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VOLUME 3

Negotiating Urban Mobility Futures: Collaborative design futuring with residents in two Munich neighbourhoods

This study addresses pressing issues in urban mobility and examines how participatory design futuring empowers communities to shape sustainable urban mobility futures. Marco Kellhammer, Stefanie Ruf, and Eileen Mandir situate this work within the broader discourses of transition design and systemic design. They examine how structured design futuring workshops empower communities to identify and resolve existing conflicts and to engage with long-term urban mobility transitions. A key insight is that design futuring acts as both a visioning tool and a deliberative practice, enabling the negotiation of conflicting perspectives and collective agency in transition processes.

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The Proof of the Pudding: Introducing quantitative testing in transition design reasoning

Transition design has emerged in response to complexity, and the development of evaluative frameworks is critical to strengthening the field’s credibility, effectiveness, and impact. Amid the field’s growing formalisation, Hannah Goss, Hendrik Schifferstein, Jotte de Koning, and Nynke Tromp propose and empirically test a conceptual framework for evaluation, identifying three outcome qualities—desirability, plausibility, and networkedness—and applying them to a portfolio of interventions aimed at reducing food waste in the Dutch food system. While participants perceived the interventions as both desirable and plausible, the study highlights the importance of integrating feasibility and viability into future evaluative approaches without compromising the systemic ambition that defines transition design.

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Transformative Design Frames: A transdisciplinary model to support designing for sustainability transitions

This article advances transition design research by conceptualising a transformative design frame that integrates insights from design, sustainable behavioural science, and transition studies. Anna-Louisa Peeters, Nynke Tromp, and Paul Hekkert introduce the transdisciplinary model “as a living and evolving reference for transition designers in practice.” It is organised into five key building blocks: Transition Case, Transition Strategy, Systemic Levers, Behaviour Change, and Worldview. Using a qualitative, multiple-case study approach with designers from four Dutch agencies, the research applied framework analysis to interpret findings systematically. Participants highlighted the model’s systematic nature as a key strength. This conceptualisation offers transition designers a tool to enhance design reasoning, framing and reframing and craft comprehensive, persuasive rationales for sustainability transitions.

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VOLUME 2

An Intervention Framework for a Business Context: A systemic design case of sustainable parenthood

How might a systemic design process feasibly enable commercial organisations to facilitate complex societal transitions? Through a case study with a leading consumer healthcare brand, Elisabeth Tschavgova, Elise Talgorn, Charlotte Kobus, Jo van Engelen, Conny Bakker, and Sonja van Dam investigate systemic design’s impact on the company’s capabilities to address complexity. They offer a dual narrative, detailing both the client project and the six research methods employed: boundary setting, causal loop diagramming, leverage analysis, storytelling, quantitative research, and the development of insight cards. The article also describes the resulting MINT framework (Mapping Interventions and Narratives for Transformation).

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Acting on Emotions: Designing with the relational dramas in welfare systems

Audun Formo Hay, together with contributors from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Kristiania University College—Jonathan Romm, Simen Formo Hay, Hobbe Mikae, Jenny Holm, Bjørgum, Lara van der Poel, Yijuan Wang, Anna Kristine Aarø Halvorsen, and Per Roppestad Christensen—draw on their collaborative exploration and learning. The research aimed to integrate experiential and systemic perspectives in service design to support actors in transforming complex welfare systems and include three pairs of propositions for incorporating emotions into systemic approaches to service design.

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Learnings from Black Liberation System Entanglements Part II: Our experience of system traps

In this article, Part II, Victor Udoewa delves deeper into the harmful, context-specific system entanglements that justice workers encounter and encourages system healing-centered approaches. He identifies 15 entanglements, beginning with Neocolonialism and progressing through Institutionalizing Movements, Mythologising Mythology, Protest-Campaign-Movement Discontinuity, and an examination of justice approaches that can inadvertently entangle us in injustice.

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Methodological Pluralism in Practice: A systemic design approach for place-based sustainability transformations

Haley Fitzpatrick, Tobias Luthe, and and Birger Sevaldson explore methodological plurality and integrate quantitative scientific methods with participatory gigamapping and embodied practices. This longitudinal design inquiry engaged with communities undergoing sustainability transformations across three mountain regions: Ostana, Italy; Hemsedal, Norway; and Mammoth Lakes, California. The authors identify the need for contemplative and psychological practices in systemic design that focus on inner resilience.

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Citylab X: Towards a lens on the urban living lab as driver of systemic innovation

Anja Overdiek’s exploration of the ISLE model as a lens for systemic innovation in urban living labs (ULLs) involves the study of a municipal ULL in the Netherlands (Citylab X). She observes that European municipalities increasingly use ULLs for complex situations, demanding a paradigm shift from service design to systemic innovation and a transition approach. The ISLE model is proposed as a process that might support co-creation, provide a heuristic process framework, and mobilise knowledge across ULLs and related networks. The findings include considerations for systemic design practice in ULLs.

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Cosmotechnic Encounters: Designing with foodwaste, landscapes, and livelihoods

Markus Wernli and Kam-Fai Chan consider circularity in organic waste, drawing on Daoist cosmotechnics, design research, anthropology, and diverse economies. They suggest cosmotechnic designing with the world, concluding that designing with shapelessness, integral to systemic design with situatedness and mutualistic care, “is essentially about symbiotic survivability or sympoiesis in cosmotechnics.”

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VOLUME 1

Editorial: Engaged Design Scholarship in Contexts

The editorial for the inaugural volume by Editor in Chief Peter Jones and Deputy Editor Silvia Barbero. They provide an overview of Volume 1 and a brief on the emergence of systemic design as an interdiscipline to Contexts, which they view as reflective of “the common ground of complexity that many design scholars share as a common grand challenge.”

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Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix

Harold Nelson leads the collection with an invited essay, Contexts’ first article, that helps place the footers and foundation into the field that has grown from design for complex scale and generations of systems thinking from the fertile ground of the centre of the 1960s consciousness revolution, the University of California at Berkeley.

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Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning

Dulmini Perera and Tony Fry present a powerful approach to enable systemic critique of innovation propositions and their potential outcomes. The paper takes the form of presenting three “historico-fictions” from the US, China, and Cuba to distinguish these value frames within selected histories of dominant systems. Perera and Fry suggest a “second order design fiction” to bring forth pluralistic expansions of meaning and enable participants in design conversations to recognize many possible positions that might challenge acceleration, defuturing, or sustainment.

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Systemic Spatial Design: Enhancing the potential of spatial design disciplines to navigate adaptive cycles in cities

Elena Porqueddu presents a spatial-architectural theory based on complexity theory and complex adaptation. She advances a systemic approach to mixed-discipline spatial design in urban planning, which she calls “systemic spatial design,” and introduces the “multi-scale atlas.” The paper presents a new approach to spatial design—the designer can intervene in the context, but the approach is adaptive and self-organizational, with no claim to control.

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The Power and Place Collaborative: Participatory strategies for scaling

Danielle Lake, David J. Marshall, Rozana Carducci, and Tracey Thurnes present an action case study of a social lab and interrogate the issues of scaling effective change in social design. This article is valuable for practical instruction on how to achieve diverse forms of scale via more participatory systemic design practices and offers a conceptualization of scaling as a meshy, stretchy place of emergence.

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Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change: A systemic design research agenda

Ryan Murphy extends a body of work with an analysis of the function of intervention points that we understand as leverage and argues that the (theory of) leverage is crucial to understanding systems’ complexity, “Finding leverage means finding advantage: identifying the phenomena in a system with the greatest potential to multiply or compound a changemaker’s efforts to achieve the impact they want.”

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