| Summary: | Transdisciplinar collaboration is essential to approach the most important socio-environmental problems of our time. The transdisciplinar problem is not only the consensus building over common conceptual principles but also on how our reference frameworks organize and are sustained by the contributions of disciplinary and specialized knowledge built through their integration. The paper emphasizes the lessons learned through our line of research called Geomatics and Society, enabling us to advance transdisciplinar methodologies by establishing links between research and social claimants (government, private sector, NGOs, and civil society). As a result, complex interactions are represented, organized and geared towards the needs or problems expressed by actors involved in the search for possible solutions. The themes undertaken by our teams include territorial and land management, ecosystem services, environmental risks and vulnerabilities, competitiveness, health, education, public safety, migration, water and energy. To deal with such complex problems, a meta-design was developed, with a territorial systemic, analytical and transdisciplinar approach, in which not only scientific knowledge (explicit and formal) is considered valuable, but also the profound experience of the society is recognized as a product of creativity and tacit knowledge, acquired and progressively adapted to changes in its environment. We introduce "the territory" as a key and novel feature of the above framework thus enabling, through Geomatics solutions, the intersection of maps and knowledge from diverse specialists and social plaintiffs. This transdisciplinar meta-design is relevant to the understanding of the way social and natural phenomena auto-organize in a changing world.
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