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Transition Design proposes design-led, systems level change that will lead towards more place-based and sustainable lifestyles. Transition designers can be people from all walks of life, including professional designers, and apply an understanding of the interconnectedness of social, economic, political and natural systems to to intentionally address problems and to seed, catalyze and direct change at all levels of spatio-temporal scale, in ways that improve quality of life.

Recent Development
Transition Design was was first introduced into a university curriculum in 2014 at Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) School of Design. CMU has a doctoral program in Transition Design, all graduate students are required to take a seminar in Transition Design, and it also informs undergraduate projects and curricula. Several other universities, including the University of Palermo in Buenos Aires, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, and Eina in Barcelona, have established partnerships for the development of Transition Design with the CMU School of Design, and are including Transition Design in their curricula or research programs. The University of Trondheim in Norway has established a professorship in Transition Design in the Department of Product Design and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy in Germany has a Transition Design strand in its research program.

The first Transition Design Symposium was held in March 2015, at CMU’s School of Design, structured around the position papers of twenty academics from multiple disciplines and institutions, including the University of North Carolina, the University of Notre Dame, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the German University in Cairo, the Parsons School of Design, the Mayo Clinic, Autodesk, the Canadian Blood Services, the University of Yonsei and the Design School Kolding. The symposium proceedings were subsequently published in a special edition of Design Philosophy Papers.

A three day Transition Design symposium, at which fifteen academics, practioners, researchers and activists from multiple universities and think tanks presented papers, was held at Dartington, Devon in June 2016. These included members of the Transition Town Network, the Open University, the Young Foundation, the Royal College of Art (RCA), the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), Schumacher College, TU Delft, the New Weather Institute, Central St. Martins College of Art and Design and the Common Cause Foundation. The Symposium was co-sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University, Schumacher College, the University of Plymouth, the University of Sussex and the New Weather Institute.

A week long course, Transition Design: New Solutions for Life on a Finite Planet was held at Schumacher College in June 2016. Several workshops on transition design have been held, including one on that focused on cosmopolitan localism,  given by members of the Carnegie Mellon Faculty of Design at the ‘Dimensions of Together’, conference at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences (Bauhaus, Dessau, 2016). Another workshop, Mapping Transition Design, that focused on the problem of forced migration was held at Carnegie Mellon University in December 2016 and was jointly run by its School of Design and faculty from RMIT School of Design. A workshop on the future of design education, jointly run by faculty from Carnegie Mellon University, Ohio State University, TU Delft, the Open University and Loughborough University at Future Focused Thinking, the conference of the Design Research Society (Brighton, 2016) included a session on transition design and the cosmopolitan localist university.

Various conference keynote talks on Transition Design have been given, including at COMAPROD, at La Universidad de las Américas (Puebla, 2016); The Shape of Design, the national conference of American Institute of Graphic Artists (Las Vegas, 2016); the conference Dimensions of Together at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences (Bauhaus, Dessau, 2016); the Hopscotch Design Festival (Raleigh, North Carolina, 2016) and the Global Service Design Conference (New York, 2015). Faculty from Carnegie Mellon University have given invited lectures on Transition Design at various institutions including the Illinois Institute of Technology (2013), Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (2014), the Royal College of Art (2016), the University of New South Wales (2016) the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (2016), the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (2016), Centro (2016), the SITAC XIII symposium at La Universidad de las Américas (2016), and La Vaca Independiente (2016).

Two papers on Transition Design, Transition Design: The Importance of Everyday Life and Lifestyles as a Leverage Point for Sustainability Transitions and Transition Design: An Educational Framework for Advancing the Study and Design of Sustainable Transitions were delivered at the International Conference of Sustainable Transitions (Brighton, 2015).

Initial development
The concept of Transition Design was first proposed in 2005 by Catherine Dunne and Louise Rooney, in relation to the report Kinsale 2021: An Energy Descent Action Plan which developed a long-term strategy and vision for Kinsale to make the transition from fossil fuel dependency to energy independence, and in so doing become a Transition Town. The concept was later developed by Gideon Kossoff in a chapter called Holism and the Reconstitution of Everyday Life: A Framework for the Transition to a Sustainable Society in the book, This chapter was a summary of Kossoff's PhD thesis, also entitled Holism and the Reconstitution of Everyday Life which used the term Transition Design to describe the process of using design thinking and process to assist the transition to a sustainable society.

Overview of transition design
Transition Design argues that complex and interconnected wicked problems, for example poverty and economic inequality, biodiversity loss, community decline, resource depletion, pollution and climate change cannot be understood or addressed in isolation from one another but are symptomatic of highly interconnected but dysfunctional societal systems. Such systems have material and non-material dimensions, and include the production and distribution of food, energy and manufactured goods; transportation and the built environment; and healthcare, finance, communications and education.

The principles of interdependence and symbiosis are at the core of Transition Design. By designing beneficial connections at appropriate levels of scale between multiple elements of societal and natural systems, Transition Design aims to transform entire lifestyles, making them more convivial and participatory, and harmonising them with the natural environment.

Transition design emphasizes the temporal element of all such design solutions — how they relate to the traditional and vernacular cultures of the past, and how they might unfold, develop and connect over short, medium and long horizons of time; it also emphasizes the importance of addressing wicked (systems) problems simultaneously at different levels of scale of everyday life — household, neighborhood, city and region. It stresses that solutions need to be developed not only at the local level but as ongoing, networked process of collaboration and mutual support between communities, cities and regions.

Transition design aims to intervene in social, economic, political and technological systems so as to assist people to satisfy their needs in ways that establish mutually beneficial relationships between people, the natural environment and the built and designed world. This process is informed in particular by living systems theory, employing such concepts as self-organization, interdependence, emergence, holarchy and phase transition and sensitivity to initial conditions. It involves changing the ways in which people earn their livelihood, and changing the organization of business, manufacturing, agriculture, finance, healthcare, education and travel. Transition design aims to cultivate lifestyles and forms of everyday life in which fundamental material and non-material needs can be satisfied in integrated, place-based ways, encouraging symbiotic relationships between communities, and between communities and their ecosystems.

Transition designers
Transition designers can come from all walks-of-life and backgrounds, regardless of whether they are formally trained designers. They use the tools, processes and methods of design to re-conceive entire lifestyles, rather than focusing on problems within existing, mostly unsustainable, social, economic and political paradigms. Designers assume a similar role in transition design as they do in service design or social design: the designer is a facilitator of emergent solutions to problems rather than an expert who conceives and delivers blueprints and finished solutions. Transition designers are especially focussed on potentialities for beneficial change that exist within systems, and on making modest interventions which can ramify throughout entire systems or catalyse ‘phase transition’.

Because complex wicked problems are multi-faceted, their solutions require not only the skills and knowledge of designers, but also knowledge from the spectrum of disciplinary fields. Transition design is therefore a collaborative process that is informed by knowledge from outside design. It emphasizes the need for transdisciplinarity and for the reintegration of knowledge. Transition design solutions, however, are not simply collaborations between groups of experts and specialists; since solutions must be contextual — place-specific and ecosystem appropriate — they must incorporate local knowledge, participation and commitment. Just as Transition Design solutions need not only represent the reintegration of knowledge, they should also represent its recontextualization.

Transition designers think and design systemically, that is in terms of complex and non-linear relationships: any given societal, political, economic and ecological problem is likely intertwined with, and therefore difficult to separate from, other such problems. The task for the transition designer is to develop an understanding of the system to which the problem at hand belongs, and of how this system is influenced and affected by other systems.

Ultimately, the transition designer will aim for both the reintegration and transformation of entire systems (food, energy, communications, manufacturing, building, finance etc) so that they more effectively satisfy human needs without damaging or destroying ecosystems or the communities in which they are embedded. This is not, however, achieved by redesigning systems from scratch but, rather, from identifying and making modest interventions at points that are likely to trigger wide scale change and transformation. This approach of modest, well-honed and well-timed intervention, a key skill of the transition designer, is based on system theory’s concept of sensitivity to initial conditions. This states that, in contrast to interventions in linear systems (which have proportionate and predictable outcomes) small interventions in non-linear systems (ie all social, political, economic and economic and ecological systems) can rapidly amplify, to the extent that they ultimately transform entire systems.

Transition Design Framework


Terry Irwin, Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, with Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design at the University of New South Wales, and Gideon Kossoff, Adjunct Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, have together developed a Transition Design framework. This framework was first disseminated at a talk given by Irwin, Kossoff, and Tonkinwise at 'Head, Heart, Hand', the 2013 national AIGA design conference in Minneapolis.

The transition design framework organizes transition design into four mutually influencing areas: 1) Theories of Change, 2) Posture/Mindset, 3) Vision for Transition, and 4) New Ways of Designing. Each of these four areas has been strongly influenced in various ways by systems and non-linear thinking. Transition design argues that it is necessary to make a clear distinction between living, or organic, and mechanistic systems, and that wicked (systems) problems often arise because most human designed systems fail to embody living systems principles.

Theories of Change
Transition Design is premised on the need to for transformation of the social, economic, political and technological systems upon which society depends. The task of the transition designer is to seed and catalyse such change. Transition Design is therefore centrally concerned with Theories of Change — how and why societal systems change or remain inert, and how such change manifests and can be catalyzed and directed towards desirable and sustainable futures.

In general, Transition Design identifies everyday life as the context within most wicked problems arise, and the context in which they must be addressed. Everyday life therefore forms the backdrop for the theories of change area of Transition Design. It has been particularly influenced by the critique of everyday life that was developed by figures such Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord, in which it is argued that in the modern era, everyday life has been colonised and devitalized by capital and bureaucracy.

Transition Design looks at how change, for example in socio-technical systems, in social practices and in the structure of everyday life, has occurred historically in order to better understand how it can occur in contemporary society. It works with many theories of change from multiple fields and disciplines outside of design. Most of these have been influenced by insights into the dynamics of complex, open, non-linear systems, and include socio-technical transition management, social practice theory, Manfred Max-Neef’s theory of Needs and social ecology.

Posture and Mindset
Such shifts can lead to different forms of interaction between people and between people and the natural world: a shift towards a more holistic or ecological paradigm is a necessary feature of the transition process.

Various fields and discourses from outside of design which all emphasise the need for ways of being in the world that focus on relatedness (between people, artefacts and the natural world) and on context (spatial and temporal) have been identified as having an important role in contributing to a shift in Mindset and Posture. These areas include World view,  Goethean (phenomenological) science   beauty ecopsychology craft  indigenous knowledge  and theories of collaboration and leadership.

Futuring, scenario building and iconoclastic utopianism
Kossoff has argued that transition design can be located in the tradition that historian Russel Jacoby has referred to as “iconoclastic utopianism", represented in the work of figures such as Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch These authors, Jacoby argues, focussed on the “clues, fragments and whispers” of the future to be found in the present, rather than preconceived blueprints of the future.  This approach bears comparison with that of designer Ezio Manzini, who argues that social design should develop solutions to social problems by  "amplifying" specific instances of grassroots and community based creativity, rather than attempt to generate such solutions from scratch.

Cosmopolitan localism and levels of scale of everyday life
The term cosmopolitan localism was coined by the German sociologist Wolfgang Sachs, and later developed by Italian designer Ezio Manzini,who argued that if communities are to thrive and be sustainable, they need to become small, local, open and connected (‘SLOC’). The sociologist Gerard Delanty argues that the attempt to resolve the tension between cosmopolitan and localist forms of community can be found in multiple political and cultural traditions In contemporary terms. The objective of cosmopolitan localism, in the form it has taken within the field of transition design, is to foster a global network of mutually supportive communities that represent different levels of scale of everyday life: households, neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities and regions — what Kossoff has called ‘the Domains of Everyday Life’. These ‘Domains’ can be understood as nodes of social, economic, political, and cultural activity within complex networks that enable the sharing and exchange of knowledge, ideas, skills, technology, culture and (where socially and ecologically sustainable) resources. An important element of transition design, therefore, is the renewal and reinvention of the household, neighborhood, city and region as integrated sustainable and self-organizing networked forms.

Cosmopolitan localism fosters a creative, reciprocal relationship between the local and the global and is seen as a non-prescriptive alternative to economic globalization. It is argued that cosmopolitan localism could foster diverse localized, socially and ecologically sustainable lifestyles that develop within the context of the needs of the planet as a whole. It addresses the problem of globalisation, which tends to subsume local cultures and economies into homogenised and unsustainable global systems,   whilst avoiding the pitfalls of localisation, such as parochialism and isolationism.

New Ways of Designing
In addressing wicked problems and designing for systems level change; in designing for the relationship between people, nature, and the things that people make and do; in designing for short, mid and long horizons of time and in acknowledgement of vernacular, historical and indigenous cultures; and in designing place/ecosystem specific solutions, transition design can be seen as a logical development of a trend in design over recent decades that emphasizes relationship and context. Within mainstream design this trend has included service design (or design for service), social design (or design for social innovation), interaction design and policy design, whilst outside of mainstream design this trend has included permaculture and ecological design.

In the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Transition Design is taught alongside design for service and design for social Innovation, in the expectation that designers will be able to move freely between these three areas of practice and research, according to the scope of the problem that they hope to address. Thus design for service represents moderate change within existing paradigms and systems; design for social innovation represents significant change within emerging paradigms and systems; and transition design represents radical change within future paradigms and systems.

These areas of design practise and research can be located on a continuum, and the movement along this continuum (from design for service, through design for social innovation to transition design) represents an expansion of the scale of time, depth of engagement, and context to include social, political, economic and environmental concerns. Transition design's foregrounding of relationship, context and wholeness represents the incorporation into design of an ecological or holistic worldview and gives it several defining features:


 * Living systems theory is used as both an approach to understanding wicked problems and to designing systems level solutions to address them.


 * Designs solutions, based on visions and narratives of sustainable futures, for short, medium and long horizons of time and all levels of scale of everyday life (household, neighborhood, city and region).


 * Designs solutions that may evolve over time or may have intentionally short life spans that are intended as single steps in a longer-term transition toward a future-based vision.


 * Designs solutions that protect and restore both social and natural ecosystems through the creation of mutually beneficial relationships between people, the things they do and make and the natural environment.


 * Advocates place and ecosystem based, but globally networked solutions; seeks solutions that connect place to planet (cosmopolitan localism).


 * Sees everyday life in place (defined socially, culturally and ecologically) and lifestyles as the most important/fundamental context for design.


 * Looks for emergent possibilities within problem contexts and amplifies grassroots solutions already underway, as opposed to imposing pre-planned and fully resolved solutions upon a situation


 * Links existing solutions together so that they can function as steps in a larger, longer-term transition vision.


 * Distinguishes between 'wants/desires' and genuine needs and bases solutions on maximizing and integrating satisfiers for the widest range of needs.[ref. Max Neef]


 * Sees the designer's own mindset and posture as an essential component of transition designing.


 * Calls for the reintegration and recontextualization knowledge and work in and work in transdisciplinary and grassroots teams.

Use of the term 'transition'
The use of the word 'transition' in Transition Design is suggested and reinforced by several contemporary networks and discourses which use term ‘transition’ to describe the dynamics of societal change or ongoing efforts to move towards to more sustainable futures. These networks and discourses include transition towns, which seek to develop local and community resilience to external disruptions such as interruption to energy supplies and climate change; transition management, which studies the coevolution of technologies and their uses in order to understand how innovations can be introduced into society to enable new ways of living and working; the Great Transition, the term adopted by the Global Scenario Group, and now used by various leading think tanks such as the New Economics Foundation, in their series of reports identifying multiple future-based planetary scenarios and various strategies for change; and the Great Transition Initiative, an international network of more than 40 scholars and activists who seek to develop and mobilize a planet-wide citizens transition movement.

The concept of 'transition' in transition design also alludes to the dynamic nature of complex, non-linear, self-organizing and interdependent systems such as ecosystems and organisms. The 'phase transition' that occurs as such systems undergo stresses or 'perturbations' from their environment, can lead them to display unexpected, unpredictable and 'emergent' new forms of behaviour and structure. By corollary, transition design incorporates living systems theory or ecoliteracy in order to prepare designers for work within complex social systems, and to understand how these are embedded in natural systems. Transition design leverages the potential for self-organization, interdependence and emergence within such non-linear systems, and anticipates the possibility of rapid systemic change that can be triggered by modest interventions.

Domains of Everyday Life and Needs Satisfaction
Kossoff has proposed that Transition Design should integrate holistic science (including chaos, complexity and systems theories,    and Goethean science   with a tradition of non-authoritarian social and political philosophy that includes figures such as Murray Bookchin, Lewis Mumford, Peter Kropotkin, and Jane Jacobs.     These figures can be called 'radical holists' since they use organicist, holistic or ecological principles to underpin their advocacy of decentralized, mutualistic, self-organizing and participatory social, political and economic structures. According this perspective on transition design, in order to become sustainable, everyday life will need to be redesigned according to holistic principles. It is argued that everyday life arises as people strive to satisfy their material and non-material needs. and that it is more likely to be sustainable when communities control the satisfaction of their needs at all levels of scale—households, neighbourhoods, villages, cities, regions—'The Domains of Everyday Life'. It is argued that when control of need satisfaction is appropriated by centralized institutions, as it has often been in the modern era,

Aside this background, the TransforMap initiative emerged with the objective to visualise socio-technical transition initiatives that occur in the domain of everyday life on a geographical map.[52]

Education	Edit

Doctoral programs	Edit DDes in Transition Design (professional doctorate): Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design PhD in Transition Design: Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design See also	Edit

Circles of Sustainability Ecological design Modular design Open hardware Sustainable design Sustainability Transition management (governance) Urban acupuncture References	Edit

External links	Edit

Wuppertal Institute, Transition Design in the Discourse of Sustainability http://wupperinst.org/en/topics/resources/design/ Optimistic Grumpiness and Other Qualities of Transition Design Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, http://pro2.unibz.it/projects/blogs/bydesignorbydisaster/optimistic-grumpiness-much-more/ University of Palermo, Diseño en perspectiva, http://www.palermo.edu/dyc/programa_investigacion/diseno_perspectiva.html Daniel Wahl, Transition Design as Holistic Science in Action https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/transition-design-as-holistic-science-in-action/2016/09/22 AIGA, A Complete Primer on Transition Design, http://www.aiga.org/what-is-transition-design Susanna Carmen, Design Led Business: From Where to What http://www.susannacarman.com/single-post/2016/09/09/Design-Led-Business-From-Where-To-What Dave Wolfenden, A Solution Focus in Transition Design: Why it Needs to be Different https://medium.theuxblog.com/a-solution-focus-in-transition-design-why-it-needs-to-be-different-edc48db6cbcb#.pjb0zxrq7 Jeff Howard, Service Design in Transition at CMU Blog d’Eina, Research Group in Transition Design, http://blog.eina.cat/en/el-grup-de-recerca-transition-design-i-estudiants-del-grau-de-disseny-a-la-barcelona-design-week/57503dbbcbf5c69f6d915719 The Promise of Transition Design: An Interview With Terry Irwin, https://impactdesignhub.org/2015/11/11/the-promise-of-transition-design-an-interview-with-terry-irwin/ Design Futures Lab, RMIT, http://www.designfutureslab.org/social-futures/transition-design-studio/ Schumacher College, Transition Design: New Solutions For Life on a Finite Planet course description Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design Transition Design Course Outline and Schedule Transition Design: Re-conceptualizing Whole Lifestyles, Video Lecture Cameron Tonkinwise, Transition Design, Video Lecture, Konstfack 2014 Transition Network Sustainability Transitions Research Network Commons Transition

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