At the 70th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) in Pyla, Larnaca, Cyprus – held under the theme Elevating Systems Science to Address Humanity’s Greatest Challenges MUELLER-DIVJAK presented the paper Shifting from Systems Thinking to Systems Sensing: The Potential of Smell for the Imagination of Embodied Systems Awareness. Their participation was encouraged by Alexander Laszlo – member of the SLS advisory board and former president of the ISSS – who recommended bringing the project’s sensory approach to the international systems sciences community.

The paper argues for a complementary shift from systems thinking to systems sensing – the pre-reflective, embodied apprehension of systemic relationships such as connectedness, interaction, feedback, and the self-organization of open, living systems. Grounded in General Systems Theory (Bertalanffy), living systems theory (Miller), and enactive accounts of embodied cognition (Varela, Thompson & Rosch), it draws on SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS to ask how the senses – and smell in particular – can complement the analytical vocabulary of the systems sciences.