Chris Sutevski
Systemic design’s investment in methodological pluralism risks, at present, to be more epistemologically confident than it is tractable. The field has expanded its repertoire of frameworks, vocabularies, and participatory instruments without developing a corresponding account of the foundational commitments those instruments carry. This paper argues that those commitments are primarily homeostatic in origin, and that the cybernetic inheritance operates not as explicit doctrine but as sedimented assumption in how transition is conceived relative to stability and difference, and at what scale of engagement is treated as methodologically legitimate or operable.
Alongside the call for pluralisation, two structural conditions delimit the present moment for systemic design. The first is the progressive delegitimisation of systemic and scalar thinking within critical theory, which displaced the technocratic associations of first-generation cybernetic rationalism but also risks foreclosure of the conceptual instruments through which critical practice might operate at scales adequate to the problems it diagnosed. The second is the consolidation of a homeostatic technical paradigm operating at planetary scale: the convergence of AI architectures, platform infrastructure, and computational systems towards morphological constants (Poliks & Alonso Trillo, 2026) that critical design practice is currently ill-equipped to address or actively avoids.
Against the critical reflex and diagnosis of an aversion to the vertical, the paper probes resources within second-order and critical cybernetics to examine what might be transduced between the two positions as a generative tension, seeing what resources are available within each. Drawing on Simondon’s metastability, Hui’s cosmotechnics and White’s call for a critical epistemology, the paper asks whether the kind of diversity that a robust pluralist systemic design would require is achievable through critical inflection of the cybernetic episteme, or whether it demands a more fundamental reckoning with the cosmotechnical commitments that episteme carries. Put differently, can systemic design move with/against its systems?
Keywords: systems theory, cybernetics, epistemology, design theory