In this chapter, we wish to tie together the grand project of world-making with the moment when an individual experiences themselves genuinely in touch with their surroundings and entirely present. Building on ontologies that take process and entanglement as starting points, we believe it is by stringing together such moments that sound world-making can take place. This is an understanding that world-making—and therefore stewardship of ecosystems (as well as of interconnected social justice)—takes place from inside and literally in anybody’s here and now (see also Tham, 2022). In this chapter we share how we come to this position from an understanding of urgent global challenges and what it takes to respond to them. We see pedagogy in nature education, and for a broad understanding of sustainability, as the practice of being and staying in touch. Nature education is therefore here taken as an expression of sustainability pedagogics (Boehnert, 2015; Leichenko & O’Brien, 2020; Mugnaini et al., 2025; Ståhl et al., 2023; Stoddard et al., 2021; Wamsler et al., 2021).

Our primary interface with education is a particular design education environment: bachelor and master of fine arts degree programs in the Department of Design, Linnaeus University, Sweden.

In the chapter we ask and seek to address the question, “How can design education and research for change contribute to intergenerational nature education in terms of its purpose, pedagogical approaches, and the risks it might pose?”

In a world of increasing complexity, designers working in transitional spaces face blockages imposed by the dominant, locked-in capitalist mindset. Frustrated by the impediments in the systems we try to change, we were prompted to go deeper into the conditions for our change agency, as researchers focused on sustainability and long-term straddlers of industry and academia. As we asked how we can navigate being change agents within complex systems, we turned to becoming systems change pen pals, following the steps of a metadesign tool, which takes us from the remit of personal feelings to future perspectives and new vantage points for our respective and collective change work. This paper shares insights from this collaborative autoethnographic method. It proposes Pen-palling Systems Change as an accessible and agentic tool for change agents, as co-reflections are needed to extend our relatedness and care for the resilience required for long-term, complex change.

En fot stadigt förankrad i jorden. Några grässtrån följer med skosulan när foten lättar. Tankarna är fokuserade för att klara förändringen från spring till gå. Snart går det av sig självt att alltid ha en fot i marken och vi kan lyfta blicken. 

Vi är väldigt många som har erfarenhet av och känner till olika fotbollskulturer, särskilt springfotbollskulturer. Från skolan, från fritiden och kanske från proffsarenor. Med skiftet från spring till gå sker också en kulturförändring. De som bidrar till förändringen genom att röra sig emellan olika kulturer kan vi kalla för entreprenörer. I rörelsen förflyttas olika bitar som fogas samman genom kreativitet. 

In Holding Surplus House we have been inquiring into change for multispecies flourishing - starting in households as dynamic units, experimenting with resources, values and seasons. We have made two main tracks: Citizen Budgeting and Seasonal Clothing

Access to clean and healthy water in households is a global concern. Although the value of water is recognised, human actions demonstrate the opposite. Uncontrolled consumption, increasing drylands, deterioration, and pollution of water sources are some manifestations of the human water footprint. These actions evidence a paradox of value, a discrepancy between the intention and the action of water care. To this extent, and to decipher this paradox, this research project was conducted through design where the systemic value of water was studied in the context of Swedish households. The central question was to identify what are those values, mindsets, norms, behaviours, and lifestyles associated with the use of freshwater in households. In addressing this question, theories such as social norms, behaviour, and systems, as well as local, regional, and global projects, were reviewed, and the behaviour was mapped with the help of open surveys, as well as with stakeholders involving a technical expert from government, design teachers and industry-connected designers with the intention of revealing the systemic value of water. As a result, two areas of the system emerged that are useful for guiding design efforts to reduce the intention-action gap. The first area focuses on mapping norms and behaviours with respect to value preferences and expectations. These norms and behaviours were organised into levels of product and service design and systemic, organisational, and social design. The second area identified twenty behavioural components that were grouped into four factors related to the functioning of motivation, education, information, and social relations that increase the water value gap.

The chapter positions a belief that we can and must have overview before we act as a barrier to real change, a belief intertwined with the economic growth logic, sexism, racism and human exceptionalism that co-creates unsustainability. Instead, it proposes metadesign as an uncompromisingly systemic and holistic craft of making change from within a ball of yarn. It takes the reader on a journey and meditation from Me to We to World and Back Again, exploring how a system of approaches—languaging, learning and governance—can support change agency from within each position. The chapter foregrounds care as a relational, intimate practice of healing available to anyone, anywhere; thereby decentralising response ability (Haraway, 2008) in the face of urgent convergent social and ecological crises.

This text explores what it can be like to care from within fashion, drawing on the experience of activism from within fashion since the mid 1990s. It offers a metadesign framework with nested levels of fashion activity to identify agentic spaces in fashion and beyond.

This chapter, discusses the notion of Equality in Hannah Arendt's work, and how equality can purposefully be practised in and through design. It proposes a set of principles for designing equality, specifically informed by the notion that genuine equality work is risky, because it necessitates taking sides; not being anti-racist is being racist. The chapter points to the intersectionality of sexism and racism with hierarchies of ways of knowing - epistemology.

Introduction to the project BOOST metadesign, and the context of metadesign.

This workshop offers care-oke, a singing orchestra of care, as a design method and ritual to simultaneously manifest and probe care of self, care of others, care of community, care of matters of care in collaboration. We argue that such silly-serious approaches have an important role to play in injecting vulnerability, social risk-taking, feminist ways of knowing into complex change work addressing complex global challenges. Participants will experience coming together in care-oke, and reflecting on what singing as caring can mean for design cultures and collaborations.