In 2023, five of us—design practitioners, architects, farmers and educators—came together to conceive and design a new master’s programme titled Social Ecological Design: Regenerative Practices for Everyday Life for IED Torino. From the outset, the programme was guided by a simple but insistent motto: “Out There.” This phrase became both a pedagogical orientation and an ethical commitment. The master’s programme goes out there into real-world contexts and challenges, combining in-class learning with immersive fieldwork across Sicily, Tuscany, and Piedmont (Turin and the Alpine region). It is intentionally oriented out of the classroom, out of conventional design approaches, and out of disciplinary limitations, in order to nurture emergent social and ecological alternatives.
As a collective of co-heads—each bringing distinct expertise, perspectives, approaches, interests, and professional networks, enriching the programme through a plurality of methodological and epistemological approaches. We sought to weave together a master’s programme that is immersive, experimental, and responsive to urgent conditions. Our shared ambition was to create an alternative educational space that reconnects design with lifeworlds and life-affirming practices. The programme foregrounds design as a relational, situated, and caring practice, cultivating deep connections with living systems, material processes, and socio-ecological contexts.
Launched in November 2025, the programme is as a 16-month MA with sustained engagement in communities and ecosystems. Students are developing a versatile and transdisciplinary skill set that includes biomimicry, multispecies thinking, cross-cultural communication, post-human thought. cultural ethnography, creative activism, systems analysis, inclusive design, and regenerative practices. Alongside this, the programme includes a professional internship, allowing students to integrate critical theory with creative practice in real-world contexts and to test their learning within ongoing social and ecological processes.
From my own perspective within this constellation, my role has been to bring in nature-based and more-than-human approaches to learning, drawing on biomimicry, multispecies and post-growth thinking, nature reconnection, and immersive pedagogies. This task is supported by a network of collaborators developed through previous engagements with Swedish institutions and initiatives such as the University of Gothenburg, Konstfack University of Arts. Crafts and Design, Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship SSES, as well as start-up farms and regenerative projects in both Sweden and Tuscany. Through these collaborations, we connect, engage, and continuously rethink what it means to be a designer working with lifeworlds—and, crucially, what it means to educate oneself amid the polycrisis, under the affective and ethical pressures of ecological anxiety.
This is the first time we are running the programme, and we find ourselves fully within the uncertainties, frictions, and potentials of a carefully crafted experiment. Alongside us are ten committed and ambitious designers from 9 different countries around the globe who are undertaking this journey, as together we explore a living curriculum composed of lectures, events, actions, site visits, and situated encounters—each contributing to a shared process of capacity building and collective learning.
Anna Maria Orrù