The Center for Complexity is a platform for transdisciplinary collaboration and innovation, informed by global events and creative practices, founded to benefit scholars, practitioners, a diverse range of partners, and the RISD community.

‹We are interested in systems and their big challenges. We believe they must be addressed by methods that link minds, disciplines, geographies, and scales. The Center connects thinking and doing through research, publishing, and collaborative projects by drawing on the creative talents of the RISD community and a global network of collaborators.

As a working environment that prizes the progressive development of creative approaches to systemic challenges, we recognize diversity as an essential catalyst. Our work requires us to encounter the systems that deny or restrict social access on the basis of race, ethnicity, economic class, gender, sexuality, spiritual practice, disability, and age, among other characteristics. We seek to transform these systems for the better.

It is our intention to build an environment where it is safe to take risks. This means being willing to push our boundaries while being strictly respectful of those of our collaborators, partners, and participants.›

Design: TwoPoints.Net
Client: Center for Complexity, Rhode Island School of Design

The visual concept is very simple. We designed a font which modules can be filled with a heterogeneous mix of complex images. The imagery visualizes the holistic perspective on a subject and the font is the tool to build communication.

The images placed inside of the modules can be abstract or concrete, as long as each family of images contain the four quarters of a circle and a square element to construct all the glyphs of the font.

The are two color schemes, apart from black and white. One for promotional and another for informative deliverables.

The Center approaches the complex systemic challenges that shape the future from angles that can reveal opportunities for holistic and lasting change in society.

CfC’s Focus Areas and Projects:

Future Food Systems
Farming is humanity’s most important and ancient technology. The global food system is a marvel and a scourge. What should the future of food be?

Design Education
How should we design teaching, what can design teach, and how should we teach design?

Nuclear Security
What role (if any) do nuclear weapons have in a stable global security system? We are taking a systems and design approach to achieving new models of global security.

Civics & City Making
Our civic life is built from a tapestry of individual and collective actions along with dynamics evident and invisible. How can we work toward structural changes to realize priorities for common good and shared prosperity?

Opioids, Care and Addiction
Designing beyond crisis. Reshaping how we think and design our systems to accommodate for addiction — our species’ constant companion.

Complex Spaces in Emergency Medicine
Cross-disciplinary research to advance how practitioners on the front-lines of emergency care better navigate complexity and uncertainty to improve outcomes.

Design and Public Policy Studios
The DPPS is a 5 day design studio that develops approaches necessary for professionals of all disciplines to flourish when uncertainty and complexity challenge the status quo.

More at www.twopoints.net