Dulaj Perera, Jairo da Costa Junior, Wouter Eggink and Geke Ludden
This study critically examines whether systemic design methodologies are effective in making sense to people, particularly in the context of planetary health, where complexity, urgency, and epistemic diversity necessitate inclusive and reflexive design practices. While systemic design promises to support collaboration, sense-making, and co-created action, its real-world application can fall short of this potential, especially for non-expert or marginalised participants.
We explore these tensions through a comparative analysis of ten empirical case studies in diverse domains, including food systems, urban governance, climate adaptation, and Indigenous knowledge. Each case is analysed using two complementary frameworks: the Level of Systems Perspective (Neramballi et al., 2022), which assesses how system scale and stakeholder positioning shape engagement, and the Systems Design Approach Framework (da Costa et al., 2019), which explores both system tool functions across inquiry, sense-making, modelling, planning, and evaluation, as well as the methodological paradigms and knowledge creation processes that inform the interpretation and adoption of tool use.
Findings reveal that systemic design tools often become barriers rather than bridges. Tools are rarely co-framed with users, frequently operate at levels too abstract to engage, and routinely overlook participation’s cultural, emotional, and epistemic dimensions. Many tools presume systems literacy and neutrality, undermining the relational and political conditions needed for authentic engagement. These tensions suggest that while systemic design methodologies aspire to inclusivity, the ways they are translated into practice, particularly through tools, often result in stakeholder exclusionary experiences. This disconnect is not inherent to the methodologies themselves but emerges through how tools mediate key engagement capacities.
We reconceptualise tools not as passive supports but as methodological mediators: infrastructures that shape participation, knowledge, and power. From this view, the design of tools is inseparable from the quality of engagement they afford. Building on the cross-case synthesis, we identify four relational capacities — authorship, comprehension, safety, and agency — as critical to whether systemic design “makes sense” in practice.
These capacities inform five guiding principles that reflect, rather than map one-to-one onto, the capacities themselves: co-framing, situated comprehension, epistemic and emotional safety, consequential participation, and iterative reflection. Rather than proposing technical fixes, we offer these principles as conceptual orientations to support a more relational and inclusive enactment of systemic design, particularly through its tools and participatory formats. By doing so, we aim to contribute to the evolving conversation on how systemic design can foster more just, inclusive, and actionable responses to planetary-scale complexity.
Keywords: Systemic Design; Participatory Sense-making; Relational Design; Planetary Health; Stakeholder Engagement; Epistemic Diversity; Design Tools