Designing Systems Interventions – Transition Design Seminar CMU

Transition design focuses on everyday life in place as the primary context for intervening in wicked problems. Everyday life can be understood as an emergent property of people going about the activity of satisfying their needs. Understanding how people define their needs, and go about satisfying them (or failing to do so) is a key strategy for dev... See more

In the modern era, the satisfiers for needs have often been appropriated by large centralized organizations such as the nation-state or multinational corporations. Such satisfiers are decontextualized — they are not unique to place and culture and their ownership, management and control is not embedded in the communities who depend on them. Satisfi... See more

How might design problems be framed differently if the primary context was everyday life? Discuss how the same problem, framed first using traditional design approaches and secondly using everyday life as the primary context, lead to different solutions?

everyday life is an emergent property of people meeting their needs

needs are few, finite and universal, but the ways in which they are satisfied are limitless. They identify ten material and non-material needs that are the same regardless of culture, era, geography, ethnicity (subsistence, freedom, participation, protection, affection, understanding, leisure, creation, identity, transcendence). However, the ways i... See more

Try to imagine interventions at the macro, mezzo and micro levels of scale. How could they be interconnected for greater leverage?

Satisfiers that are centrally created and therefore decontextualized are often designed to satisfy a single need in a simplistic way. Max-Neef argues that such satisfiers are often inadequate or even damaging, and categorizes these along a spectrum of ‘singular’ ‘inhibiting’ ‘pseudo’, or ‘destroyer’ satisfiers. By contrast, place based satisfiers, ... See more

place based satisfiers, embedded in community are likely to satisfy multiple needs simultaneously, and are referred to as ‘synergistic satisfiers’. ‘One size fits all’ satisfiers that are centrally created undermine social and cultural diversity and have likely to have a homogenizing effect on everyday life; satisfiers that are decentralized and ar... See more

How can you imagine balancing the implementation of multiple ‘interventions’ with periods of observation and waiting? Should this process be staggered, so that transition designers are observing the results of some interventions, while implementing others? How can this process be choreographed and adjusted quickly when necessary?