Courses
MVI designs and offers experiential education on many topics within the broad fields of sustainability, resilience, transitions, and regenerative design. All our offers focus on how to cope with complexity and derive solutions that matter, employing systems thinking and systemic design, understanding and practicing the overarching connection and embeddedness between “things” and “beings”, between the biotic and abiotic world, across scales.
We collaborate with various Universities, institutions, municipalities, companies, local people, and we invite educators, trainers, professors, teachers from around the world.
We experiment with “virtually stimulated social outdoor experiences” and combine place-based “real” experiences with “dirty hands” with virtual, digital learning independent of place and time.
We offer a variety of educational offers, from short campus visits to week-long summer schools, multiple day hike/bike/ski adventures with a “cause”, restoration camps, and virtual trainings based on local innovation.
Upcoming courses
MVI Co-Working Days 2026
2-6 May 2026
The MVI Co-Working Days are an immersive, hands-on working format on the MonViso Institute campus in the Italian Alps. A small group of participants comes together to contribute to real design, restoration, and regeneration work while learning directly from ongoing campus development and community embedding.
Systemic Cycles Tours
2026
Systemic Cycles Tours are guided learning journeys that invite participants to experience systems in motion. They are not sightseeing tours in the conventional sense, but slow, embodied explorations of landscapes, livelihoods, infrastructures, and cultures, designed as accessible entry points into systemic thinking, systemic design, and bioregional practice.
Forming Relationships - Building One’s Own Tool as a Holistic Practice
July-Aug 2026
An exploration of how tools, places, and people co-create one another. Framing tool-making not only as forging a knife or carving a spoon, but as forming: an act of arranging materials, gestures, techniques, stories, and places into a coherent whole.
Rewild yourself - (re)calibrate your senses
As of now there is no current date foreseen for 2026. If this course offer is being reactivated in 2026, we will inform in all our MVI/DRRS chanels.
Contemporary survival, inner resilience and leadership. The course responds to nested crises, to build the inner capacity to withstand and resist, to reframe, to regenerate internally, mentally and physically.
Systemic Design for Regenerative Practice
Post-RSD15 Retreat
18-21 Oct 2026
This course is a specific DRRS elective and builds upon MOOC/CAS#3 Systemic Design. We will embody the use of the SD wheel of inquiry and practice question-based navigation for systemic intervention applied to the MVI system, and how SD supports and enable regenerative practice.
Past courses
MAS ETH in Regenerative Systems: design thesis module
February - October 2025
The MAS ETH programme is about creating a positive impact in complex systems as part of learning communities. Participants find different entry points to connect with insights and updates into the latest state of science on sustainability and resilience, research by design, designerly practice, and more.
RSD14 MVI hub @ ExpoLab, Camping Ca'Savio, Venice Lagoon
16-18 October 2025
The annual systemic design conference “RSD - Relating Systems Thinking and Design” is offered this year as a physical conference at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. For those participating online and not traveling to North America, we offer a hybrid format to mingle between selected virtual screenings and joint systemic dialogues in an experiential, also outdoors format - this time offered by our partner Experience LAB, Folef Hooft Graafland, at the Venice Lagoon.
CAS ETH Worldviews: Sustainability to Regeneration
September 2025 - January 2026
The MAS ETH in Regenerative Systems equips professionals to navigate complexity of accelerating nested crises, to guide society toward regeneration between technology, real-world practice, AI, cultures, place specificity, and personal resilience.
Systemic Cycles down the Po River bioregion - from the Alpine source to its delta at the Adriatic Sea
17-24 November 2025
Cycle across Italy’s most iconic river — from alpine springs to the Adriatic Sea — while immersing yourself in a week of systems exploration and cultural discovery. The Systemic Cycles Tour blends the thrill of cycling and adventure with hands-on methods for sensing complexity, mapping living systems, and engaging with local communities.
Designing Experimental Places and Spaces
10-18 May 2025
How to design experimental places and spaces? What differentiates the various formats, i.e. living labs, real-world labs, bioregional learning centers or weaving labs, and others? Visit four very different lab types and engage in personal dialogues to learn about creating one’s own potential lab space.
Systemic Cycles weaving guide certification course
5-11 May 2024
A Systemic Cycles weaving guide combines the skills of a classic bike guide with science-based designerly systemic weaving knowledge and didactics for designing resilient regenerative systems. SC guides are bicycle guides with the extra “SC” skills for offering new, impactful tours of tourist, educational and regional development values.
Retreat "Renewal - The Way Out is In"
9 - 14 July 2024
Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) with Inner Development Goals (IDG) and Nature Connection (Awake in the Wild).
We are excited to invite you to the Retreat “Renewal - The Way Out Is In”, which will take place in the wild landscapes of the Piemontese Alps, Italy, in the village of Ostana at the Monviso Institute (MVI), from July 9-14th, 2024.
Permaculture course I and II
May 09 - 23 2021
co-working weeks on water systems: pond, black water cleaning system, grey water
ETH EPFL SDL PhD summer school
June 04 - 12 2021
co-working weeks on water systems: pond, black water cleaning system, grey water
Mindfulness and compassion in nature
July 11-28 2021
Join us in July 2021 for a sparkling, pioneering initiative, in which we take compassionate action by bringing together passionate professionals from different cultures, countries, areas of expertise and training to explore mindful ways of living and caring for ourselves, our society and our planet.
Examples of educational offers from the last years are:
University of Lugano: Master class “International Economics and Tourism”, with the course “International Tourism Colloquium” and the topic “Mountain Resilience”. Over three years, students engaged in local social network analyses and mobility experiments with choice experiment surveys.
German Permaculture Association: 12-days immersive course on Permaculture design
ETH Zurich: Master class “Systemic Design Labs” on co-designing alpine-urban circularity and a regenerative regional bio-economy
ETH Zurich and EPFL Lausanne: PhD Summer School «Regenerate Alpine-Urban Circularity”
Politecnico Torino: Master in “Systemic Design” with the course “Open Systems Design” on designing a regional circular economy, together with companies and practice partners from the region
Politecnico Torino: RSD7 De-Conference two-days retreat (Relating Systems Thinking and Design)
Mark Coleman of Awake in the Wild, USA: Exploring mindfulness and “flow” in nature
ShiftN, Belgium: The View from Above. A Workshop on complex sustainability challenges, flying drones. https://shiftn.com/
Dozens of day visits and offers for the public, for schools, trainings for Architects, and many others.
Salem Kolleg, Germany: over the last years, MVI serves as base camp and re-supply/safety backup for student groups who leave on annual self-supplied mountain backpacking trips over 8-10 days, including a 24h "solo" in wild nature.
https://www.salemkolleg.de/de/
Grown Outdoor Creativity Lab: Regenerative composite design courses - building skis, snowboards, kiteboards, outdoor utensils from locally grown renewable materials, i.e. hemp, Paulownia, and renewable glues.
Continuous public educational series: Regenerative Design Talks
For upcoming teaching courses and educational experiences,
please visit the Events pages