Annan Zuo, Fred Steier, and Claudia Westermann
Preceding the workshop of this two-part session, is a panel discussion based on the understanding that in systemic design, uncertainty is not a problem to solve—it is always part of the system’s ontology. No matter how careful the research, how sincere the intention, the outcomes always unfold in ways we can’t fully predict. This is especially true where complexity and entanglement mean that every intervention will generate effects beyond our sight, across time, across species, across generations. So how can we still speak of good intentions? Can intention itself be ethically meaningful when we know the consequences will never align perfectly with what we hoped?
Husserl and von Foerster both propose an ethics that begins not with control, but with careful attention—intentionality not as command, but as openness. A “good” act, in this view, is not guaranteed by its result, but by the attentiveness and care with which it is intended. In Ethical Know-How (1992), Francisco Varela similarly suggests that ethics is not the application of external rules, but the cultivation of sensitivity to what the situation calls for. Empathy here is not sentimental; it is a mature attunement to others—human or otherwise—as they arise within our embodied experience.
But both attentiveness and empathy are hard to realise when the designer is institutionally disembedded or structurally removed from what they design through scale, institutional abstraction, or market forces—when projects are too large, roles too fragmented, and no one person holds the thread of relation.
So, if good intention arises from responsible, affective attention, and if ethical responsiveness depends on attunement, what happens when systems prevent attention? When direct and intimate relationships that formulate care are unassigned, or impossible?
The question shifts: not simply “how can I intend responsibly,” but how can systems be designed so that intention and responsibility stay connected? Can a system empathise with those it exists for? Can we design for ethical proximity — practices that sustain situated knowing, feedback, and accountability?
Following the panel, the workshop invites attendees to engage with the central dilemma posed in the panel: How can individual intentions of care and responsibility be sustained within complex systems that seem to make such intentions ineffective or impossible? Through a design scenario set in a speculative future, participants explore the ethical tension between personal intimacy and systemic abstraction — between the desire to care, and the realities of control.
The scenario is set 60 years from now in a depopulated Satoyama landscape in rural Japan. As the last group of human residents prepares to leave, the fate of a once-cultivated piece of agricultural land is uncertain. Participants take on the roles of more-than-human elements—a local government official, a retiring farmer, a frog in the rice paddies, a cedar tree, a moss colony, a kami (Japanese spirit) of crops, or a structural column in a soon-to-be-abandoned Machiya house. Through improvisation and collaborative speculation, the group is asked to co-develop a design proposal for the future of the site—while holding on to their character’s perspective and capacity for care.
Keywords: systemic ethics, care and control in complex systems, intentionality in design, Varela ethical know-how, more-than-human systems
Profiles
Annan Zuo
University of Oxford
Annan Zuo is a more-than-human researcher and architectural designer. He holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Cambridge and is currently a PhD student in the department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on empathy, intersubjectivity, more-than-human architecture, and landscape recovery.
Annan’s work has been featured at cross-disciplinary platforms including ARS Electronica, the Media Architecture Biennale, Edinburgh Fringe, and Austin Unchained Gallery. He is the recipient of the 2024 BioDesign Challenge Grand Prize and has presented at conferences across cybernetics, bio art, and architecture, including RSD12, ASC60, ISEA 2025, and TTT2025. He was nominated for the RIBA Bronze and Silver Medals and is an active member of the Eco-centric Future Lab. Ecocentric Future Lab.
Frederick Steier
Fielding Graduate University | University of South Florida
Frederick Steier is Professor in the School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University and Emeritus at the University of South Florida, where he also served as Director of Interdisciplinary Studies Programs. His work focuses on systemic approaches to social/ecological systems, with attention to whole systems design and learning at multiple levels. His publications include the edited volume Gregory Bateson: Essays for an ecology of ideas (2005), in celebration of the Gregory Bateson centennial, and Research and Reflexivity (1991). More recently, he is co-editor of the volumes Mary Catherine Bateson: Compositions in Living Cybernetics (2023, with Jane Jorgenson) and Humberto Maturana: Reflections on Bringing Forth Worlds (2023, with Pille Bunnell).
He has led participatory action research programs in a wide variety of settings, ranging from government institutions, such as NASA, to science centres, such as the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), in Tampa, Florida, where he was also a Scientist-in-Residence exploring the systemic design of learning spaces.
In 2019, Frederick was honoured to receive the Norbert Wiener Award for lifetime achievement from the American Society for Cybernetics. Earlier, in 1985, he had the honour of being named a King Olav V Fellow by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which led to collaborative relationships with researchers at the Work Research Institutes in Oslo and the University of Oslo that continue to this day.
Frederick received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Social Systems Sciences in 1983. On reflection, that program, with its emphasis on systems thinking and systems practice, has fostered a transdisciplinary life, creating opportunities for serious play across boundaries.
Claudia Westermann
American Society for Cybernetics
Claudia Westermann is an artist-researcher and licensed architect. She has held faculty positions at the TU Vienna in Austria and Xi’an-Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, and, since September 2025, she is Associate Professor of Creative Practice in the School of Design and the Built Environment at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. She is a licensed member of the German Chamber of Architects, Vice President of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), and managing co-editor of Technoetic Arts, a journal that has fostered transdisciplinary and creative-practice-based research for more than two decades. Claudia Westermann’s projects have been shown in many prestigious exhibitions. She has received awards for her practice and teaching, including two provincial and three national awards related to studio teaching and a county-level award for a Philosophy of Art module. For her visionary engagement fostering systemic research and practice, she received the Margaret Mead Prize from the American Society for Cybernetics in 2024.
