third day – final thoughts

Final day of the course, dynamic systems, group presentations and discussions... The course was short, but intense and, at least for me, very useful.
In this last post I want to talk about the results I got from the course and relate them to the group presentations and my future expectations concerning sustainability and social design (my focus area).

First of all, this contact with the theory about system thinking allowed me to get a wider view our actions in the world and also how complex systems are organized, what leads them to collapse and how does it goes after collapsing.

If I can say one specific way that it really helped me, is the following: When Sustainable development started to became more wide spread, they said “think global, act local”. What means that we can’t, alone, change the entire world, but that, if each of us make our part, we can. But then, during the last years people started to talk about the “wicked problems” and saying that they are very complex, that they can’t be solved through only one solution, that for that, we should have many initiatives from many different sides to tackle it and so on; Hence, that is almost impossible to solve them. But now, with the vision of systemic thinking, especially with the concepts of “complex systems” and “levels”, I can see that, no matter how “wicked” a problem is, we can “break” it into smaller pieces so that we can find a level which is within our part. What means that, step by step, we can make the change.

I’m not going into systems theory in this post, but I must say that I’ll continue researching about that, especially because my area of interest in design is “social design” concerning initiatives to bring equality and development to the underprivileged population; and, therefore, been able to understand the system where a given community is located, how it works, which relations it has, the levels, the incomes and outcomes and so on and do forth is crucial to this kind of work.

One think that I learned in this course is that there is much more things to learn about, so, citing Socrates, I would say that, the more I know “I know that I know nothing”; and this keeps me interested in continue learning...

Thank you Gary for the course!