Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems

Hybridizing Science, Design, and Transformative Praxis

This Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems (DRRS) programme builds on the qualities of top-notch basic and applied research at ETH in the service of science, society, industry, politics – and the animist world. How to plan, design, and engineer emerging, unpredictable, adaptive systems in the direction of regeneration? We learn to navigate through questions and open up the “solutionieering” paradigm to iterating continuous interventions. We deepen our scientific understanding, such as in ecosystem functions, biogeophysical cycles, and social-ecological resilience. We refresh and activate a tangible methods portfolio, such as life cycle analysis, social network analysis, participatory modelling, serious gaming, AI prompting and transdisciplinary real-world design. We practice keeping science light enough by shifting from control and prediction to participating in life’s complexity.

Exciting real-world field design trips take participants to partner Living Systems Labs: the MonViso Institute (Ostana, Italy), Mallorca (Spain), Hemsedal (Norway), Annecy (France), and Venice (Italy). In these places, we embody complex systems and their circularities from governance scales of green chemistry to material supply chains, to products, buildings, communities and cities with their services, to landscapes, bio-regions, and transnational cooperation. This offers a relational understanding of communities, economies and regions undergoing sustainability transitions across different contexts, cultures, climates, and geographies.

This MAS builds bridges between different ways of knowing and reasoning, between disciplines, and between science, design, and praxis. Participants are nudged to formulate a dynamic set of guiding questions, their QUEST, combining their specific learning interests with a place-specific embedding and practical transformative intervention space as a learning compass, a spine to relate and arrange the various programme elements to. This QUEST is prolonged from its initialization to the executive progamme and builds the base for the final Master design thesis project.

While participants are being exposed to various scales of non-linear living systems, the programme builds awareness within ETH as an organization for regenerative research and teaching, nudging circularities across all departments, and manifesting research to the specifics of places. Topics such as transformative leadership, critical systems thinking, post-activism and inner development occupy neuralgic points in promoting dynamics and blending teaching across departments, unlocking the potential for decolonizing research and higher education.

The DRRS learning system

The DRRS learning programme contains four free-of-cost Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as the entry funnel and precondition to the executive study programme: Three Certificates of Advanced Studies (CAS) entitled “Worldviews: From Sustainability to Regeneration”, “Beyond Systems Thinking”, and “Systemic Design” together with a Master design thesis project, the QUEST,  lead to the Master of Advanced Studies ETH in Regenerative Systems.

The DRRS learning system, in its tree metaphor, is a self-regenerative system that attracts thousands of learners from more than 100 nations to the MOOCs, where a fraction may enter the tree’s root system and take the executive programme. Alumni may then contribute some of their experience to the ever-updated MOOC series.  It all rests on a vibrant learning community with already more than 2000 participants, a virtual place to co-create the Now and the Next, to deep dive into themes that a MOOC may trigger, to engage and create further learning opportunities.

Innovative didactics: A hybrid course design guided by the QUEST

The programme’s innovative experiential didactics embrace a learning journey that starts with studying the foundational theory and language of regenerative systems by taking the cost-free and self-paced MOOC series as the basis. Supported by the virtual DRRS community on Mighty Networks with live speaking events, peer-learning, and discussion forums, curious and highly interested MOOC alumni may apply with their QUESTs for the executive study programme and the related elective courses.

With the shared theory and language base built by the MOOCs, the hybrid course structure at the CAS and MAS level allows to focus on live conversations with experts from various fields of knowledge, one-on-one mentoring, peer learning, and real-world practice field design experiences at the partnering Living Systems Labs.

By asking questions, such as “how to engineer within living systems?”, participants’ QUESTs relate the learning content to their individual interests, and their own bioregional place specificity, and thus form a growing body of bioregionally relevant research and transformative practice.

Outdoor experiential didactics foster holistic learning with hands, heads and hearts, and build a key skill of the future: organic emergence, the inner capacity and trust to deal with uncertain situations and emergent futures. Embodied cognition, flow experiences, and experiencing the safe return from beyond the comfort zone, are examples of the proven didactic portfolio of the DRRS programme.

Navigating challenges with scientific, designerly and embodied methods and practices

We are finding ourselves in times of deep, nested, and accelerating ecological, social, cultural, political, economic, and also personal “meta”crises. This dynamic situation is highly complex, uncertain, unpredictable, and even chaotic. Yet within chaos is creativity, and creativity leads to chances for renewal. Scientific research is the solid base for an informed discourse across cultures, such as the Planetary Boundaries framework.

In dealing with complex systems, we also need the relational capacity to connect not only beyond scientific disciplinary knowledge but with different ways of knowing and reasoning, between scientific worldviews and warm data, across scales of governance, and with communities of practice.

Participants learn to navigate challenges within different scientific and designerly methods and practices, which we call systemic design. They get access to quantitative methods and understand their relational value with qualitative methods, AI, embodiment, and personal development.

An essential element throughout the DRRS learning journey is the Quest. The Quest is a concept that guides us on our individual learning journey in complexity. We can “pack” our learnings and discoveries alongside the “spine” or pathway of the Quest. The Quest is a didactic tool for self-reflection and personal development. It helps us to meta-design. Quest offers participants literally a compass – a navigation tool to deal with complexity and uncertainty across system types and governance scales, to get equipped for designerly interventions for resilience and regeneration.

Learning to unlearn, to be able to relearn 

Unlearning is the process of abandoning or giving up knowledge, values, or behaviour, either unconsciously or deliberately. We all were trained in a specific field and way. We gathered experience over time. We are all experts. The more we know, the more we know what we don’t know. This makes us humble.

Knowledge systems evolve quickly. What we were taught once may not be the state of knowledge today. The idea of science is that we know more tomorrow than we do today. Other types of knowledge exist that we may have had no access to. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing knowledge distribution.

Throughout the programme participants learn to unlearn, to be able to relearn. It is a process of personal growth. This opening and cross-wiring support participants› personal Quest – their interest, motivation, and mission to be part of a network of creative weavers for bio-regional regeneration.

Blended learning

The programme blends the MOOC series with the hybrid CAS courses and the final MAS module to a self-regenerating learning system. CAS alumni enrich the MOOC courses with their learnings. A virtual community enhances learning through student and teacher engagement, knowledge retention, and professional networking. Updated MOOC/CAS video content is made accessible via the community bridge to other ETH courses involving further teachers.

The first iteration of CAS#1 Sustainability to Regeneration comprised 16 people of 11 nationalities. The professional spectrum ranged from architects and service designers to engineers in air traffic control, computer scientists from the big tech sector, FinTech experts, to permaculture designers.

The programme’s early impact on professional career paths and personal lives is remarkable. One participant has found access to related consecutive study courses at ETH via the virtual content of the CAS, for which she now regularly travels to Zurich. Other sprouts from CAS#1 include the development of Living Systems Labs by three participants – one in the Venice Lagoon, one in a Norwegian fjord, and the other in the Negev Desert in Israel where he now teaches on regenerative systems. CAS alumni have become weavers in their bioregions and will feed back into the DRRS programme through the MOOC series.