Since the outbreak of the COVID19-pandemic we have been working on promoting student wellbeing in higher education. In this Medium blog post I share my perspective on the interconnection between learning, wellbeing and human connection.

https://medium.com/@miekevanderbijl/learning-is-joy-wellbeing-challenges-in-pandemic-higher-education-f74aaae67ec4

On October 26th I presented some of my work on systemic design practices at the Service Design Days Challenge at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. I talked about the practices of developing a systemic perspective on the problem, designing for evolution, designing for human relationships, and designing for mental models. This is the slide deck of my presentation. You can find references to the articles I referred to in the talk on the last slide.

I will be speaking about my research in systemic design at the Service Design Challenge at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on the 26th of October 2019. Get your tickets here: http://servicedesigndays.com/challenge-dutch-design-week-2019/

Last year we (students and staff from the UTS Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation) worked on a paper on ‘creative third spaces’ in our teaching & learning practice in the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. I am very pleased and proud that the paper has now been published in the International Journal for Students as Partners, and is available open access here:

https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/ijsap/article/view/3735

In a recent study, I investigated how social innovation practitioners generate frames that help them find productive ways to address complex challenges. The results of the study are published in this (open access) article in She Ji — the Journal of Design, Economics and Innovation. In this blog post I summarise the results.

Earlier this year I conducted a qualitative study into how professionals collaborate to tackle complex societal problems. There is one thing that became very clear to me and that is that thinking about how we work together and how we behave as individuals, is at least as important as how we think about innovation in complex problem situations. Read more about this study in this blog post.

Many have turned to the application of design practices when addressing complex societal problems. One of the differences between ‘traditional’ design practice and design in a complex societal context is that design no longer just happens within specialized teams. Instead, designing has broadened to what Ezio Manzini calls ‘a designing network’, where design roles and skills are distributed over multiple stakeholders who are actively involved in making decisions. This fundamentally changes the roles of designers, the people they work with, and arguably the processes they run. While I visited MaRS Solutions Lab earlier this year, Claire Buré and I started to explore the concept of a designing network to draw new insights on collaborations for social innovation. We summarised our insights in this blog.

Earlier this week I shared some of my research about systemic design in public and social innovation, and discussed the implication of systemic design for systems change with Tim Tompson at the Social Design Sydney event ‘Systems change with systemic design‘. You can download a copy of my slides here: 180925systemicdesign_mieke

And watch a video of the talk here:

I enjoyed guest editing a special issue on Trandisciplinary Innovation with co-guest-editor and colleague Martin Bliemel. It has certainly expanded our understanding of the topic and it has been great reading all the contributions. The issue is open access and online available here. One of the papers is written by my PhD-student Mariana Zafeirakopoulos, and describes the learning experiences of professionals who have shifted from using positivist rule-based practices (such as science) to transdisciplinary innovation methods.

The amount of people involved in social innovation is rapidly increasing. Many people are trying to improve people’s lives and create more resilient and sustainable societies through innovation in social enterprises, innovation labs, grass root organisations, and within social and public-sector organisations. Many great examples exist of successful social innovation, as well as many failed initiatives. There is still a lot we need to learn about how we can advance this field and I believe that learning together and sharing knowledge is one of the keys to achieve this. In this blog I reflect on how we learn, and how we can learn from each other in social innovation, based on a one-month visit in May 2018 to the MaRS Solutions Lab in Toronto as International Fellow.

Learning together in social innovation – a reflection on my visit to the MaRS Solutions Lab