Design is present at every scale that humans have imagined. In order to work at the largest scales systems have already been deployed to support the intentions of individuals, companies, and governments. What is the elastic nature of control as we experience movement, knowledge production, archiving and retrieval, connectivity on scales that can swing climates, make resources rare, engage the labor of massive groups of people? The future of systems and their adaptability is the future of our species.

Dynamic Service Systems
Shelley Evenson
Eight years ago, I did a talk for the AIGA that was a bit out there. It was called Living Service Worlds. In it I described the living nature of digital services and suggested that designers can’t design a service experience, they can only design the resources for people to bring the experience to life for themselves. Designers create affordances that help people know where to start what to do and when to do it. Services come to life through people: how they “read” the resources their personal history and their context. This hasn’t fundamentally changed, but what has is the context for our designing.
I will revisit one of the trends influencing designing for service that I identified back in 2013—living or dynamic services and talk about a new one—twinning. Dynamic services—the meteoric rise of embedded sensors, IOT and more natural interfaces. The second just starting to appear as a reality is digital twins. In this talk I will describe how I think these trends will influence designing for dynamic service systems.

Teaching Systems Thinking
Meredith Davis
This segment of the panel presentation will address longstanding curricular practices that get in the way of teaching design from a systems perspective, and what a new approach might mean for college-level design education programs. Meredith Davis will also explain The Future of Design Education initiative, an international effort to rethink design education with more than 700 volunteers and 20 working groups.