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August 14, 2026 | RSD15–SÃO PAULO
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RSD15 is on! Co-located activites in São Paulo and Turin, livestreamed talks, Mapping Mondays, Workshop Wednesdays, and Paper Talks with authors. New events and collaborations will be added throughout the season. Explore plurality as it unfolds from August to October.
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Contexts of Brazil and Latin America
RSD15–São Paulo kicks off two months of systemic design
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This year, the RSD15 Symposium runs from August to October. Our wonderful host team at Politecnico di Torino is led by Silvia Barbero, Amina Pereno, and Asja Aulisio, culminating in the annual RSD gathering in Turin in October. We begin on Wednesday, August 19 with the Symbiotic Design Framework, the first in our series of online Workshop Wednesdays, inviting us to step into the Pluriverse with Gonzalo Ranieri Bernain. RSD-15–São Paulo, organised by Rosana Vasques and Bruno Madureira Ferreira, takes place on Thursday, August 20 at ESPM TECH–Campus Joaquim Távora, and all sessions will also be livestreamed through the RSD15 hub.
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Please register in advance for the ESPM on-campus event and for any or all online sessions you would like to attend, so that you receive session information and reminders. As always, RSD15 online events are pay-what-you-can through donations to the Systemic Design Association; there is no fee for the ESPM on-campus programme. If you are joining only the August 19–20 programme, or registering after August 18, please register directly through the RSD15 hub. Download the programme.
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Workshop Wednesdays | August 19
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First online workshop: The Symbiotic Design Framework facilitated by Gonzalo Raineri Bernain
The Symbiotic Design Framework offers a rigorous pedagogical transition from extractive, anthropocentric design toward autopoietic social systems. Grounded in the theoretical lineage of Maturana, Varela, and Luhmann, the framework addresses "wicked problems" by redefining design as a self-producing organism rather than a producer of inert objects. Drawing on Arturo Escobar's concept of the Pluriverse, the framework integrates epistemic justice and diverse knowledge systems to dismantle the coloniality often embedded in design standards. Participants engage in a systemic audit of seven interdependent components to identify and transform relational pathologies. By mapping interactions through six symbiotic typologies practitioners develop a Systemic Diagnostic Report. This outcome empowers designers to shift from extractive practices toward mutualistic configurations, ensuring that design interventions contribute to a world where many worlds fit and foster collective flourishing.
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This workshop is one hour and scheduled at a Europe+Americas time to align with RSD15–São Paulo. Gonzalo will offer it again at a time that's Asia–Pacific friendly later in the programme.
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Conversation Studio | August 20
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RSD Conversation Studios bring together perspectives on how systemic design is being understood and practised. This roundtable explores the relationships between design, systems, ways of knowing, and the social and technological conditions in which practice takes place, with an emphasis on Brazil and across Latin America.
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The studio runs for one hour, with some authors on campus and others online.
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Flávia Dutra
Between Knowing and Becoming: Evaluation as service in cooperative financial ecosystems
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Bruno Madureira Ferreira
Design as Condition of Existence: Reflections on a post-Promethean agency in the digital era
Co-authors: Amina Pereno and Massimo Di Felice
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María Suter Warnholtz
Designing from Within: Interior design and the enactive roots of systemic knowing
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Thais Arrias Weiller
A Systemic Approach to Game Design: Past discussions, current techniques and future applications
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Rosana Vasques and Mari Suoheimo
Service Design Across Buchanan's Four Orders: Insights from participatory workshops in funeral contexts
Co-authors: Marja Kuronen and Christoph Stahl
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Talks | August 20
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These four talks offer an opportunity to hear directly from people living and working within Brazilian and wider Latin American contexts. Together, they bring situated perspectives grounded in local knowledge, practice, and experience, while raising questions that resonate across the international field of systemic design. Each set of talks is one hour.
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Carla Link: Designing Integrated Systems for Early Childhood Development
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Professor & Coordinator of the MBA Experience Design programme, ESPM-SP
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In São Paulo, an Integrated Protocol for the Care of Infants was developed through participatory design with municipal departments and frontline practitioners. The initiative uses human-centred service design and cross-sector collaboration to reduce institutional fragmentation, align services around family needs, and build shared responsibility across the public system. The project focuses on strengthening coordination among health, education, and social assistance to ensure that pregnant women, young children, and families receive more continuous and integrated public support.
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Massimo Di Felice: From the Anthropocene to the Plastocene: The Emergence of Complexity
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Professor, Escola de Comunicações e Artes, University of São Paulo, and founding director of ATOPOS
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The Plastocene is a way of understanding a world increasingly shaped by artificial materials, digital networks, and hybrid socio-technical ecologies. The lecture moves beyond a human-centred account of the Anthropocene to consider how technological, material, ecological, and social systems are becoming deeply entangled. It examines the emergence of new forms of complexity in which nature and technology can no longer be treated as separate domains. It asks what these conditions mean for our understanding of agency, organisation, and inhabitation in a networked world.
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Cecília Loschiavo: From professional designers to people who transform discarded materials
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Professor of Design, the University of São Paulo
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Focusing on the transformation of discarded materials through necessity, improvisation, and situated knowledge, Cecília examines spontaneous design as a form of material intelligence. The talk raises epistemological questions about professional design, informal practices, and the kinds of knowledge that become visible when attention shifts from designed objects to the people who remake and repurpose what others discard. Cecília’s research into homelessness, informal recycling and spontaneous design shifts attention from the professional designer to people who transform discarded materials out of necessity.
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Amina Pereno: Shades of Systemic Design—Designing within a plural world
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Associate Professor in Design, Politecnico di Torino
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As RSD15 Co-Chair, Amina's talk connects the conversations emerging in São Paulo with RSD15's wider exploration of designing within a plural world. Drawing on work spanning healthcare, circular economies, territorial systems, education, and participatory design, Amina considers how systemic design can bring diverse actors and situated knowledges into dialogue, making relationships visible and opening possibilities for collective change.
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RSD15: What's unfolding
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RSDX Festival features Mapping Mondays and Workshop Wednesdays throughout RSD15. Cybernetics: Conversational Confluences, hosted by the American Society for Cybernetics, continues and extends the ASC 2026 conference online. Bodymind, hosted by the Coordinated Management of Meaning Institute, explores neurodiversity, access, and communication. RSD15 host Politecnico di Torino convenes Paper Talks online, followed by Shades of Systemic Design in Turin, bringing the systemic design community together around pluralism in theory and practice. The programme concludes with Regenerative, a retreat hosted by Mon Viso Institute and ETH Zurich’s DRRS programme, exploring regeneration and systemic design in complexity.
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