January 21, 2021

Transitioning

(Surviving)

Our only security is our ability to change. ~John Lilly

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly. ~Francis Bacon

Over the short history of the modern design professions, thought leaders have articulated value propositions about the public roles of design, setting structuring norms into play. In addition to establishing professional standards, diverse visions for change have challenged the existing commercial, social, and civic scope and role of design. This important work of stepping back and reflecting on design and its efficacy in the arena of social practice has had decisive impacts on the perceived agency of professionals in applied design specialties such as planning, visual communication, product development, architecture, fashion, integrated systems design, interaction, service, and process design.

The central and pervasive position of design in society means that it mediates the spectrum of environmental conditions - only some of which we as individuals have choice over. This situated and mediating role provides a strategic opportunity for designers to be more consciously active in shaping the qualitative and performance dimensions of lifestyles and choices. Seeking to challenge pedagogy and practice to engage opportunities in our world of profound inter-dependencies and amidst previously unknown challenges, a group of professors at School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have established a participatory platform for transdisciplinary praxis called the Transition Design framework. Beginning in 2009, under Terry Irwin’s leadership as Head of the School of Design at CMU, the entire faculty met twice monthly for retreats over a period of several years to establish trust and dialogue as an active culture of learning. Around 2012 Irwin, along with Gideon Kossoff, Cameron Tonkinwise, Peter Scupelli and other colleagues were shaping what eventually became the Transition Design framework - a charter for a new way of teaching and practicing design that came out of a radical revision of their top-tier undergraduate, graduate (and most recently doctoral programs in design - the first PhD granting program and design in the US, led by the influential educator Cameron Tonkinwise).

The Transition Design framework synthesizes a growing body of interdisciplinary knowledge around the “transition” meme - and its significance in our complex times, with mature and developing practices in a synthesis they have dubbed Transition Design. Conceived as a space that gathers emergeing global trends in transdisciplinary praxis, transition design is a more complex conceptualization of the mission of design yet also more synthetic and elegant than previous meta-models. TD includes yet goes beyond the mature expressions of orthodox design such as product and service design, it encompasses developing disciplines such as design for social innovation in a dissipative leap to new levels of positive social impact. Most profoundly however, Transition Design names and frames the next becoming of the design professions and in so doing establishes a strong ethical and aspirational strange attractor. “The transition to sustainable futures calls for new ways of designing that are based upon a deep understanding of how to design for change and transition within complex systems” (Irwin)

Transition Design aims to leverage the propositional and integrative role of design in service of problems worth solving - and at scales that matter. The Transition Design framework is of great significance because it foregrounds the core transdisciplinary capacities of design — the roles of configuration and mediation — and their potential contributions to societal transformation in service of thriving and emancipatory futures. Spatio-temporally situated as an evolving body of knowledge and capacity, Transition Design aspires to the role of integrative sense making of the interlocking complexities that characterize the inter-systemic crises of our times. Situated in a global socio-cultural scale of influence, with a charter to serve fundamentally life-positive objectives while holding the immediate needs of the present, as well as future generations, in nested priority, TD presents the challenge of design as an ethical mediation inside a deep time horizon.

The Transition Design framework synthesizes a diverse body of knowledge on theories and practices of change. A number of robust precedents suggest that “transition” is an apt term for capturing the global zeitgeist. Some of the models that influenced the development of the Transition Design framework include Sociotechnical Transition Management Theory & Sustainability Transitions used by the Dutch government to manage large-scale energy infrastructure transformations; the growing international Transition Town Network; the Great Transition, a meme first proposed by Kenneth Boulding and elaborated upon by entities such as the Global Scenario Group, the Tellus Institute, and the New Economics Foundation; and finally the transdisciplinary impact of complexity theory and dynamic systems theory which provide frameworks with which to learn from systems level behaviors while stressing the dynamic, nonlinear and interdependent factors that influence systems change. The Transition Design framework recognizes the crucial role of design in a mediating and integrating role amongst these diverse practices and global initiatives. It invites design educators, design students and professional designers to recognize the value and salience of their current efforts within larger patterns of greater planetary amplification and synergy.

Key aims of the Transition Design charter document, Transition Design 2015 are to build the momentum necessary to educationally skill-up a generation of designers who will be capable of contributing to interdisciplinary teams on development of transition design solutions. The authors of the charter identified and articulated four mutually evolving areas of focus: 1) Vision for Transition; 2) Theories of Change; 3) Posture and Mindset 4) New Ways of Designing. Vision for Transition makes space for proposition, speculation, wonder, and debate. Theories of Change draws from an interdisciplinary body of knowledge about change in states and structures. “… Transformational societal change will depend upon our ability to change our ideas about change itself — how it manifests and how it can be catalyzed and directed.” (Irwin, Kosoff, Tonknwise, Scupelli). Posture and Mindset recognizes the decisive influence of individual and collective world views inclusive of beliefs, values, and assumptions, and explicitly asks designers to examine their own way of being and their own value system and the role these play in their own design process. “Designers’ mindsets and postures often go unnoticed and unacknowledged but they profoundly influence what is identified as a problem and how it is framed and solved within a given context.” And finally New Ways of Designing signals an identity shift as designers see themselves as agents of transformative change. Invested in long time frames, and capable of recognizing patterns and envisioning future possibilities; they amplify, connect, and align communities and other stakeholders; they work within transdisciplinary teams, they integrate ways and means in place-based ways.

Internally, the Transition Design framework serves as an integrated curriculum. Externally, as an open-source platform that invites sharing of resources, dialogue, debate and development of further phases of the initiative. As an open invitation to expand action research in transition design both from within as well as outside of the design education and expert arenas, the authors are sharing research and writings, bibliographic references, and syllabi. Collaborative curricular partners include the University of Palermo in Buenos Aires; EINA School of Design and Art in Barcelona, and Schumacher College/Plymouth University in the UK. The first public symposium was held in March 2015 and there are plans for a Transition Design Conference to be held in 2017. Explore the institution-neutral Transition Design website here.

As a mediating agency, design can cohere community and establish a sense of place, or produce fragmentation and alienation. Complexity science demonstrates how, as members of nested, relational holarchies, designer-actors demonstrate that even the subtlest of our impacts matters. Reading this, I hope you will sense how as a holon within a whole system, there is no position to occupy outside of the intra systemic mesh. As participant observers, we situate and enact ethical know-how as the system itself (Varela). Everyday habits and practices — mediated by design — are powerful contexts for transformative change. The Transition Design framework models how the mature disciplinary role of the product or service designer as teller of consumerist stories is now giving way to an emergent role, that of the transition designer who, through acts of wise mediation within the system, retrieves the past to envision, narrate, and proposition the next. Often, less is more. Transition designers may function as cultural acupuncturists, sensing into the system and working with a light touch. Eliminating the barriers to thriving, learning from and working with community desire lines, building paths where wise people are already walking.

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