Assignments – Transition Design Seminar CMU

Transition design is distinct from service design or social innovation design in its deep grounding in future-oriented visions, its transdisciplinary imperative, its objective to initiate and direct change within social and natural systems and designers’ heightened awareness of the temporality: solutions are intentionally conceived within short, mi... See more

Transition Design argues that it is necessary to develop visions of the future and interventions in the present that are grounded in integrated and contextualized knowledge. For this reason future visions are developed, and wicked problems addressed, in the context of everyday life, the level at which society reproduces itself from one day to the n... See more

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. Transition Design argues that it is important to understand the dominant worldview which underpins many wicked problems in order to envision new socio-economic- political-e... See more

Transition Design attempts to reveal and map power relations among stakeholder groups in order to: 1) understand which groups have what types of power in the system (sometimes a group has the power/reason to keep the problem unresolved); 2) identify which groups have little power/are disenfranchised (the work is to help build their capacity and giv... See more

The Transition Design Approach Emphasizes:

The need to frame problems within radically large, spatio-temporal contexts that include the past (how the problem evolved over long periods of time), present (how the problem manifests at different levels of scale) and future (visions of the long-term future in which the problem has been resolved).

The n

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A brief backgrounder on transition mapping

In practical terms, this type of mapping — instead of representing the current state of the system, as most system maps do — highlights the underlying drivers and blockers of change of any system transition, enabling us to more effectively pinpoint the strategic intervention areas which can support that tra

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