ABSTRACT
Societal transformation for sustainability depends on the interaction of individual consciousness with different social structures and practices, such that it leads to individual and social transformative learning. In order to reflect and engage in such complex transformation processes, it is necessary to better understand how humankind approaches complexity on an individual and societal level. This chapter presents a conceptual framework to analyse how different categories of signs are used to represent complexity, using language, numbers and pictures independently and in combinations. Different ways of representing complexity will result in drawing different productive boundaries around systems of interest. A better understanding is required of the role that signs play in a person’s interaction with the internal and external world in order to make accessible the space of possibility, which exists for the establishment of sustainable development paths regarding complex systems. From this perspective, transformative learning will be enabled by a synthesis of diverse subjective and social constructions of the world in the light of different polysemiotic representations.
