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Over the years, we see an increase in the number of design approaches addressing complex societal challenges and supporting systemic change. However, this field remains difficult to comprehend. Approaches typically do not build on each other, their relationships are unclear, and it is difficult to grasp which method does what in this fragmented field. How can we collectively create a landscape of interconnected design approaches focusing on transition, transformation and systemic change that is adopted and further developed by the research community? In this conversation, we jointly reflected with the participants on our findings of a 3-year study that included 38 systemic change approaches. During the conversation, we created different mappings of this landscape, including important characteristics and still missing approaches. Building on the insights of the conversation, we attempt to enhance the interweaving of approaches and advance the establishment of a living community across different schools of thought. 

The paper presents a mapping activity carried out in 2023, by a team of researchers from RISE Research institutes of Sweden and the Eindhoven University of Technology - on an assignment of the EIT Culture & Creativity (EIT CC). The aim of the mapping was to map design-driven Practices for Inclusive and Sustainable Societal Transformation.It stems from the need, voiced by professionals in the field coming from a variety of different organisations, of better understanding how to face complex systemic challenges in an inclusive and collaborative way, leveraging on design and creative practices.Building on the team’s design expertise rooted in Design for Transforming Practices’ body of knowledge, the mapping investigates the playfield of achieving a sustainable societal transformation, carving out what design practices are currently invited in it and how are they enacted through multi- and inter- disciplinary partnerships.Given the complexity of the playfield, the mapping takes an iterative, participatory, and reflective stance making space for participants’ plurality of approaches and questions, fostering collective resonance. As a result, the mapping portrays a multi-layered landscape, exploring the values and qualities behind organisational and collaborative models that enable conditions for ecosystemic practices of transformation leveraging on culture and creativity to unfold.This contributed to the co-formulation of a set of recommendations for and from the sector. Recommendations address partners of the EIT CC, stakeholders working with Cultural and Creative sector industries (CCSIs), as well as societal actors engaged in mission-driven innovation. It provides them with insights contributing to accessing available strategic design and creative expertise.

This workbook originates from the insights and learnings of our work in the field of design for sustainable systemic societal transformation.

More and more organisations are striving to transform their current practices into new ones, that embrace complexity and open-endedness. These new practices do not rush into defining confined (and potentially misleading) problems in the name of efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness. They rather take time to engage in transformation processes, that start by forming collaborations around specific systemic societal challenges. Redefining these challenges into missions that are tackled by a partnership, which evolves in time.

Framing challenges as societal proves to be the first, important hurdle to overcome. Mainstream practices tend to identify and reduce problems to localised interventions that can be solved linearly, by specialised field knowledge.

A problem is defined and a technologically driven, incremental innovation is applied to solve that problem. Haraway refers to these kind of attitude as looking for technofixes, which she unapologetically identifies as comic. This bitter humour stems from the awareness that those attempts are dangerously ignoring the necessity to acknowledge the systemic nature of human acts: from the complex life-cycle of products and services that we realise, to the behaviours that we elicit in direct and indirect receivers of such products, services, systems and policies. A shift is urgent: from extractive approaches to regenerative ones, where materials, value and energies are not extracted, but where regenerative practices are established instead.

The five authors of the relay interview, through their contribution, stimulate a comprehensive reflection on the issue of collective and political creativity from the situational specificities of four different contexts. 

From the dialogue, a profoundly evolving scenario emerges in which collective creativity, multidimensional co-design and inclusion are key to sustainable action. 

„Chiedo che un flutto almeno | dal mio grembo discenda | a suscitar miriadi di me stessa.“ Alda Merini

Mi trovo in uno spazio latteo, grembo popolato di pinnacoli bianchi, che come matrioske traslucide, proteggono piccoli pinnacoli nel loro grembo. La loro superficie, realizzata da migliaia di murrine bianche e trasparenti, mostra un reticolo complesso, che lascia intuire il contenuto. Una maestria artigianale che affonda le sua radici nel profondo del passato, si avvolge ad una visione gentile del futuro. Morbidezza delle forme si miscelano alla freschezza del vetro. Un vetro da toccare, accarezzare per sentirsi accarezzati e curati. E quando il vetro viene toccato il paesaggio luminoso reagisce al tatto e cambia, come si trasforma anche il paesaggio sonoro. 

In this one-day workshop we are going to make access. We aim to counteract the phenomenon that access to making (e.g., in makerspaces, fablabs, etc.) is not equally distributed, with certain groups of people being underrepresented (e.g., women∗1). After brief introductions from participants and a set of three impulse keynotes, we will envision and "make"interventions together, such as speculative or provocative objects and actions. The workshop takes a constructive stance with the goal to not rest on empirical and theoretical findings or individual experiences, but to translate those into viable interventions. These serve as exemplars of findings with the clear goal of being deployed soon after.

This work explores how designerly practices drawing from embodied sensemaking, can foster actionable systemic perspectives that allow for co-response-ability in the formu- lation of a Climate City Contract in the city of Umeå, Sweden. The paper describes the design and facilitation process of

3 cross-disciplinary roundtable conversations that build on notions of thriving together, making kin and commoning. The main aim is to contribute to creating alternative collab- orative practices that develop means to acknowledge the complexity of — and our entanglement with — systemic challenges. Such practices are necessary for addressing the mission-driven approach that the public sector in Europe

is adopting. The outcomes of this research point toward three elements that might foster such an ability to respond together and propose ways for building resilient collaborative practices: (1) stimulating the emergence of situated knowl- edge to be shared and used, (2) creating legitimacy within the ecosystem through an embodied exploration of the systemic perspective, and (3) cultivating trans-disciplinary interconnectedness of actors through aesthetics.

In this pictorial, we present two different tangible interaction designs that enable managing of wireless connections between devices in a smart home environment. One design (Interaction Tile) utilizes a centralized approach based on a high level of semantic abstraction. The other design (Nodes) employs a distributed and localized approached building on laws of grouping from Gestalt psychology. These works were previously used for a comparative study to develop insights into the different mental models users developed, while using these designs. In this pictorial, we focus on the interactive qualities of the two designs and we propose a way to invite the reader to actively and physically engage with the pages of this publication. The reader is asked to print the pages of this pictorial and to engage in folding sequences on particular pages in order to actively engage with the different ways of interacting between the two different designs.

In this work in progress, we start to unpack the act of making in a digital fabrication process. In particular, one kind of digital fabrication - 3D printing - that is typically considered to be highly automated but in this case is not. In this process, a tension exists between our skills, the properties of a novel material and the capabilities of a novel machine. As design researchers, we navigated through the design space that emerged in this tension and explored how to 3D print in wood. In unpacking this tension between machine, material and designer, we pay attention to how the embodied nature of this process was essential for its development. We start to explore how we might explain the embodied act of making in the context of digital fabrication through the lense of ambiguity and resistance, notions previously used to unravel craftsmanship.

This paper reports on preliminary results of a design research project that explores how spaces in virtual reality may be designed to build on qualities of embodied sensemaking. The project forms a basis for the exploration of an ethical dimension to interactions in virtual reality. This publication focuses on identifying qualities of embodied sense-making in an existing physical space, the interactive exhibition Charged Utopia. These qualities are transposed into a virtual interactive space. The translation of the qualities is done through the three main themes: Physical Movement, Resistance and Ambiguity. We present the design research process to describe how these themes were identified and transposed. We conclude with reflections that sketch ways in which we might capitalise on the opportunities offered by a virtual space, while respecting human skills in embodied sensemaking.