Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research

Abstract

Fundamental change at every level of our society, and new approaches to problem solving are needed to address twenty-first-century “wicked problems” such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, depletion of natural resources, and the widening gap between rich and poor. Transition Design is a proposition for a new area of design practice, study, and research that advocates design-led societal transition toward more sustainable futures. This reconception of entire lifestyles will involve reimagining infrastructures including energy resources, the economy and food, healthcare, and education. Transition Design focuses on the need for “cosmopolitan localism,” a lifestyle that is place-based and regional, yet global in its awareness and exchange of information and technology. Transition Designers would apply a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of social, economic, and natural systems and the Transition Design framework proposes four key areas in which narratives, knowledge, skills, and action can be developed.

Keywords:

• Transition Design
• sustainable design
• social innovation
• cosmopolitan localism
• transition town movement

Notes

1. Transition Design draws part of its inspiration from the Transition Town Movement started by activist, author, and environmentalist Rob Hopkins (2008) (http://transitionculture.org/about/). The transition movement is a grassroots, community-led movement that seeks to build resilient local communities in response to peak oil, climate change, and economic instability. The Transition Town movement began in Totnes, Devon, UK, in 2004 and was inspired by permaculture activists and designers (Mollison 1988; Fleming 2011; Holmgren 2011). Transition Design is a concept originally proposed by Gideon Kossoff (2011: 5–24), who argued that the transition to sustainable futures is a design process that requires a vision, the integration of knowledge, and the need to think and act at different levels of scale, and that is also highly contextual (relationships, connections, and place). The Transition Design framework was first introduced in a lecture given by Terry Irwin, Cameron Tonkinwise, and Kossoff at the AIGA National Conference in Minneapolis, October 2013 (Terry et al. 2013). In September 2014, the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University introduced Transition Design as an area of design studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels and offers a Ph.D. and professional doctorate (D.Des.) in the subject.

2. The importance of thinking in long horizons of time is discussed in The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand (1999: 2). Brand asks “How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?” He argues that “society is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economies, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed – some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘the long term’ is measure at least in centuries.” The seventh-generation principle from the Great Law of Iroquois Confederacy instructed that decisions made in the present should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. An important ability of the Transition Designer will be to think in a similar way about designs in the present and their potential to affect future generations in the social and environmental spheres.

3. Co-evolution is an important aspect of Transition Design. It is a biological concept that refers to a relationship (that can occur at multiple levels of scale, from the microscopic to the level of organisms and communities of organisms) between entities in which each party exerts selective pressures on the other which affects each other’s evolution. Transition Designers would be aware of the potential to leverage this principle in the formulation of solutions (Briggs and Peat 1990: 160–1).

4. The value of future casting and envisioning alternative futures is underscored by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond (2006). In it he discusses the concept of “the sociology of emergences” that aims to identify and amplify the signs of possible future experiences that reveal themselves as tendencies and latencies that often go ignored. The philosopher Ernst Bloch introduced the concepts of “The Not Yet” (Noch Nicht) and “The Possible” in The Principle of Hope (1995: 241), which explores the idea that the future is inscribed, or latent in the present. Moreover, Bloch views “The Not Yet” as a type of anticipatory consciousness that has been neglected in our lives. Transition Design places importance on the possibilities represented in “The Not Yet” and advocates developing the skill to look for what Bloch called “the tendencies of the future in the latency of the present.” In other words, looking for clues to solutions for sustainable futures in the context of the present and developing the ability to anticipate over long horizons of time.

5. Localism is a political philosophy that prioritizes local production and consumption of goods and local government and culture. It is seen as a strategy for the development of sustainable communities because it reduces carbon emissions, revitalizes local economies, empowers communities, and strengthens the bonds of relationships, creating a higher degree of resilience through their independence from centralized, monolithic corporations in the satisfaction of needs (Douthwaite 1996; Shuman 2000).

6. The concept of needs and the way in which people go about satisfying them is central to the idea of Transition Design. Chilean economist and environmentalist Manfred Max-Neef (1992) has developed a theory of needs that proposes that human needs are universal and finite (regardless of culture, era, age, geographic location, belief system, etc.), but the ways in which humans satisfy their needs is infinite (and specific to culture, era, age, geographic local, belief system, etc.). Max-Neef argues that unmet needs can give rise to “pathologies” and proposes “integrated or synergistic satisfiers” (34) as a way to meet several needs simultaneously and address these pathologies. In The Business of Sustainability, Irwin (2011a) argues that these pathologies of unmet needs are at the root of many wicked problems.

7. Everyday life, a concept within the social sciences and humanities, is a central theme in Transition Design. Gardiner (2000) argues that an alternative, multidisciplinary everyday life paradigm could offer a myriad of new possibilities for theory and research. French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1984, 1991), among other critics, developed the idea of the “critique of everyday life” and argued that it is an important and often overlooked and undervalued space. He wrote: “Everyday life, in a sense residual, defined by ‘what is left over’ after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis, must be defined as a totality. … Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground” (Gardiner 2000: 79). Transition Design emphasizes the need to reconceptualize whole lifestyles within sustainable futures and argues after Lefebvre that everyday life is a powerful locus for developing transition visions, applying theories of change, and formulating design solutions. Situating visions and solutions within the context of everyday life, shifts the emphasis from solutions rooted in the consumer-led marketplace to quality-of-life scenarios based in the everyday.

8. From unpublished notes on Transition Design by Tonkinwise, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, June 19, 2014: “A theory of change is a model of the system in which design interventions are taking place. It identifies key components and the relations between those components, as well as other systems that may lie alongside the focus system, or systems within which the focus system resides. The model allows responsible predictions about how interventions will change that system – and those changes could involve the emergence of new components, relations, and contiguous or nested systems. A Theory of Change is never fixed or complete, but always being modified by what is learned about the system being modeled by error-friendly, more-or-less-reversible interventions into that system.”

9. These concepts and theories show that nonlinear, complex systems such as social organizations and ecosystems are: (a) self-organizing and that their responses to perturbations from outside the system are self-directed and unpredictable; (b) comprised of mutually influencing, interdependent parts; (c) display emergent properties: new forms of order and behavior arise spontaneously and unpredictably out of seeming chaos/disorder; and (d) small changes within one part of the system can ramify throughout, creating sweeping change in another location.

10. Theories of Change within the Transition Design framework conceive of change as a continually evolving body of transdisciplinary knowledge about the anatomy and dynamics of change within complex systems. Theories of change can include alternative and accepted bodies of knowledge as well as new concepts and ideas that are in the process of gaining momentum. Some of these include: (a) Living systems theory refers to a transdisciplinary body of thought that explains the dynamics of self-organization, emergence, and resilience within complex social and natural systems (Briggs and Peat 1990; Prigogine and Stengers 1994; Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers 1996; Capra 1997; Wheatley 2006; Meadows 2008); (b) Post Normal Science is a method of inquiry applied within the context of long-term issues when relatively little information is available, facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, outcomes are critical, and decisions are urgent (Funtowicz and Ravetz 2003); (c) Paradigm Shift, a concept developed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2012), challenged the accepted view of the progress of scientific knowledge as “development by accumulation,” arguing that periods of conceptual continuity are interrupted by periods of revolutionary discovery and insight that lead to new paradigms; (d) Alternative Economics is an emerging body of thought that views the dominant economic paradigm and the consumer-based marketplace (capitalism) as one of the root causes of the complex problems of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The authors identify the inherent, unsustainable problems in this paradigm and offer myriad alternatives and solutions (Schumacher 1973; Max-Neef 1992; Hawken et al. 1999; Korten 1999; Ritzer 2011); (e) Sociotechnical Regime theory looks at the process of change and transformation in sociotechnical regimes (patterns of artifacts, institutions, rules, and norms) and the role of technological “niches” as the principal locus for change. Change begins when practices and norms developed in the niche become widely adopted and gather momentum until the wider technological regime is transformed by the concepts and configurations nurtured in the niche (Berkhout et al. 2003: 1; Geels 2010; Pettersen et al. 2013); (f) Metamorphosis and theories of wholeness and holism (also “applied phenomenology”) focus on the transformation of form in natural organisms. This dynamic and temporal process of change has strong relevance for both the design of artifacts (materiality) and the initiation and direction of change within social organizations (Bortoft 1996, 2012; Schad 1997; Seamon 1998; Holdrege 2005; Kossoff 2011: 73–96). These are just a few of the ideas and theories from diverse fields and disciplines that can serve to deepen designers’ understanding of the dynamics of change within complex systems and inform new approaches to transition visions and solutions.

11. There is a substantial body of thought that has emerged since the late twentieth century that views mindset or worldview as a powerful leverage point for change (Meadows 2008) and argues that our historic/dominant worldview is inadequate for understanding complex, interdependent, and interconnected problems. The dominant worldview derives from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century; developments in mathematics, philosophy, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry transformed society’s views about nature and humanity’s place in the cosmos. This style of thinking has predominated since that time and is characterized in the first column (dominant) of Figure 3. Transition Design argues for an intentional shift from reductionist thinking with its emphasis on quantities and short horizons of time, to a more holistic view of the world characterized by the second column (holistic) of Figure 3. Theorists and practitioners from diverse disciplines increasingly view mindset as the basis for deep and lasting change and argue that a more holistic worldview must be the basis for the transition to a sustainable society (Briggs and Peat 1990; Prigogine and Stengers 1994; Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers 1996; Capra 1997; Wheatley 2006; Meadows 2008; Ritzer 2011).

12. Although designers have long been familiar with the concept and characteristics of wicked problems, not much energy has been directed toward understanding their dynamics and anatomy (Irwin 2011b). Transition Design proposes that designers can learn to solve for wicked problems more effectively if they acquire a better understanding of complex systems and change dynamics. These ideas are represented within the Theories of Change segment of the transition framework.

13. Gardiner (2000) discusses the philosopher and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “buds and shoots of new potentialities” within a given situation. Bakhtin encouraged disruptive approaches designed to shift one’s point of view when encountering the familiar and wrote: “All such forms of defamiliarization encourage the conceptualization of existing modes of experience and perception from a different point of view ….” Transition Designers will be called upon to look for the buds and shoots of new potentialities within both strange and familiar situations in order to conceive solutions outside the dominant socioeconomic and political paradigms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Terry Irwin

Terry Irwin is Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where her teaching includes a recently launched area of study: Transition Design. She holds an M.F.A. (The Basel School of Design) and an M.Sc. in Holistic Science (University of Plymouth/Schumacher College, UK). Her long academic career includes faculty positions at California College of the Arts and the University of Dundee, UK. Terry’s thirty years of practical in-house experience include being a founding partner and Creative Director of the San Francisco office of international design firm MetaDesign. [email protected]