The Individualized Program Knowledge Areas:

The WSD Knowledge Areas are to be integrated into your degree process. A primary factor in determining Candidacy status will be the extent to which you have achieved this integration, both in your Graduate Project and in your work in the Program in general.

The Knowledge Areas, combined with and framed by the WSD Core Purpose abilities, constitute the minimum learnings expected of a graduate of the Program. Working with these areas is a strategy for becoming an effective whole systems designer; they are not ends in themselves.

You will address these areas through interaction with your Faculty Advisor and Degree Committee. The Knowledge Areas are important elements of WSD which should receive consistent reflection throughout the program.

Philosophy:

The critical inquiry into the presuppositions and claims made by the fields of knowledge represented through Whole Systems Design. Such inquiry leads to speculation on possible systematic and coherent world views from which beliefs, ideas, values, and attitudes arise.

Theory:

The development of general, abstract, and idealized principles or models used to explain subject matter within the body of knowledge of Whole Systems Design in a clear and systematic way.

Methodology:

The development of procedures or ways used to obtain prescribed results through the construction of conceptual systems which organize and interrelate elements within a structure of theories and inferences.

Metaphysics:

The study of anything that is spiritual. It is also the study of the most general, persistent, and pervasive characteristics of one's understanding of the universe including existence, change, time, substance, identity, uniqueness, space, difference, unity, variety, sameness and oneness.

Emergent Qualities:

The study of the belief that organic or integrated wholes have a reality independent of and greater than the sum of their parts by explaining phenomena in terms of the purposes, properties and activities of the wholes that are the guiding principles of their parts.

Aesthetics:

The study of beauty and related concepts like tragic, ugly, humorous, boring, and pleasing which are involved in our experiences of and judgments about things made by humans or found in nature.

Creativity:

The development of an ability to cause something to come into existence or to be brought into being by designing and making something which requires art, skill, invention, and imagination.

Practice:

Putting knowledge into practical action by facilitating social systems change. The application of theories and methods to specific instrumental action.

Approach:

The utilization of inquiry and research to produce knowledge. Research is the careful, systematic, patient study and investigation of fields of knowledge. Inquiry is a process of questioning and seeking information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Tradition:

The study of the history of Whole Systems Design by analyzing, correlating, and explaining the events in the life and development of this field of knowledge as a basis for knowing from the past.

Ethics:

The analysis of concepts such as ought, should, duty, moral rules, right, wrong, obligation, and responsibilities through inquiry into the nature of morality.

Epistemology:

One's habits of perceiving and acting (i.e., of embodied experiencing). As science, epistemology is the study of how particular organisms or aggregates of organisms perceive, think, and act; as philosophy, epistemology is the study of the necessary limits and other characteristics of perceiving, thinking, and acting. In the systemic view, ontology (the study of how the world "is") and epistemology (the study of the processes by which such "is"-ness is brought forth in our experience) are necessarily united to form an indivisible, non-dualistic study.

Teleology:

The study of phenomena exhibiting order, design, purposes, ends, goals, tendencies, aims, direction, and how they are achieved in a process of development.

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