Eugenia Rosina
As a contribution to the conference debate on Systemic Design Pluralism, this paper presents Hartmut Rosa’s theories of social acceleration (2013) and resonance (2019) as a diagnostic and generative lens for exploring how systemic design can support systemic Intermediary Organisations (IOs) in cultivating the relational posture that makes pluralism in participation processes for sustainable transitions actively transformative. Sustainable transitions demand that communities, institutions, and the actors operating between them navigate complexity together—across different actors, forms of knowledge, and ways of understanding the world. This is a relational challenge as much as a technical one, and at its core lies a question about pluralism not as a value to be declared, but as a condition to be actively sustained. A central and underexplored site where this challenge becomes concrete is that of Intermediary Organisations (IOs), whose work is grounded in participatory practices: organisations that hold the space between communities, institutions, funders, and policy processes, designing and sustaining the participatory processes within which plurality emerges. By virtue of their intermediary position, IOs operate within a structural paradox: advocating to facilitate openness to plural perspectives while working across institutional logics that tend to suppress the very conditions of openness it requires. While systemic design has developed valuable methodological approaches to support this work, less attention has been given to the relational and organisational conditions that allow plurality to become genuinely transformative—and in particular to how practitioners and IOs can cultivate a relational posture that makes it possible to be affected by difference, and to enable others to change in turn. Rosa’s sociology offers a precise diagnosis of why this openness is structurally difficult to sustain and, through his theory of resonance—a mode of being-in-the-world in which subject and world genuinely touch, respond to, and transform each other—a vocabulary for what cultivating it might look like. Positioned as an exploration emerging from my ongoing doctoral research, this paper offers the presented theoretical resource as an invitation to collective reflection on the following question: what does it mean to design towards relational conditions of resonance within IOs that lead participatory processes for sustainable transitions? How might the relational quality of a process be evaluated through Rosa’s lens? What could change in systemic design research and practice if the cultivation of resonance within IOs becomes a site of inquiry?
Keywords: design for sustainable transitions, intermediary organisations, pluralism, resonance, modes of being-in-the-world