Studio

Except Systemic Design emerged from 25 years of integrated sustainability practice. The studio applies the SiD (Symbiosis in Development) framework to architecture, urban planning, landscape, and product design: every commission is stress-tested across ecological, physical, economic, governance, and social dimensions before a single line is drawn.

Tom Bosschaert

Tom Bosschaert

Founder

Tom Bosschaert founded Except in 1999 and developed the SiD (Symbiosis in Development) framework over more than two decades of practice. He leads strategic framing and systemic analysis across the studio's architecture, urban planning, landscape, and product design commissions.

He writes and speaks widely on systemic design, sustainability, and the built environment, and authored Symbiosis in Development (SiD): Making New Futures Possible.

LinkedIn ↗

The SiD Framework

SiD stress-tests every design decision across five dimensions: ecology (material flows and living systems), physics (energy, water, structure), economics (lifecycle cost, market viability), governance (regulation, ownership, policy), and social (community, equity, lived experience). A design that performs well on four dimensions but fails on one does not pass. This is not an audit layer applied at the end. It is how the brief is read from the first conversation.

Example: in the Roosendaal climate adaptation project, physics analysis of historical rainfall data (340 soil core samples) revealed that municipal drainage averages masked three annual flood events. The SiD ecology dimension then flagged that conventional drainage would accelerate soil compaction. The resulting bioswale design resolved both dimensions simultaneously: 40-minute drainage in the March 2025 test event, zero soil compaction increase after three years.

How We Work

We take commissions where systemic complexity is the central design challenge. Regulatory risk, ecological constraints, multi-stakeholder coordination: these are not obstacles to design quality; they are its specification. We expect clients to share data, tolerate structured uncertainty, and value outcomes over aesthetic preference.

If this sounds like the right fit, let's talk.

Publications