Transition design

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Transition design is a design approach that proposes design-led societal transition towards more sustainable futures. Transition design is an approach to complex and interconnected wicked problems such as poverty and economic inequality, biodiversity loss, decline of community, resource depletion, pollution and climate change. It originates from a tradition of non-authoritarian social and political philosophies developed in the mid to late 20th century.

Transition design leverages the power of interdependence and symbiosis with the aim of transforming lifestyles, making these more convivial and participatory, and harmonizing them with the natural environment. It emphasizes the temporal element of all design approaches—how they relate to the traditional and vernacular cultures of the past, and how they might unfold, develop and connect over short, medium and long horizons of time.

Transition design aims to intervene in social, economic, political and technological systems so as to assist people to satisfy their needs in ways that establish mutually beneficial relationships between people, the natural environment and the built and designed world. This process is informed in particular by living systems theory, employing such concepts as self-organization, interdependence, emergence, holarchy and phase transition. It involves changing the ways in which people earn their livelihood, and changing the organization of business, manufacturing, agriculture, finance, healthcare, education and travel. Transition design aims to cultivate lifestyles and forms of everyday life in which fundamental needs can be satisfied in integrated, place-based ways, encouraging symbiotic relationships between communities, and between communities and their ecosystems.

Transition designers

Transition designers can come from all walks-of-life and backgrounds, regardless of whether they are formally trained designers. They use the tools and processes of design to re-conceive entire lifestyles, rather than focusing on problems within existing, mostly unsustainable, social, economic and political paradigms. Designers assume a similar role in transition design as they do in service design or social design: the designer is a facilitator of emergent solutions to problems rather than an expert who conceives and delivers blueprints and finished solutions. Transition designers are especially focussed on potentialities for beneficial change that exist within systems, and on making modest interventions which can ramify throughout entire systems.

Because complex wicked problems are multi-faceted, their solutions require not only the skills and knowledge of designers, but also knowledge from the spectrum of disciplinary fields (science, philosophy, psychology, social science, anthropology and the humanities etc.). Transition design is, therefore, a collaborative process that is informed by knowledge from outside design. It emphasizes the need for transdisciplinarity and for the reintegration of knowledge.

Transition design solutions, however, should not simply represent the collaborative efforts of groups of experts and specialists; since solutions must be place-specific and ecosystem appropriate, they must incorporate local knowledge, participation and commitment. Just as transition design solutions need not only represent the reintegration of knowledge, they should also represent its recontextualization. Just as engineering has been used as a metaphor to describe the large scale, top-down and managerial influence of social phenomena (designer, urban planner, technocrat and policy maker as social engineers) so the transition designer might be compared to a gardener. Like a good gardener, the transition designer has an intimate understanding of and feeling for a particular place and its ecosystem, of the relationships between its different parts, of what its particular needs are, of what will and will not flourish, and of how it might grow and develop over long periods of time.

Comparison with other approaches

In designing for the relationship between people, nature, and the things that people make and do; in designing for short, mid and long horizons of time and in acknowledgement of vernacular, historical and indigenous cultures; and in designing place/ecosystem specific solutions, transition design can be seen as a logical development of a trend in design over recent decades that emphasizes relationship and context. Within mainstream design this trend has included service design (or design for service), social design (or design for social innovation) and interaction design, whilst outside of mainstream design this trend has included permaculture and ecological design.

In the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), transition design is taught alongside design for service and design for social innovation, in the expectation that designers will be able to move freely between these three areas of practice and research, according to the scope of the problem that they hope to address. Thus design for service represents moderate change within existing paradigms and systems; design for social innovation represents significant change within emerging paradigms and systems; and transition design represents radical change within future paradigms and systems.

These areas of design practice and research can be located on a continuum, and the movement along this continuum (from design for service, through design for social innovation to transition design) represents an expansion of the scale of time, depth of engagement, and context to include social, political, economic and environmental concerns. Transition design's foregrounding of relationship, context and wholeness represents the incorporation into design of an ecological or holistic worldview and gives it several defining features:

• Living systems theory is used as both an approach to understanding wicked problems and designing solutions to address them.
• Designs solutions that protect and restore both social and natural ecosystems through the creation of mutually beneficial relationships between people, the things they do and make and the natural environment.
• Sees everyday life and lifestyles as the most important/fundamental context for design.
• Advocates place and ecosystem-based, but globally networked solutions; seeks solutions that connect place to planet.
• Designs solutions for short, medium and long horizons of time and all levels of scale of everyday life.
• Looks for emergent possibilities within problem contexts and amplifies grassroots solutions already underway.
• Links existing solutions together so that they can function as steps in a larger transition vision.
• Distinguishes between 'wants/desires' and genuine needs and bases solutions on maximizing and integrating satisfiers for the widest range of needs.
• Sees the designer's own mindset and posture as an essential component of transition designing.
• Calls for the reintegration and recontextualization of diverse transdisciplinary knowledge.

Framework

Transition design framework (Irwin, Tonkinwise & Kossoff, 2013)

Terry Irwin, Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, with Cameron Tonkinwise, Director of Design Studies and Chair of the doctoral program at Carnegie Mellon University, and Gideon Kossoff, Adjunct Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, have together developed a framework which organizes transition design into four mutually influencing areas: Vision for Transition; Theories of Change; Posture/Mindset and New Ways of Designing. This framework was first disseminated at a talk given by Irwin, Kossoff, and Tonkinwise at 'Head, Heart, Hand', the 2013 national AIGA design conference in Minneapolis.

Use of the term 'transition'

The use of the word 'transition' is suggested and reinforced by several contemporary discourses, projects and networks. In various ways, these initiatives explore how change and transition manifests and can be initiated and directed, or are actively engaged in trying to bring about transition to more sustainable futures. Such initiatives have influenced transition design in several ways, and include:

Transition town network

Transition Towns are, for example, developing locally-based food and energy systems and local currencies and businesses. By corollary, transition design involves a type of social engagement and community organizing that situates projects and initiatives within the context of long-term visions for specific places and ecosystems.

Transition in complex and living systems

The concept of 'transition' in transition design alludes to the dynamic nature of complex, non-linear, self-organizing and interdependent systems such as ecosystems and organisms. The 'phase transition' that occurs as such systems undergo stresses or 'perturbations' from their environment, can lead them to display unexpected, unpredictable and 'emergent' new forms of behaviour and structure. By corollary, transition design incorporates living systems theory/ecoliteracy in order to prepare designers for work within complex social systems, and to understand how these are embedded in natural systems. Transition design leverages the potential for self-organization, interdependence and emergence within such non-linear systems, and anticipates the possibility of rapid systemic change that can be triggered by modest interventions.

Cosmopolitan localism

Its objective is to foster a global network of mutually supportive communities (neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities and regions) who share and exchange knowledge, ideas, skills, technology, culture and (where socially and ecologically sustainable) resources. Cosmopolitan localism fosters a creative, reciprocal relationship between the local and the global. It addresses the problem of globalization, which tends to subsume local cultures and economies into homogenized and unsustainable global systems, whilst avoiding the pitfalls of localization, such as parochialism and isolationism.

Initial development

The concept of transition design was first developed by Gideon Kossoff in a chapter called 'Holism and the Reconstitution of Everyday Life: A Framework for the Transition to a Sustainable Society' in the book, Grow Small, Think Beautiful: Ideas for a Sustainable World from Schumacher College, edited by Stephan Harding. This chapter was a summary of Kossoff's PhD thesis, also entitled Holism and the Reconstitution of Everyday Life (2011). The term 'transition design' has since been adopted by the Carnegie Mellon School of Design and incorporated into its curriculum as one of three areas within which design is taught and researched at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels (Design for Service, Design for Social Innovation and Transition Design).

In his PhD thesis, Holism and the Reconstitution of Everyday Life, Gideon Kossoff used the term transition design to describe the process of using design thinking and process to assist the transition to a sustainable society. This early framing of transition design integrated holistic science (including chaos, complexity and systems theories, and Goethean science) with a tradition of non-authoritarian social and political philosophy that includes figures such as Murray Bookchin, Lewis Mumford, Peter Kropotkin, Martin Buber and Jane Jacobs. These figures can be called 'radical holists' since they use organicist, holistic or ecological principles to underpin their advocacy of decentralized, mutualistic and participatory social, political and economic structures. This 'radical holist' approach has been validated by holistic science which defines wholes in terms of dynamic and creative self-organization, mutualistic interdependencies, and a reciprocal relationship between wholes and the parts of which they are constituted. These principles are at the heart of an emerging ecological or holistic worldview that has been articulated by Fritjof Capra, Richard Tarnas, David Abram and many others. Transition design can be thought of as a way of using this ecological worldview to address many contemporary problems.

In everyday life

Transition design, in its initial development, focused on everyday life, since this is the context within which ecological, social and economic problems arise, and this is the arena within which such problems must be resolved. It therefore drew on various critiques of everyday life such as those made by Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and Mikhail Bakhtin.

This framing of transition design proposes that in order to be sustainable, everyday life will need to be organized according to holistic principles. Everyday life arises as people strive to satisfy their material and non-material needs. It is more likely to be sustainable when communities control the satisfaction of their needs at all levels of scale—households, neighborhoods, villages, cities, regions—'The Domains of Everyday Life'. In traditional, pre-industrial communities, the Domains emerged as people endeavored to satisfy their needs. Embodying the social processes of such cultures, the Domains were to varying degrees, self-organizing, participatory, semi-autonomous and mutualistic, and everyday life as a whole consisted of nested networks of households, villages, neighborhoods and regions. These characteristics are shared with living, whole and ecological systems. With the arrival of modernity and the Industrial Revolution, control of need satisfaction was largely appropriated by centralized institutions. When this happens, the Domains lose their role as loci for the satisfaction of the needs of their inhabitants, and they no longer emerge as vital, integrated, semi-autonomous forms: households, neighborhoods, cities and regions are typically hollowed and fragmented. Their decline leads to many social, ecological, economic and political problems and to the unsustainability of everyday life. There is, therefore, a direct relationship between sustainability, community and place-based control of need satisfaction and holism in everyday life: the transition to a sustainable society requires the reconstitution and reinvention of the Domains of Everyday Life. An additional Domain, that of the Planet, has emerged in modernity and its development could give everyday life a cosmopolitanism it lacked in pre-industrial societies.

Any place-based initiative that promotes holism in everyday life, protecting and recovering control by communities of the process of need satisfaction, will help the transition process. It is the task of transition design to facilitate this at all levels of scale, revitalizing and improving the quality of everyday life through the development of nested, networked, integrated, semi-autonomous and self-organizing households, neighborhoods, cities and regions.

Aside this background, the TransforMap initiative emerged with the objective to visualize socio-technical transition initiatives that occur in the domain of everyday life on a geographical map.

Education

Transition design was first introduced in 2014 at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design where it informs projects, curricula and programs at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels. On March 7, 2015, a Transition Design Symposium was held at CMU's School of Design. This was structured around the position papers of twenty academics from a wide range of disciplines (e.g. anthropology, sociology, architecture, psychology, human computer interaction, philosophy, design and design studies). Each position paper was a response to a 'Provocation and Briefing' document written by Professor Terry Irwin, Dr. Cameron Tonkinwise and Dr. Gideon Kossoff.

See also

• Circles of Sustainability
• Ecological design
• Modular design
• Open hardware
• Sustainable design
• Sustainability
• Transition management (governance)
• Urban acupuncture

External links

• Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design
• Transition Design Course Outline and Schedule
• Transition Design: Re-conceptualizing Whole Lifestyles, Video Lecture
• Cameron Tonkinwise, Transition Design, Video Lecture, Konstfack 2014
• Transition Network
• Sustainability Transitions Research Network
• Commons Transition

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