Climate change, biodiversity loss and pan-syndemics are some of today’s most pressing complex challenges. Much of our economies and societies are exhaustive, vulnerable, and unfair. We need to actively restore and regenerate ecosystems and their services while transforming our economies to become more circular and just. We require new knowledge systems and cultures leading to transformative action as the human impact on earth needs to be fundamentally redesigned.

Scientific knowledge and reasoning are the fundamental tools to guide policy and management decisions, especially in times of crises. But the limitations of reductionist science are evident due to the lack of widespread action in addressing today's highly complex challenges, which are self-emergent, unpredictable, span across nested scales, depend on societal behavioral transitions, and lack data.

Design disciplines offer creative ways of prototyping solutions in an iterative way. Design responds to a current problem by proposing future pathways, through a feedback exchange from praxis. Designerly praxis can benefit from science, for example by directing interventions and leveraging relationships based on quantitative data. Neither the analytical and descriptive tools of science, nor the iterative process of design alone are adequate for addressing complex challenges. Combining both cultures and methods of reasoning as a fluid, intervention-based and synergistic process is beneficial for fostering the regenerative, transformative action that is urgently required.

Therefore, this MOOC series entitled “Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems” (DRRS) offers four consecutive MOOCs that aim to address these urgent and complex challenges. Participants are invited on a learning journey that includes emphasis on extending our worldviews, concepts like regeneration and resilience, befriending complexity and uncertainty, methods and hybrid practices of science and design, meta-design and the seeing of patterns and root causes, connecting more with our inner self, and becoming bio-regional weavers within communities of transformational learning and praxis.

This first MOOC places global crises in context with local and regional examples for planetary health. Participants build consciousness by questioning the dominant reductionist worldviews that drive our global societies and learn ways of rethinking our relationship with nature as a holistic approach of “interbeing,” which places humans as part of the broader web of life.

Justyna Swat

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