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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.