Laura Niño Cáceres, Anja Overdiek, Celina Whitehead, and Wina Smeenk
This paper examines how shared ways of knowing are produced and sustained within design‑led research networks, addressing a gap in the systemic design literature, which has largely focused on outputs and methods rather than epistemic processes. By epistemic processes we mean the collective activities through which a community produces, validates, shares, sustains, and negotiates knowledge. Through an empirical study of the Expertisenetwork Systemic Co-design (ESC), the paper analyses a workshop framed by dialogical relationality, boundary spanning, and knowledge infrastructuring as complementary theoretical lenses. The findings show that Systemic Co-Design (SCD) emphasises relational, embodied, making-as-sense-making, and community-embedded forms of knowledge. At the same time, tensions emerge around time, scale, power, and the limited articulation of these practices in systems’ transitions. Interpreted through the lens of knowledge infrastructuring, these findings reveal how SCD generates shared epistemic conventions by cultivating relational practices, sustaining trust over time, mediating across institutional boundaries, and protecting plural forms of knowing from standardising pressures. While these processes support the emergence of shared ways of knowing, they also contribute to SCD’s limited visibility within dominant transition governance contexts. The paper argues that SCD should be understood as an evolving epistemological position, and that knowledge infrastructuring offers a critical lens for making explicit how such epistemologies are collectively produced, sustained, and contested in practice. By articulating these infrastructuring dynamics, the paper helps ground SCD as a methodological and epistemological approach and advances ongoing debates about plural ways of knowing in systemic design.
Keywords: Systemic Co-Design, Boundary Spanning, Knowledge Infrastructuring, Dialogical Relationality, Ways of Knowing