How to introduce yourself as a systemic designer

In our workshop, “How we talk about what we do: Rethinking the introduction,” we started exploring a workshop around how designers introduce themselves.

The RSD community includes systems thinkers and designers from different sectors, countries, and perspectives. We wanted to use our activity group as an opportunity to source something that would be helpful to us, that these people might have an interesting perspective on, and that could help them too. We started with designing with care: principles-based design using our thesis. What we’ve really been working on since our thesis though is not designing with the principles themselves but how to get started in our own practice as designers (with care). How do we describe the work we do? It is complex and systemic. We use terms like design that mean different things to different people. It involves all kinds of people who might come in with different levels of understanding and different vocabularies.