Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems

The Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems (DRRS) is an innovative MOOC series that equips participants with the tools to address complex challenges. It fosters a holistic approach, combining consciousness, systems thinking, and cooperative design-doing through real-world examples.

This program focuses on creating positive impacts within complex systems, emphasizing adaptability and trust in navigating dynamic, unpredictable environments. It encourages embracing complexity, forming communities for collective learning, and weaving new connections and cooperations.

DRRS offers diverse entry points for participants, including philosophical discourse, scientific insights, practical design principles, and personal growth, all within a supportive community.
One key objective is to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration, bridging language and values to foster systemic innovation for complex issues. It enhances the skillsets of non-design disciplines in creatively addressing complexity and equips design students with systems thinking, conscious worldviews, and scientific reasoning.

The MOOCs introduce nature-inspired creativity tools of systemic design, empowering students from technical and science backgrounds to take an active role in designing resilient and regenerative systems. These systems can span from green chemistry to national and international cooperation, strengthening regional economies and communities while reducing reliance on global supply chains.

Most higher education programs emphasize disciplinary depth, leaving students ill-prepared to analyze complex systems or co-create effective solutions. However, the rapidly changing world demands holistic thinking and cooperative problem-solving.
The 2023 DRRS MOOC series comprises two courses, with a total of four planned. It empowers students to become change makers, collaborating on local and regional solutions for resilient, regenerative systems.

The MOOC didactics are designed to combine time and place independent virtual learning through pre-recorded conversations and presentations, both accessible as movies and audio files, readings, and practical engagement outside in nature.
Virtual content is meant to stimulate physical and social interaction in the bio-region where the participant lives. Systemic Cycles takes the participant on a conscious exploration of place and regional supply chain actors on their bicycle, to playfully learn systemic design methods, to weave together local and regional networks and to explore the inner self through physical activity. An accompanying visual mapping process called Gigamapping acts as a designerly way to co-create your own learning journey and connect across the MOOC series to your final transformative design project. The personal QUEST guides through the learning journey.

In the MOOC#1 production, we invited colleagues from ETH Zurich and from global academic and professional communities. Content was produced in close collaboration with this group of experts and help from the ETH Media Lab. We recorded content at a ETH EPFL PhD summer school, through conference meetings, virtually through Zoom, and we offered as much content in praxis settings and also outside in nature as possible. The inclusion of ETH colleagues helped to spread and support this MOOC series into various existing ETH teaching courses.

In the first iteration of MOOC#1, we offered bi-weekly live events to “sense” the growing community of interested participants and to frame the virtual content with live conversations and direct feedback. These live events, supported by visual dialogues on Miro boards, helped fine-develop the content and also build a wide online community.

Developing the DRRS online community on Mighty Networks is a key component of making this MOOC learning experience a success.

With MOOC#2 we proceeded similarly, offering bi-weekly live events with already largely improved multiple choice quizzes at the end of each module.

At the end of their first run, after about 3-4 months, each MOOC counted about 2400-2600 participants from 100+ nations. This shows the huge interest and future potential in this program.

The DRRS online community counts about 1800 members in mid ‘23.

The cost-free MOOC series is, from its second iteration on, a purely virtual program with pre-recorded content, student paced, without live sessions, but backed up by the DRRS online community with rich dialogues and a help forum.

The project goals have been fully achieved. With both planned MOOCs #1 and #2 produced and executed, even in teacher-paced format, plus the intense, accompanying live events to sense the “market” needs, plus the additional online community for a richer, also more personal learning experience, we even have over achieved beyond the initial project goals.

The success of the MOOC series even allowed the launch of a new executive study program in DRRS, a current CAS and future MAS ETH in DRRS. MOOC#1 is one of the prerequisites to enter the executive program, and thus the MOOC series experiences an even larger field of application.
A colleague from the University of Zurich even invited us to teach specific classes in a PhD course, where MOOC#2 will be a prerequisite to enter the PhD lectures.

We soon learnt that the DRRS program needs, in terms of market request and relevance of the topic of regeneration and complex systems design, two further MOOC elements to finish, finalize and fully empower the content and objectives of MOOC#1 and #2. There simply is too much content, given the learning progress of participants, their feedback, and the development of the field, to put into the two first MOOCs. We are thus in the process of producing the remaining content for MOOC#3 and #4.

Meanwhile, MOOC#1 is online again in its 2nd iteration, largely expanded and improved, based on the learnings from the first iterations of MOOC#1 and#2. We invested major time into iterating MOOC#1 to learn from the first version, the rich feedback, the live events, and as well from producing and executing MOOC#2.

MOOC#2 is now in autumn ‘23 in the reproduction process, while not much has to be changed or added in this 2nd MOOC, since it already largely benefited from the experience of the first MOOC. MOOC#2 should be online again from November ‘23 on. MOOC#3 should be offered from February ‘24 on, and MOOC#4 in early summer ‘24.

Covid made the overall production even more challenging, since we tried to offer as much “in real” as possible, meaning conversations together in person, field experiences etc., but the Covid induced mobility limitations were quite difficult to merge with the production processes.

The next step is the further inclusion of the MOOCs into the common ETH teaching, via blended learning formats. This is not a technical question, merely, but more so a cultural and organizational question of acceptance of a MOOC into existing consecutive programs. This process would further increase the values of the MOOC investments, but the work on this requires further resources.