Intervene in Complex Systems
Tobias Luthe is an academic transdisciplinary hybrid. At ETH Zurich, Tobias is director of the learning program “Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems” and the leader of the ETH Systemic Design Labs group. Tobias is the founding director of the MonViso Institute (MVI) in the Italian Alps, a living systems lab. At MVI, Tobias designed and built the passive net-positive “regenerator” house Il Doppio. Additionally, Tobias has been an Associate Professor for Systemic Design at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway, and co-founded Grown, a design-as-nature lab and experience collective. Tobias is also a mountaineering guide and photographer and leads the Mountain Resilience Group at the Mountain Research Initiative, hosted at the University of Berne.
In this session, which took place in XX, Tobias answered the question: Why, where, when, and how should we (or should we not) intervene in complex systems? Shifting from “engineering” solutions from outside to fostering emergence from within through navigational practices, his session explored how entrepreneurs act to change systems, the science behind their actions, and the strategies used to guide those changes effectively. It highlighted real-world case studies, ranging from an eco-design company to a living systems lab to an educational program on designing regenerative systems. He also introduced the latest iteration of a framework for navigating toward regenerative organizational management: the Compass Matrix.
