From Knowledge Transfer to Living Systems: Reimagining Universities Through a Systemic Design Lens

We live in a time when the scaffolding of our modern institutions is straining under the weight of the polycrisis. Climate disruption, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation are not isolated anomalies—they are symptoms of deeper systemic dissonance. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in higher education. Our universities—once beacons of Enlightenment-era certainty—are increasingly out of step with the complexity and interdependence of the world we now inhabit.

It is time to reimagine these institutions—not as static repositories of knowledge, but as living, breathing ecologies that nurture both human and planetary flourishing.

At Studio Imaginal, we work at the intersection of futures thinking, systemic design, and regenerative cultures. And in my other role as Head of Service Design at The Open University, I encounter daily the invitation—and challenge—of shifting a large, distributed learning institution toward more relational, regenerative ways of being.

Otto Scharmer’s Universities as Innovation Ecologies (2025) lands not just as theory, but as a grounded call to action: to redesign the purpose and presence of our institutions.

Rebalancing Our Ways of Knowing

Scharmer suggests that universities must evolve from knowledge dispensers into spaces of praxis—where self, society, and soil are regenerated together. This echoes Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s call in Outgrowing Modernity (2025) to move from “educational responses to ignorance” toward “educational responses to denial.”

In both perspectives, the invitation is clear: to shift from accumulation to metabolisation.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) reminds us of the power of reciprocity in learning: knowledge as a gift with responsibility, not a commodity for extraction. Indigenous and ecological ways of knowing teach us that learning is embodied, place-based, and deeply relational.

What might it look like for universities to embrace not-knowing as generative ground? To see discomfort not as failure, but as the compost of transformation?

This is not abstraction—it’s the essence of systemic design. And it starts by reframing the university not as an institution to be defended, but as a relational process to be co-created, composted, and continually renewed.

Universities as Living Systems

At The Open University, we are learning to move from service improvement to service transformation—from reactive silos to responsive ecologies. This mirrors the U-shaped journey Scharmer describes: sensing, presencing, and prototyping. It also aligns with the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective’s call to shift from “doing to” toward “being with.”

This is slow, deeply relational work. It asks us to rethink leadership—not as control, but as the ability to hold space in complexity.

We are asking:

• What kind of leadership is needed in times of rupture and reconstitution?

• What infrastructures support action learning rooted in place, purpose, and possibility?

• How do we design for emergence, not just efficiency?

  
  

Nora Bateson’s work on Warm Data invites us to see the invisible threads between people, systems, and contexts—reminding us that what we often miss in institutional change is the relational space itself. At Studio Imaginal, we describe this as cultivating the conditions for regenerative cultures—not designing linear solutions but tending the soil where new patterns might take root.

Designing for Regenerative Agency

Too often, universities define the student experience through touchpoints—digital, physical, administrative. But what if we reframed the lens toward student agency? Not just the ability to navigate the system, but the capacity to reshape it?

Scharmer identifies three levels of action learning:

1. Structured exposure

2. Immersive learning

3. Transformative, regenerative practice

   
   

Most institutions remain at level one. Transitioning to level three requires what he calls “social middleware”—those subtle, often invisible relational infrastructures of trust, co-sensing, and co-creation.

As service designers, we might represent this through blueprints or journey maps. But as systemic designers, we know: the blueprint is not the territory. The real work happens in the relational field—in the “social soil” Scharmer describes, and in what Machado de Oliveira names as the space where denial is metabolised into deeper awareness.

As Adrienne Maree Brown writes in Emergent Strategy (2017), transformation happens in fractals—in the small, in the relational, in the patterns we nurture daily.

Studio Imaginal: Living the Questions

At Studio Imaginal, we help organisations live the questions that matter. What if universities became spaces of becoming — where learning is not transactional, but a co-evolutionary dance with complexity?

This is design not as problem-solving, but as possibility sensing. A practice of imagination, attunement, and benign rebellion—what Burnout From Humans (2025) describes as “composting modernity's harmful patterns into the soil of a different relational paradigm.”

We are not updating the software of higher education. We are rethinking the entire operating system.

Watering the Seeds

As the structures of higher education groan under the pressure of collapse, patching won’t do. We need new ways of sensing, structuring, and stewarding learning—ways that blend ancestral wisdom with technological foresight, that centre relational integrity over institutional survival.

The seeds of this future already exist—in action labs, in cross-sector constellations, in place-based learning rooted in soil, story, and self.

Let’s water them.

References & Influences

Bateson, N. (2021) Warm data: Contextualising complexity. Stockholm: International Bateson Institute.

brown, a.m. (2017) Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (n.d.) GTDF.space. [online] Available at: https://decolonialfutures.net [Accessed 29 Mar. 2025].

GTDF Arts/Research Collective (2024) Burnout from humans: A little book about AI that’s not really about AI. [online] Available at: https://burnoutfromhumans.net [Accessed 29 Mar. 2025].

Kimmerer, R.W. (2013) Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021) Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Machado de Oliveira, V. (2025) Outgrowing modernity: Navigating complexity, complicity, and collapse with accountability and compassion. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Manzini, E. (2015) Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Scharmer, O. (2025) Universities as innovation ecologies for human and planetary flourishing. Field of the Future Blog. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/universities-as-innovation-ecologies-for-human-and-planetary-flourishing-84313c75c0d7 [Accessed 29 Mar. 2025].