The transition towards a sustainable society is a long, wide, contradictory learning process that involves the whole society. In this framework, the paper introduces and discusses these main ideas: (1) democracy, by its very nature, is the political regime in which learning processes can happen at best. (2) The search for a democratic regime converges with the one for distributed sociotechnical systems. (3) To be conceived and put into practice distributed systems require the existence of widespread collaborative design intelligence. (4) Design experts can support all this bringing in the process co-design tools and visions.

Authors: Ezio Manzini