Conference Agenda

Systemic design is increasingly emerging as a foundational concept in contemporary design research, attracting growing scholarly attention. However, despite converging ambitions toward addressing complexity, the field remains characterized by diverse terminologies, conceptual framings, and methodological vocabularies. This plurality, while intellectually productive, often raises the entry barrier for new researchers and risks duplication of effort due to unclear conceptual boundaries and fragmented knowledge development. To address this challenge, this study traces the historical evolution and theoretical roots of systemic design, clarifying its conceptual scope, key constructs, and stages of theoretical formation. Building on this foundation, it further examines the historical trajectory of Chinese systemic thinking and design traditions, and contrasts them with Western systemic design paradigms. The study argues that Chinese systemic thought, embedded in everyday life, ethical practice, and socio-cultural philosophy, constitutes a long-standing system paradigm that holds significant value for enriching and diversifying contemporary systemic design discourse.

Pluralism is essential for transformations toward regeneration, to (re)align human activity with holistic planetary health. Systemic design’s pluralistic intentions offer a promising pathway, yet its methodologies rarely match the complexity they aim to engage. The focus often falls on adding new methods instead of examining how methodologies function. As a result, systemic design methodologies struggle to navigate the contextual, epistemic, and cultural differences within plural pathways toward regeneration. This paper argues that systemic design methodologies can negotiate pluralism more effectively when functioning as complex systems themselves: nonlinear, emergent, and relational. Drawing on participatory action research across three diverse communities, I offer a reflexive perspective on engaging with methodological pluralism in practice. I then introduce a visual heuristic showing how plural methodologies can be understood as ongoing dialogues with complexity. This paper aims to support systemic designers in embracing pluralism and emergence as core methodological capacities for regenerative transformations.

Systemic design addresses complex, transdisciplinary challenges by integrating systems thinking and design methods. Yet, academic discourse remains limited to formal research and institutional methods, “invisibilizing” the rich, plural, and grounded practices of grassroots non-designer practitioners such as social workers, indigenous knowledge practitioners, and community facilitators. This paper challenges that narrow epistemology, and advocates restoring practice-centricity and incorporating plurality & pluriversality as essential ethical and political commitments to advancing the field. Mashing up the metaphors of “The Blind Men and the Elephant” and “The Elephant in the Room”, it highlights the need to proactively accommodate multiple perspectives for better reflexivity. The article critiques systemic theory’s limits, urges restoring practitioner wisdom to the centre, and legitimizing embodied, tacit, and cultural knowledges. Drawing on case studies and pluriversal principles, it calls for democratizing systemic design to foster epistemic justice and inclusivity, making it more relevant to and effective in real-world systemic transformations.

Integrating systems thinking and design thinking offers a promising approach to address systemic challenges in healthcare. However, existing studies apply diverse systems thinking theories and methods across different healthcare contexts, and design also shows methodological pluralism. Such diversity has created conceptual fragmentation and uncertainty about how designers can meaningfully apply systems thinking. This paper presents a scoping review of 44 empirical studies that apply both design approaches and systems thinking theories or methods in healthcare service systems. The analysis examines where systems thinking is positioned within studies and identifies four relationship types: (1) design as systemic practice, (2) systems thinking informing design, (3) design–systems thinking integration, (4) design supporting systems thinking. It also highlights the practical challenges that emerge from the integration. The study clarifies the current landscape of how design engages with systems thinking and outlines research opportunities for advancing systems thinking to address healthcare complexity.

This paper investigates how critical design can challenge universalist frameworks in design education and open up space for pluriversal perspectives. We explore the use of provocative probes as a concrete pedagogical method for cultivating pluriversal thinking and critical reflection. Our theoretical reflections are empirically grounded in a one-week workshop in which design students created and deployed provocative probes to surface experiences of those who ‘misfit’ and to initiate public interactions around these lived experiences. The notion of misfitting was used to introduce complexity and reflexivity. Findings show that while students began to delink from solutionist thinking and engage with plural perspectives, the practical constraints of the workshop limited opportunities for deeper systemic understanding. The paper concludes by discussing the epistemic and pedagogical implications of fostering pluriversal and critical design education within universalist institutional structures.