12th International Conference on Smart Learning Ecosystem and Regional Development

design learning ecosystems: interactions, co-design, and adaptive futures

24th-25th of May 2027 (mixed mode)
Siena, Italy

SLERD is the international conference that promotes the exchange of knowledge, research, and experiences in the field of education and learning, regional development, social innovation, technologies for smart ecosystems.
Every year, the conference is hosted in a different location, providing opportunities to bring together the scientific community in different geographical and academic contexts.
The 2027 edition is organised in Italy by ASLERD and the University of Siena, continuing the conference’s journey across Europe.

Learn more about past editions of SLERD – Discover 2027 conference venue in Siena

The theme of SLERD 2027, “Design Learning Ecosystems: Interactions, Co-design, and Adaptive Futures”, explores how learning ecosystems can evolve in response to the unprecedented social, technological, environmental, and cultural transformations of our time. The conference promotes an ecological, inclusive, ethical, and adaptive vision of learning in which people, technologies, institutions, local communities, and natural environments interact and co-evolve.

Bringing together researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, SLERD 2027 aims to foster new perspectives on smart learning ecosystems as drivers of social innovation, sustainability, and territorial development, where smartness goes beyond technology. Smart refers to learning ecosystems where intelligence, purpose, collaboration, and the wellbeing of all actors involved are means to respond meaningfully to change.

The achievement of the learning ecosystems’ smartness is a process that needs a long term vision, multidisciplinary competences, an attitude to understand people and contexts and to mediate point of views, a dynamic resilience to keep on track to achieve, step by step, the foreseen goals: in short a design literacy from which to make emerge projects and processes capable to reify them, all aimed at achieving a people centered smart education, social innovation and territorial development.

Over the years, the SLERD conference provides a space for interdisciplinary dialogue on the present and the future of the smart learning ecosystem. This ongoing dialogue has contributed to the elaboration of the Declaration of Timisoara and its updated version Declaration of Troyes or Timisoara 2.0, while the publication of the conference proceedings has provided a lasting record of the research, perspectives, and experiences discussed within the SLERD community.

Read the CfP and submission instructions – Apply for the Student Design Contest

Watch the video on the Youtube ASLERD channel