The old no longer works, and the new hasn’t fully arrived yet. What exactly are we moving toward, and how to keep on moving? Mechanistic paradigms brought a lot of comfort, but we have now realized that this came at a too high cost to the natural environment. Being in the middle of upgrading our behaviours, this shift naturally brings bumps, hiccups, and confusions. As opening to the new is rather inevitable…
 

..how to experience something familiar in a new way? 

...how to disrupt established behaviour and introduce a novel pathway of interacting with the surroundings?

...how to scale out individually experienced behavioural shifts to a global level of a social paradigm shift on the planetary path to sustainable and regenerative futures? 

Imagine you are an electron... If we were to split a grain of sand into a trillion tiny pieces, the mass of one of these pieces would be your mass. You have two natures: depending on whether a physicist measures your behaviour or not, you show up either as a particle or as a wave, experiencing suchphenomena as superposition, quantum tunnelling, or quantum entanglement…

When exploring new (re)sources for individual and societal transformation toward life-honoring human cultures, quantum physics provides an interesting lens for interpreting the world. Alongside its computational and empirical foundations, it also engages with what remains for now unobservable, opening the field of the yet-unknown. 

Quantum Metaphoric Design (QMD) is a framework addressing the (re)generative potential of uncertainty, ambiguity, and counterintuitiveness accompanying critical moments of transformation - when the old no longer works, and the new hasn’t fully arrived yet. Inspired by quantum physics phenomena, it experiments how nanoscale, nonlinear, and nonlocal processes can be translated into macroscale, multisensory, immersive experiences, opening possibilities to engage with dimensions of reality that currently escape direct experience. Complementing scientific perspectives, QMD chooses artistic practices as a means of shaping scenarios for the unfolding world(s).

The key element of the QMD experiment is the spontaneous, unforced emergence of content beyond the so-far-known, at both the individual and collective levels, without imposing a predetermined structure. Rather than instructing or guiding, it offers an inspirational form of space-holding.

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• Reading: Exploring fascinating unknowns beyond systems thinking, Sylwia Orczykowska, Medium, May 25, 2024.
   

• Art & Quantum Social Transformation Lab hosted within the framework of the RSD I Systemic Design Symposium, Arcs of Impact, Toronto, Canada, October 15-18, 2025: see invitation and photo highlights.
   

The QMD concept, Sylwia Orczykowska's own exploratory term for this design approach, has been in development since early 2023 and, given its pioneering nature, remains a work in progress.