Flavia Sollazzo and Michela Mattei
Design education has developed sophisticated tools for teaching the design of complex systems, yet, to our knowledge, has rarely treated the group itself as a design condition—something to be structured, observed, and intentionally cultivated before the beginning of any project. While research has long recognised the importance of group dynamics for collaborative learning, the group often remains a precondition of design work rather than becoming its explicit object. This paper proposes a reversal: the classroom as a first complex adaptive system design students are called to enter, and the design of its relational conditions as an act of systemic design in itself. The paper documents a case of applied research: the Advanced Prototyping Laboratory, a studio course within the Communication Design for Emergencies teaching unit (Master’s in Design for Innovation, Vanvitelli University, a.y. 2024/25). The Laboratory operates as an intentional pedagogical system articulated around two complementary strands. The first integrates four interconnected dimensions—social cognition, collective agreement, ritual, and semantic capital—that aim to progressively build the group’s capacity to recognise itself as a system of interdependencies. The second, “The History of Us”, makes the group visible to itself through three progressive devices of collective data visualisation: Data about us, How do we feel about us?, and How do we feel about the space? Together, these devices create a space where vulnerability and disagreement can emerge as operative conditions of the group, while collective data visualisation, turned inward as self-administration, supports students in decoding and inhabiting the group as a complex system.
Keywords: design education, systemic design, relational pedagogy, social cognition, data literacy RSD TOPIC(S): Learning & Education; Methods, Methodology, & Theory