The 2026 programme brings the American Society for Cybernetics’ theme of Conversational Confluences into dialogue with RSD15’s Designing within a Plural World. Drawing on Nego Bispo’s concept of confluence, the programme explores how distinct worldviews, epistemologies, and practices can meet without assimilation, treating difference as a source of collective learning, creativity, and mutual amplification.

The conversations span a wide terrain: the legacy of Stafford Beer and the design of viable institutions in dialogue with Latin American experience; pluriversal and more-than-human design, where agency is shared with animals, plants, landscapes, and spirits; hybrid naturecultures at the meeting point of the biological and the digital; futures that emerge from drift and chance rather than control; encounters among Indigenous relationality, quantum systems thinking, and AI reflexivity; mapping and modelling as reflexive, situated practices; second-order epistemology as a response to algorithmic governance; and cyber-systemic traditions of gathering attention and acting amid uncertainty.

The #NewMacy and ASC collaboration explores relationality in complexity across domains of information mapping, architecture, design, and organisational structures in diverse disciplines, geographies, and generations. #NewMacy and ASC converse with the RSD14 theme, Arcs of Impact, to explore how effects unfold in ever-expanding time and scale through a dynamic interplay of components with wholeness emerging from relationships. The day includes a range of cybernetic enactments, from evolving community engagements in Brazil to creating experimental glossaries and archives, developing laboratory approaches for student-focused curricula, and studying the environmental interdependence of honeybees. The sessions open with a speculative address on language-in-action hinged on uncertainty, moves through questions of design ethics and pedagogies, and ends with organisation and modelling of viable systems.

In a world where our actions create a ripple effect, we ask: how can systemic design become a living ecology that catalyses conversation?

#NewMacy and the American Society for Cybernetics hosted a community-led programme of sessions independently organised by people working in transdisciplinary spaces. The single-track online Currents in Cybernetics series featured discussions, panels, and two discovery sessions: The Transformations Community and #NewMacy. The series of three talks, Flow, Reflexivity, and Recurson, pick up on key ideas in the confluence of RSD13’s Rivers of Conversations.

Colloquies for Transgenerational Collaboration considered the wicked challenges of our time, including climate change, population growth, totalitarian regimes, terrorism, economic insecurity, and systemic inequities. These challenges, recursive in nature, demand that we grapple with complex situations, define their scope, evolve our thinking, and create prototypes—all while navigating obstacles to progress and maintaining our passion for meaningful change.

The sessions encouraged participants to consider how they see the world, what they desire, and what they want to change. Contributions examined the richness of transdisciplinary collaboration through various conceptual lenses and welcomed and encouraged alternative approaches, fostering diverse perspectives on addressing these urgent challenges.

This programme was the design outcome of the Carnegie Mellon University project-based special topics seminar Collaborations for Wicked Challenges. In spring 2023, Paul Pangaro, Visiting Scholar in the School of Architecture and School of Design, taught the seminar to both graduate and undergraduate students.

Different Stories in Design marked the first year of collaborative transdisciplinary programming for RSD, developed in partnership with #NewMacy and the American Society for Cybernetics, during RSD11 hosted by the University of Brighton. The work of cybernetician Gregory Bateson provided a valuable foundation for #NewMacy sessions, which fostered conversations for action across disciplines, geographies, and generations, grounded in systemic principles, processes, and communities. The programme introduced the #NewMacy initiative and featured six studios at RSD11, designed to catalyse action-oriented dialogue among individuals and communities. These sessions aimed to consider the possibility of immediate change while focusing on systemic transformations.