Towards Living System Maps: Reimagining systemic design tools as adaptive, inclusive, and participatory infrastructures—with and beyond AI

Dulaj Perera, Jairo da Costa Junior, Wouter Eggink, and Geke Ludden

This workshop invites participants to engage in a collaborative inquiry into the concept of Living System Maps as an approach to reimagining systemic design tools as adaptive, inclusive, and participatory infrastructures. Participants engage in a series of hands-on and reflective activities to explore how systemic design tools could better support situated engagement, shared authorship, and meaningful participation in complex contexts.

Grounded in the submitted RSD14 paper “Inclusive Complexity: Towards enhancing systemic design methodologies with support for relational sense-making and decision-making,” this workshop builds on the idea that systemic design tools are not neutral artefacts but methodological mediators, tools that shape who participates, how knowledge is legitimised, and what forms of influence are possible. Participants work with a pre-framed system map and reflect through the lens of four relational capacities introduced in the paper: authorship, comprehension, safety, and agency. These capacities enable the evaluation of how tools facilitate or hinder inclusive engagement. They are supported by a set of guiding principles that inform the workshop’s overall structure and facilitation approach.

Building on earlier reflections, participants engage in a speculative design exercise to explore how AI might contribute to more equitable, context-aware, and participatory systemic design practices. Using provocations such as AI as a translator, facilitator, visual explainer, or bias detector, participants explore ways in which emerging technologies can assist rather than replace human sense-making in complex design settings. AI is framed not as a technical fix but as a design material—something that must itself be shaped by the values and principles of inclusive and reflexive practice.

This workshop builds directly on the submitted RSD14 paper and serves as an early design experiment within the broader doctoral research project “AI-Driven Systemic Design Methodologies for Planetary Health Actions” (2024–2028). Participants leave with embodied insights into how systemic tools are experienced in practice, a deeper understanding of their limitations, and a shared vocabulary of relational design principles for shaping future tools—with and beyond AI.

KEYWORDS: systemic design, participatory mapping, design tools, methodological mediators, AI-assisted design, inclusive design, reflexive practice

RSD TOPIC(S): Methods & Methodology, Mapping & Modelling, Sociotechnical Systems

Related RSD14 paper

Inclusive Complexity: Towards enhancing systemic design methodologies with support for relational sense-making and decision-making