The 59th Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences was held in Berlin, Germany, August 2 – 7, 2015.
Conference co-chairs
Ray Ison
Louis Klein
Conference theme
Governing the Anthropocene: the greatest challenge for systems thinking in practice?
Track theme: Socio-Ecological Systems
Track co-chairs
Stefan Blachfellner, BCSSS Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Sciences
Liss C. Werner
This track intends to help advance a sound epistemology and methodology for systems design. In cooperation with the SIG Research Towards a General Theory of Systems and other tracks insights we investigate the interdependencies of natural – social – technological systems to develop appropriate design competencies for future oriented thrivable ecologies. We work at the interface of science – humanities – engineering/design. The call is for an integration of the knowledge of all those disciplines involved through a transdisciplinary systems approach to advance the disciplines.
The mere notion Anthropocene demands from us to find the ways and means to deal with the actual complex challenges we have co-created as human societies. Design (Gestaltung) is more than a human potential. All we as humans do or not do is Gestaltung. Thus Socio-Ecological Systems, their definition, design and understanding are increasingly subject to a critical review and preview alike. The SIG follows its agenda of conducting research that takes the complexity of both ecological and social systems into account and extends the subject matter into the paradigm of design and Gestaltung as living and learning system.
Biologists, economists, engineers, architects, designers and philosophers are invited to share the stage, to start a conversation and to exchange individual tools, methodologies, material and ways of operating. We are looking for developing strategies and designing systems of design for a ‘theory and practice of Gestaltung’ in a newly framed environment.
Instead of continuing parallel running research projects, we encourage researchers from science, humanities, economics, and engineering disciplines as well as practitioners to collaborate in a trans-disciplinary process in order to decode and encode discipline specific modes of working.
The advent of the ANTHROPOCENE gives rise to novel and challenging global and local parameters, which in some occasions take over from old ones, create new ones or, and this is our main field of interest, give birth to unprecedented emergent hybrids to help us re-search how to design design-systems for systems-design – in theory and practice.
This year’s presence of Socio-Ecological Systems continues its tradition and extends its focus succeeding the symposia Architectural Ecologies: Code, Culture and Technology at the Convergence and Emergent Design at the European Meetings of Cybernetics and Systems Research 2014.
