Smart Learning Ecosystems - Design as cornerstone of smart educational processes and places

In a people-centered perspective, to get smart, a learning ecosystem has to undergo a long evolutionary process involving a combination of co-design, participatory evaluation, and empowering steps, among other things. In this light, design literacy becomes the cornerstone for enabling and supporting this evolutionary path. Digital technologies are expected to act as empowering agents of multidimensional human well-being on that path, helping learning settings recover their central role in educating future citizens and in fostering social innovation and territorial development. Concretizing this vision means also contributing to the reification of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, this is no easy task since, as UNESCO itself suggests , it involves questioning the future of "places " and learning processes, teacher education and training, learning accessibility and all those elements that can ensure learning ecosystems safeguard the well-being of the actors involved and sustain social innovation. In the organic era of interaction dominated by the pervasive presence of devices and networks, achieving SDG 4 - Quality Education, one has also to take into consideration the digital world and the skills associated with it. This notwithstanding, technologies that can in principle offer 'unlimited' possibilities are also harbingers of important criticalities, above all the sustainability of the "digital" itself.