Transitional Design

The need to create “ecologies of synergistic interventions” (solutions) that are connected to each other and the long-term vision as a strategy for transitioning entire societies toward a desirable, long-term futures.

The need to think and work for long horizons of time. Resolving wicked problems and transitioning entire societies toward sustainabl

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. It uses the Multi-level Perspective framework (MLP) to map the systems transition at three key levels:

The Landscape Level : at this macro systems level the societal landscape is determined by changes in the macro economy, political culture, demography, natural environment, and worldviews and paradigms, which are usually slow moving and resistant... See more

How will the shifts from ownership to access, but also from productive to reproductive work affect society at large and design in particular? How will these shifts redefine the notion of the individual, community and society, and their respective relations?

Interactions among the three levels (landscape, regime and niche) are social, technical, institutional, infrastructural and normative and involve both material and non-material factors.

Transition Design seeks to address these power imbalances by building capacity and empowerment for some groups, while addressing issues of privilege, entitlement, and even ignorance with others. In many cases, certain stakeholder groups (such as those who are disenfranchised for some reason or those who are non-human). These groups will require adv... 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

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

in framing problems (the most powerful stakeholder groups usually frame the problem);

. The MLP provides a radically large, spatio-temporal matrix within which to frame a problem and consider both the material (artifacts/processes/guidelines/ policies/technology/environmental factors etc.) and the non-material (worldviews, cultural/professional norms, values etc.) factors that give rise to the problem and that are barriers to positi... See more