The design discipline has traditionally focused on products’ physical aspects, giving for granted that the context of services, infrastructures and technology will support the product life. A systemic perspective would revise such a focus, in order to project design competences over systemic aspects usually neglected by designers. This perspective shift is a challenge for designers, who have very efficient methods and tools to handle physical aspects of product design, but need to define an ‘operative paradigm’ to operate in a systemic context. An operative paradigm consists of a set of tools and methods to handle immaterial aspects such as time sequences, actors’ role and logical links in a product service system (PSS). Tools and methods can be borrowed from other disciplinary contexts, their relevance, though, derives from their adaptation to this specific study area: designing in a systemic context. This paper describes a curricular activity focused on the definition of methodologies for designing in a systemic context. using examples from students’ projects. For a semester students had to focus on a project of a PSS, borrowing and re-adapting methods from other disciplines with the purpose of developing their own project. By freely choosing and adapting such methods students defined their own operative paradigm for designing in a systemic context.