70 504 Systems Oriented Design: Catalyzing Desirable Transformations (Autumn 2026)

Course responsible: Jonathan Romm

About the Systems Oriented Design course

In this course you will learn to analyse complex situations, identify key opportunities, and design portfolios of interventions across scales, from products and services to structures, landscapes and policy, using Systems Oriented Design (SOD).

Are you ready to engage with the challenges that define our era? Whether you are a designer, architect, landscape architect or urban planner Systems Oriented Design (SOD) give you the tools to work across disciplines, understand the interconnected bigger picture and design key interventions across scales.

Through SOD, you'll gain practical tools to visualize complexity, facilitate meaningful conversations about desired futures, and support decision making processes that responds to interconnected problems and drives transformation. The course is grounded in real projects and real participants, with domain experts and practioners joining you as collaborators and ‘context navigators’ throughout the semester.

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

This course connects place-based local interests and social needs by merging systems thinking and design practice, with a focus on change-making at different scales through a mix of disciplinary approaches.

Discipline specific practice within a shared framework

Your disciplinary craft is not set aside in this course; rather, it is utilized and integrated. All interdisciplinary teams share the same systems-oriented processes and tools (such as gigamapping, stakeholder engagement, futures exploration, and strategic synthesis), but the intervention portfolio produced by each team is shaped by its disciplinary composition. Designers develop services and interaction concepts; architects contribute structural and built system proposals; landscape architects introduce ecological and topographical interventions; and urban designers bring spatial planning and policy dimensions. At the same time, the interdisciplinary nature of each mixed team may inspire, and in some cases challenge, each other's disciplines, adding novelty and depth to the portfolio.

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 an opportunity to work together and learn more about how design approaches 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 enhance 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 about SOD? 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 designers, architects and planners!

Knowledge: Students will gain knowledge in:

• Interconnectedness of complex systems: Systems thinking theories with a focus on Critictal Systems Thinking and how social, technical economic and environmental factors interact.
• Situational analysis: Methods for identifying interconnected challenges, opportunities, stakeholders and leverage points within a complex context.
• Intervention portfolio design: Principles for developing interconnected, cross scale portfolios of interventions grounded in sustainability science.
• Collaboration and team dynamics: Adaptive teamwork, how to work across disciplines, cultures and positionalities.
• Participation and codesign processes: Theories and practices of stakeholder engagement for soliciting knowledge and expertise as well as making sense and design together.
• Futures and anticipation: Concepts and frameworks for exploring evaluating and anticipating future risks and possibilities including Horizon Scanning and “Future Landscape” approaches.
• Communication and visual literacy: Methods for visual representation, storytelling and narration for communicating complex systems.

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

• Systemic and multi-perspective insight: Approach complex problems as interconnected systems; use tools such as Gigamapping and Rich Design Spaces for rapid learning and sensemaking. View problems from multiple perspectives and scales to generate comprehensive understanding.
• Situational analysis and sensemaking: Identify key challenges and leverage points within a context; synthesise information from diverse sources to define meaningful problem framings.
• Strategic and iterative design: Develop interconnected cross-scale intervention portfolios aligned with sustainability principles and stakeholder objectives; practise iterative development to prioritise and test design directions.
• Anticipatory and normative skills: Explore future possibilities through scenario development and Horizon Scanning; critically evaluate sources; navigate value tensions and uncertainty; assess the feasibility, impact, and risks of proposed interventions.
• Participatory processes & co-design facilitation: Plan and facilitate participatory stakeholder engagement processes to co-create understanding of current situations, explore alternative futures, validate intervention proposals, and support collective decision-making.
• Collaboration and interpersonal skills: Convene and facilitate group work; navigate intercultural dynamics, plurality of perspectives, and questions of positionality; demonstrate empathy and self-awareness in team settings.
• Visual communication and storytelling: Clarify and communicate complex system relationships, including invisible patterns and uncertainty, through visualisation, representation, narrative, and interaction with different media.

General competence:

• Students will be able to utilise SOD praxeology and techniques to gain rapid learnings from varied 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 inspire imagination, that a sustainable and thriving world is achievable.
• Students will develop an understanding of howholistic, cross disciplinaryperspectives, that combine ethics and sustainability as well as cultural, organizational, economic and technical considerations can inform consequential decisions.
• Students will dunderstand the potential role of systems oriented design in managing complexity in future societal developments across sectors and organisations – including private sector, third sector, public sector and others.
• Students will develop competence on the role of the systems-oriented designer as a facilitator and orchestrator of participatory processes, capable of working across professional and disciplinary boundaries

Practical organization and work methods

The course is divided into three main modules. Students will work individually during the first module and collaboratively in mixed disciplinary teams of 3-4 in the second. In some cases, students may choose to (or be asked to) work individually throughout the course by consulting with the course responsible. There is also an individual interim task during module 2. Below is a summary of the three key parts of the course:

Module 1: Culture-based Solutions at Losæter Park

The first module, (four weeks), introduces the mindset and tools of Systems Oriented Design though a real project context. Losæter is a museum without walls placed near the Oslo fjord at the neighbourhood of Bjørvika. Losæter is a modern park with edible plants and a vibrant community. Working individually, students join as co-researchers into the Culture Based Solutions project (CbS), which explores utilisation of cultural and traditional land-care practices for sustainable adaptation in areas under pressure. You will engage directly with actors from the CbS project exploring how cultural practices can contribute to more enduring and systemic responses to socio-ecological challenges in Olso.

Module 2: Oslo Watershed as a System

During the final eleven-weeks, students will be working in mixed teams of 3-5 students exploring Oslo Fjord’s watershed. The Oslo fjord is under immense pressure due to both urban as well as rural stressors across its the water ways flowing into it. The focus will be on getting an overview of the problematiques involved, identifying opportunities for innovation across scales, developing future narratives, and designing interventions that promote sustainability, resilience, and ecological regeneration. Teams will engage with stakeholders from the watershed system, and collaborate with students from the Landscape architecture studio “60 526 Commons: Parks and Park Systems” led by Professor Karin Helms, to produce intervention portfolios that reflect both a systemic and individual disciplinary perspective.

Module 3: Interim week - starting the Why SOD reflection task & the Relating Systems and Design Symposium (RSD)

During a one-week interim period, students start an individual reflection task titled "Why SOD" while participating in the online part of the annual RSD Symposium. This involves creating sketchnotes from symposium presentations and situating your own developing perspective within broader debates in systemic design. The “Why SOD” task will be finalised individually in three main uterations, parallel with the team deliveries of Module 2.

The various components of the course will be supported through lectures, assignments, tutoring sessions, and reflective conversations in the classroom and with invited external contributors during milestone sessions. Course communications will be handled through weekly updates supported by Teams and Miro.

Deliveries

Module 1 deliveries:

• Explorative gigamap with annotated interest points
• A system layer map of Losæter
• Losæter future transition vision
• Identified systemic levers illustrated with intervention sketches (sketches should reflect your disciplinary lens)

Module 1 will not be included in the formal course assessment.

Module 2 deliveries:

• Olso watershed Communcation Gigamaps
• Boundary Object/s
• Desirable future trajectories and scenarios
• Illustrated intervention portfolios (cross scale), scope and depth of disciplinary components determined by team composition
• Project explainer blog post with a presentation video
• Presentation & exhibition

The intervention portfolio is the primary vehicle for discipline-specific practice. The shared backbone of the Gigamap, boundary object(s), and futures scenarios, is produced collectively by every team. This module will be assessed as a team delivery.

Module 3: Interim week & individual deliveries:

• “Why SOD” reflection note
• 6 sketchnotes

This module will be assessed as an individual delivery.

Separate 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.

All milestone deliveries/presentations from throughout the course must be completed in order to be assessed.