of related fields. Design students can only take this in their third master semester.

The course offers learn to design with complexity and create impactful interventions – using Systems Oriented Design (SOD)

Are you ready to tackle complex challenges with a design-driven approach? Our Systems Oriented Design (SOD) master's course empowers students to rapidly grasp complex systems, define their boundaries, and identify key intervention points.

Through SOD, you'll gain practical tools to visualize complexity, facilitate meaningful discussions, and support decision-making processes. The methodology is applicable across various fields, including:

• Sustainable product, interaction and service design
• Architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture
• Regional planning, policy design and societal transitions

By integrating a regional perspective with societal needs, this course challenges you to connect place-based interests and social dynamics by combining systemic thinking and design, applying a cross-scalar and transdisciplinary approach.

Who Should Join?

If you are a curious creator who enjoys exploring broad contexts, uncovering meaningful insights, and designing for systemic impact, this course is for you. If you are studying architecture, urbanism or landscape architecture this is a possibility to work together with and learn more about how design approach a project.

For students who have taken "Introduction to SOD" in their third year at AHO (Design), this course offers a deeper dive into SOD, providing opportunities to adapt your systemic thinking and design skills across various contexts.

Throughout the course, we will collaborate with domain experts and industry stakeholders, who will serve as "context navigators"-providing valuable insights and guidance to student teams.

Want to learn more? Explore the Projects/Master Projects section on the SOD website. www.systemsorienteddesign.net

Step onto the dance floor of systems thinking and design doing-where creativity meets complexity. Join us this fall and become part of the next generation of systemic architects and designers!

Knowledge: Students will gain knowledge in:

• Systems Theories
• Sustainability Science & Sustainable Design Principles
• Concepts of cause and effect within systems
• Position, practices and tools in SOD, and how SOD relates to Systemic Design
• Applications of SOD within professional contexts
• Compiling Portfolios of Interventions
• Participation and Stakeholder Engagement theory

Skills: Students will develop their skills in the following competence areas to:

• Systemic Competence: Learn to approach problems as interconnected systems, using techniques like Gigamapping and Rich Design Spaces for better solution development.
• Visualisation and Communication: Develop skills to clarify and communicate complex system connections and invisible problems through visualisation, representation and narration.
• Multi-perspective Insight: Gain the ability to view problems from varied perspectives and scales for comprehensive understanding.
• Iterative Development: Practice iterative development methods to prioritize and understand problem situations and create effective interventions.
• Anticipatory Competence: Learn to explore future possibilities and risks, evaluating the impact and feasibility of design interventions.
• Normative Competence: Critically evaluating sources and address norms, sustainability principles, and values to navigate tensions and uncertainty.
• Strategic Competence: Develop strategic interventions across scales, aligned with sustainability principles and stakeholder goals.
• Codesign Competence: Enhance transdisciplinary collaboration by empathizing with stakeholders to foster joint learning and inspire the exploration of alternative futures.
• Collaborative Facilitation: Engage stakeholders through process design to drive ideation and decision-making, refining your role as a design professional within society.

General competence:

• Students will be able to utilise SOD praxeology and techniques to gain rapid learnings from various sources, co-create backdrops for stakeholders to hold enhanced conversations for collective sense-making and decision making
• Students will be empowered to apply SOD to typical problematiques they face in their chosen profession, to make the invisible become visible and to inspire imagination, that a sustainable and thriving world is possible.
• Understanding of the general potentiality of working with holistic perspectives, that combine ethics and sustainability as well as cultural, organizational, economic and technical considerations using SOD.
• General understanding on how SOD can play a decisive role in managing complexity in future societal developments across sectors and organisations – including private sector, third sector, public sector and others.
• Genral competency on the role of the systems-oriented designer as a workshop facilitator and orchestrator of participatory processes

The course is divided into two main modules, where students will work collaboratively in teams of 3-4. Additionally, there will be an individual task between the two modules, which includes online participation in the Relating Systems and Design Symposium (RSD14). Below is an overview of the three key parts of the course:

1. Oslo Watershed as a System

In the first seven weeks, students will be reintroduced to Systems Oriented Design (SOD) and Sustainability Principles while exploring Oslo's water system. The focus will be on getting an overview narrative of the problematique, and identifying opportunities for innovation and design interventions. This, to promote sustainability, resilience, and nature-friendly resolutions, with a long-term goal of regenerating the Oslo fjord as a living ecosystem.

1. Bodø as an Age-Friendly and Cross-Generational City-System

This module, lasting eight weeks, will address the city of Bod√∏'s ambitious development plans and its evolving demographics, particularly its growing elderly population. Students will engage in designing systemic resolutions that foster an age-friendly and intergenerational urban environment.

1. Why SOD & the Relating Systems and Design Symposium (RSD14)

During a two-week interim period, students will complete an individual reflection task titled "Why SOD" while participating in the online portion of RSD14. This will involve creating sketch notes based on paper presentations at the symposium.

The various components of the course will be supported through lectures, assignments, tutoring sessions, and reflective conversations.

Communications during the course will be handled through weekly updates supported by Teams and Miro.

Deliveries

For each module the group deliveries will include:

• Communcation Gigamaps
• Workshops
• Future Landscapes and scenarios
• Intervention portfolios
• Presentation & exhibition

Individual deliveries will include:

• Reflection task
• Visual sketch notes

Milestones & deliveries

Separte student deliveries will follow the three course modules mentioned above. During each course module, all student teams will need to present their work-in-progress in three-four milestone events, and an end module presentation.

Attendance

This is an intensive course and it demands consistent and hard work from the participants. Although the projects are often developed in groups, individual deliverables will also be required during the projects.