Just Transitions/Design for Transitions: Preliminary Notes on a Design Politics for a Green New Deal

ABSTRACT

Mobilizations occurring around just transitions and design for transition contain many potential points of overlap. They are presently remarkably disengaged. This article seeks to rectify this situation by offering some preliminary notes on how convergences between these currents might facilitate modes of anti-racist, feminist and ecosocialist design futuring that can get us to think beyond degrowth/Left ecomodern binaries and toward a design politics that can support a Green New Deal. I proceed by mapping the evolution of labor-focused just transition discussions and indicate how feminist, climate justice and decolonial contributions have expanded and complicated understandings of the labors of transition. I then go on to suggest how such currents could productively engage further with the emerging field of design for transition. Design is not to be trusted. However, post-carbon futures are not simply going to emerge through protest and policy shifts alone. Just transitions will have to be imagined and built, fabricated and realized, coded and created. This will involve the channeling of enormous amounts of creative labor and inventive praxis. It will also involve the construction of public spaces and public institutions where new knowledge practices can meet. Bringing radical traditions of design, invention and innovation into dialogue with movements pushing for just transitions could make significant contributions to achieving this end.

KEYWORDS:

• Just transition
• green new deal
• design
• creative labor
• redirective practice

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.