Giovanni Caruso and Silvio Cioni
Systemic design provides methods for engaging with complex social, technological, environmental, and organisational conditions. Its visual and relational tools support shared interpretation by making interdependencies, feedback dynamics and contextual relations more explicit. Yet futures-oriented systemic challenges also raise questions that exceed representation alone, concerning how alternative systems may be experienced, inhabited and interrogated by those situated within them.
This work examines embodied futures as a methodological contribution to systemic design. Embodied futures are understood as practices that make possible futures experientially accessible through participation, material engagement, and enactment. Rather than communicating future possibilities only through scenarios or visualisations, they allow participants to explore how systemic conditions may be encountered as roles, constraints, dependencies, opportunities and forms of agency.
Within this relationship, worldbuilding is introduced as the scaffold for materialising future systems through the configuration of relations, rules, infrastructures, and values into coherent experiential environments. It supports the translation from systemic relations to conditions that can be inhabited, interpreted and reconfigured.
The work is exploratory and methodological. It articulates a relationship between systemic design, embodied futures and worldbuilding, and outlines a process through which future systems may be explored as situated conditions.
In doing so, it supports discussions on how systemic design can connect analysis and experience when engaging with futures-oriented complexity.
Keywords: embodied futures, worldbuilding, systemic design, situated experience, design futures