Francesca Valsecchi and Saverio Silli
Systemic design offers an expanded framework for engaging with complexity, interdependence, and plural ways of knowing, facing the ecological, technological, and social crises that increasingly expose the limits of linear and human-centred innovation models.
This paper explores how design pedagogy can serve as a systemic infrastructure for cultivating ecological and transcultural capacities to navigate contemporary socio-ecological challenges and due transitions. The paper critiques persistent dualisms among nature and culture, human and more-than-human, and tradition and innovation, arguing that such separations constrain design disciplines’ ability to engage with interconnected systems. Drawing on theories of transculturality, culture is reframed not as a stable or bounded identity, but as a relational, adaptive, and continuously evolving system shaped through exchange, negotiation, and co-evolution. From this perspective, systemic design becomes not only a methodological framework for intervention, but also a pedagogical condition for engaging epistemic plurality and relational complexity.
Drawing on a retrospective synthesis of iterative teaching practice across five courses and more than 200 student participation, the paper proposes four interconnected meta-design principles as pedagogical capacities for systemic design practice: the macroscope as a tool for perceiving interdependencies across scales; futures thinking as a framework for negotiating plural and preferable trajectories; commons-oriented governance as a model for collective stewardship and distributed responsibility; and ecological design thinking as a relational approach to intervention within socio-ecological systems. Together, these principles are discussed as complementary infrastructures for systemic learning, enabling students and practitioners to develop multi-scalar awareness, ecological literacy, and adaptive capacities for transition contexts.
Keywords: system thinking, transculturality, plural epistemologies, design principles