Design Research towards socio-technical complex systems: A designerly systemic impact of Tourism value-chain

The willingness to investigate and increasingly tackle complex phenomena becomes a requirement that leads many researchers to move towards Design which deals more and more with Systems. This opens up the Design discipline to move towards the value chain level and also to lead and reframe newly established research domains. But how can we measure the impact that Design has on these new contexts at the meso scale? This paper suggests that to do so, we must start with needs directly arising from and outside the Academia, taking advantage of European funds to co-design with stakeholders by experimenting. The tourism value chain is the one selected, characterised by a highly complex and fragmented number of stakeholders and activities, marked by a business-as-usual model. Decision-makers are increasingly striving for a sustainable sector transition; hence, the Design research community is advancing systemic reflections on co-creating sustainable and impactful strategies.