Lenny van Onselen, Guido Stompff, Liliya Terzieva, and Remko van der Lugt
This paper presents a cross-case analysis of ten cases of Systemic Co-Design (SCD) practice in higher education, community initiatives, and international collaborations. It addresses a central pedagogical question for design and systems-oriented education: does learning Systemic Co-Design rely on traditional knowledge transfer, or does it require a fundamentally different pedagogy grounded in collective learning and emergence?
Drawing on qualitative analysis, the study examines how learning unfolds when SCD methodologies are applied across diverse contexts, including curricula, living labs, and transdisciplinary partnerships. Across cases, learning is not observed as the transmission or translation of predefined knowledge. Instead, knowledge emerges and transforms through interaction, co-presence, making, and reflection. Participants learn by engaging with one another and the system itself, often encountering insights they could not have produced individually.
A cross-case analysis revealed six interrelated themes. First, systems awareness reflects how learners and educators come to recognise their roles and responsibilities within larger institutional and societal systems. Second, time and rhythm highlight tensions between institutional timelines and the slower, iterative tempo required for systemic learning. Third, respect and empathy emphasise listening, visualisation, and shared experience as conditions for trust and collective sense-making. Fourth, power addresses persistent asymmetries in decision-making and legitimacy that remain present within co-design practices and must be actively navigated. Fifth, vulnerability emerges as a necessary condition for learning, as participants confront uncertainty, ambiguity, and not-knowing. Sixth, connectedness captures how team-level dynamics mirror broader system patterns across organisational and societal scales.
Together, these findings suggest that SCD education requires a shift from instructional pedagogies towards facilitative approaches that create conditions for emergence and collective capability-building. Educators act as facilitators of learning processes rather than transmitters of knowledge, while learners become co-creators of insight and action. The paper offers an empirically grounded account of collective learning in SCD, a thematic lens for analysing SCD pedagogy, and implications for redesigning higher education in the context of societal transition. It argues for a shift from instructional models towards facilitative pedagogies that enable emergence and collective learning.
Keywords: systemic co-design, collective learning, pedagogy, education