Design Practices Transitioning Towards Embracing Systemic Worldviews

Abstract

This editorial introduces the special issue Design Practices Transitioning Towards Embracing Systemic Worldviews, which addresses the urgent need for design approaches capable of engaging with the complexities of sustainable transitions. Contemporary socio-ecological and socio-technical challenges are increasingly understood as interconnected and dynamic, requiring design to move beyond linear problem-solving paradigms toward systemic, relational and multi-scalar practices. Drawing on perspectives from transition design and systemic design, the issue explores how design can operate within evolving systems by engaging diverse forms of intelligence, including human, ecological and computational. The editorial situates systemic worldviews as a synthesis of systems thinking, systemic design and pluriversal approaches, highlighting an ongoing epistemological and ontological shift in design practice. This shift reframes design as a practice of sense-making, mediation and infrastructuring, oriented toward enabling conditions for transformation rather than delivering predefined solutions. Across the contributions, designers are repositioned as embedded actors who work with, rather than on, complex systems, engaging multiple stakeholders and navigating uncertainty, conflict and emergent change. At the same time, the issue reveals key tensions and gaps that require further investigation, including challenges related to evaluation, scale, knowledge production and the political dimensions of systemic design. By bringing together diverse theoretical and practice-based perspectives, this special issue contributes to advancing design as a discipline capable of addressing the interconnected challenges of sustainability transitions, while critically reflecting on its own limitations and responsibilities in shaping systemic change.