59th Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences held in Berlin, Germany, August 2 - 7, 2015.

Stefan Blachfellner, Managing Director of the BCSSS, and Liss C. Werner from Tactile Architecture, member of the BCSSS, have been invited to chair the Special Integration Group (SIG) on Socio-Ecological Systems. This SIG will be strongly connected to the research group on Socio-Ecological Systems and Systems Design at the Bertalanffy Center.

The ISSS SIG on Socio-Ecological Systems intends to help advance a sound epistemology and methodology for systems design. In cooperation with the ISSS SIG Research Towards a General Theory of Systems and other SIGs insights we investigate the interdependencies of natural – social – technological systems to develop appropriate design competencies for future oriented thrivable ecologies. We work at the interface of science – humanities – engineering/design. The call is for an integration of the knowledge of all those disciplines involved through a transdisciplinary systems approach to advance the disciplines.

Biologists, economists, engineers, architects, designers and philosophers are invited to share the stage, to start a conversation and to exchange individual tools, methodologies, material and ways of operating.

The advent of the ANTHROPOCENE gives rise to novel and challenging global and local parameters, which in some occasions take over from old ones, create new ones or, and this is our main field of interest, give birth to unprecedented emergent hybrids to help us re-search how to design design-systems for systems-design – in theory and practice.