Facing a Phytosanitary Emergency through Transdisciplinary Approach of Systemic Design

Nowadays the designer is called to face increasingly complex problems and multi-faceted challenges of great importance. This factor leads designers to redefine the boundaries of their profession through interaction with other scientific and humanistic disciplines, in order to integrate a holistic view of reality and achieve higher degree of results completeness. A transdisciplinary approach and the dissemination of research outside academia become important aspects of this new professional perspective, which encourages the designer to investigate new areas of research and collaborate on several levels with specialised stakeholders in different branches of knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to describe a concrete case of interaction between different disciplines - in the frame of Systemic Design - to eradicate the complex problem of the Olive Quick Decline Syndrome in Salento (Apulia, South of Italy). This phenomenon caused by the progressive proliferation of the pathogenic agent Xylella Fastidiosa, has compromised the environmental, economic and socio-cultural sphere of the territory and has solicited the attention of international authorities and institutions, such as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The paper explains the methodology and the results of a concrete Systemic Design project applied to infected territory.