Transitional Design

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

Relationships of conflict or alignment can occur in a number of areas such as use of natural resources, economic issues, political/governance issues, technology and infrastructure but can also center around beliefs, values and cultural norms. Since all of these contribute to the problem in question, they can also become leverage points for positive... 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

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

An imbalance in power relations among stakeholders affected by wicked problems is a barrier to problem resolution. Power dynamics permeate societal systems; its structures, cultural norms, material artifacts and technologies etc;

Backcasting from long-term desired visions (that are based upon new paradigms) transcends current paradigms and imagines new ones. Backcasting brings the new paradigms into the present and asks what are steps toward these new ways of living, working, playing etc. Backcasting is concerned not with what futures are likely to manifest (forecasting) bu... 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