Hannah Jones, Anette Lundebye, and Mathilda Tham
This online talk sets out to explore arcs of impact in the context of metadesigning, a systemic, relational, emergent and adaptive approach to co-designing design processes and processes of change.
We work from the premise that tools for evaluating impacts also shape which kinds of impacts are created, discerned and valued (and those which are not), and that such tools are typically deeply ingrained within a dominant paradigm. The paper explores how relational metadesign tools and indicators can support a break from such paradigmatic lock-in. This is of vital importance when urgent, complex global challenges are not adequately responded to from within the dominant paradigm (e.g. Stoddard et al, 2021).
We trace a 60-year arc of retrospective and prospective impacts originating from a pioneering relational design education and research environment at Goldsmiths, University of London. The authors were students, educators and researchers in this environment and have since grown relational design approaches in higher education, research, organisational change and activism. From our vantage point in 2025, we explore frameworks that can authentically capture the impacts to date (30 years after the start of the environment). We further speculate on which frameworks might support an arc or arcs of impacts 30 years into the future.
Our examination of frameworks for understanding impacts refers to both models assigned to us by institutions, such as for grading and moderating, and frameworks that we have purposefully designed or adapted. We discuss three key frameworks that have become integral to our practice of setting up conditions, steering the process and assessing and evaluating metadesign activities— the Tetrahedron, the Fourfold Integrative Framework and the Ring of Fire. We reflect upon the different kinds of impacts/ impactful moments that these approaches have supported.
We put the frameworks in dialogue with qualities we have observed in relational design approaches: agentic, emergent, emancipatory, holistic, systemic, intersectional, integrative, transgressive. These hold special promise (e.g. Stoddard et al, 2021) for responding to complex, entangled global challenges, AND are arguably elusive to dominant measuring instruments. We explore the meaningfulness and relatability of the frameworks for evaluating impact at scales from the individual to community/organisation and wider society, as well as the relatability to frameworks ingrained in a dominant paradigm.
As metadesigners, we propose that frameworks or tools for assessing and evaluating metadesign impacts are themselves an emergent part of the metadesign process and, as such, evade a predictive ‘design as planning’ mindset—requiring rather a shift towards considering ‘design as seeding’ (Giaccardi, 2005).
References
- Giaccardi, E. (2005). Metadesign as an Emergent Design Culture. Leonardo 38 (4), pp.342-349.
- Stoddard, I., Anderson, K., Capstick, S., et al. (2021). Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve? Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 46, pp. 653–689. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-011104
PROFILES
Hannah Jones
University of Wales Trinity St. Davids
Hannah Jones is a design educator and researcher with nearly 20 years of experience in co-designing sustainable and inclusive futures. She currently supervises PhD students with a focus on metadesigning at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and teaches design research methods to landscape architecture master's students at the University of Greenwich.
Previously, she taught regularly at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford University, where she was a teaching fellow from 2015 to 2016. She continues to collaborate on research at Stanford, exploring intersectional approaches to designing socially and environmentally inclusive products and technologies.
Anette Lundebye
Regent's University London | Artist, Coach, Catalyst
Anette Lundebye works at the intersection of creativity, sustainability, and relational design, applying metadesign and co-creative methods across sectors in the UK, France, and Scandinavia. As a senior lecturer at Regent’s University London, she teaches sustainability and design thinking at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, using systemic and interdisciplinary approaches. Her artistic practice includes research on olfactory memory (supported by an Arts Council England DYCP grant) and socially engaged projects with the collective Foreign Investment. In 2023, she launched Lundebye Press with the publication of Super Special Normal, an artist book exploring grief, loss, and ableism.
As a certified leadership coach through the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM), Anette supports individuals navigating transitions by helping them gain clarity, purpose, and confidence to act. Her research and facilitation work span futures thinking, participatory design, and systemic coaching, with a consistent focus on releasing creative potential within and between people and their contexts.
Mathilda Tham
Linnaeus University | Goldsmiths, University of London
Mathilda Tham is a feminist activist and metadesigner whose work creates thought and action spaces outside the economic growth logic. She is a Professor in Design at Linnaeus University, Sweden, where she has pioneered degree programmes focused on change-making and is affiliated with Goldsmiths, University of London. Her visionary work in research, activism, transdisciplinary co-creation, and fashion as futures making has been published internationally. She is the co-author of Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan (2019) with Kate Fletcher. The Earth Logic project has led to policy initiatives for the global fashion sector (European Environment Bureau), new media platforms, and a series of dialogues with industry and governance. Mathilda Tham is a co-founder of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion.
She was a member of the Board of Mistra Future Fashion, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research. At Linnaeus University, Mathilda Tham serves as the scientific leader for The Bridge Collaboration Arena. She leads the Forest Meetings project, hosted by the Linnaeus Knowledge Environment's Green Sustainable Development initiative.
From 2023, Mathilda Tham leads the project, Cultural Entrepreneurship, Earth Logic Design, which systematically evaluates the values that design based on a new logic can create. This project is part of the larger project InKuis, PI Anders Högberg (Kamprad Foundation), with the aim of exploring and strengthening the opportunities for cultural entrepreneurship in Småland.
