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ETH Zurich

Worldviews - From Sustainability to Regeneration

ETH Zurich via edX

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Overview

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. Instead, 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 a future pathway, 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” offers four consecutive MOOCs that aim to address these urgent and complex challenges. Participants are invited on a learning journey that includes emphasis on new holistic worldviews, concepts like regeneration and resilience, befriending complexity and uncertainty, methods and hybrid practices of science and design, 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. Here 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.

Syllabus

Week 1

Global crises and local solutions

The urgence for local action with regenerative cultures.

From sustainability to regeneration

Origins of sustainability. Regeneration as next societal goal.

Week 2

Reframing complexity

Embrace and befriend complexity.

Ways of knowing and reasoning

Extended worldviews, critical science, warm data.

Week 3

Design as nature

New design principles and practices.

Mind and movement

Physical and mental activation.

Taught by

Tobias Luthe, Justyna Swat, Daniel Christian Wahl, Jeremy Lent, Fritjof Capra, Michelle Fehler, Michaela Emch, Eric L. Berlow, Ingrid Halland, Detlev Günther, Mirjam Luthe, Andrés Edwards, Philippe Vandenbroeck, Haley Fitzpatrick, Birger Sevaldson, Benjamin Marias and Michael Stauffacher

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