CALL FOR PAPERS | FROM CYBERNETICS TO CO-CREATION
Deadline: 
10 June 2026 to 17 July 2026
Publication: 
Leonardo
From Cybernetics to Co-Creation: The Promise and Limits of Systems Thinking

From early cybernetics and feedback systems to contemporary networked ecologies and participatory platforms, systems thinking has profoundly shaped artistic, scientific, and technological practice. This Focus Section revisits systems-based approaches not as closed models, but as living, adaptive, and often contested frameworks, grounded in historical trajectories while reimagined for present and future conditions. 

We invite papers that critically examine how systems thinking has enabled and constrained forms of collaboration, authorship, governance, and care. How might contemporary practices move beyond control, optimization, or abstraction toward co-creation, relationality, and situated knowledge? What can transdisciplinary systems approaches contribute not only to health, well-being, and social resilience, but also to processes of repair and healing within fractured ecological and cultural systems?

Contributions should consider how systems thinking can be reoriented toward more just, regenerative, and hopeful forms of collective sense-making in an era of planetary instability.

Topics may include (but are not limited to): participatory systems, social and ecological feedback loops, cybernetics and care, organizational and institutional systems, indigenous and non-Western systems knowledge, and critiques of techno-solutionism. Contributions may take historical, theoretical, experimental, or practice-based forms, and should foreground how integrative methods generate new insights across art, science, and technology.

Proposals and Inquiries
Interested authors may submit manuscript proposals to editor@leonardo.info.

Manuscript Submissions
For detailed instructions for manuscript and art preparation, visit Information for Journal Authors.

To submit a completed manuscript, upload to Editorial Express  (link is external)(link is external)

Please indicate which call you are submitting for in the submission notes.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Leonardo 60th | From Cybernetics to Co-Creation | Leonardo/ISAST