10.2 Troubling Transitions: Growing Pains in Designing and Researching for Transformation

Corresponding Chairs

Femke Coops, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands  

Dan Lockton, Norwich University of the Arts, United Kingdom

Co-Chairs

Marysol Ortega Pallanez, Arizona State University, United States  

Joanna Boehnert, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom  

Fabrizio Ceschin, Brunel University of London, UK  

İdil Gaziulusoy, Aalto University, Finland  

Silvana Juri, SARAS Institute, Uruguay / Stockholm Resilience Center, Sweden  

Anja Overdiek, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands  

Emma Dewberry, The Open University, UK  

Alma Leora Culén, University of Oslo, Norway  

Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Norway

Abstract

Designing for transitions includes a growing body of design scholarship with theories of change related to sustainability, justice, and futures thinking. The field is defining itself through societally impactful research to support urgent transformations demanded by today’s intertwined social-ecological crises.

As designers and collaborators apply transition theories to address complex social and ecological challenges, we encounter tensions with ingrained institutional and professional priorities and ways of working. Expanded ecological and pluriversal ontologies and epistemologies are in tension with priorities embedded into the modern logic of normative design practice and unfettered economic growth. This risks the appropriation of transition ethos to accompany dominant logics, with modes of greenwashing, reducing complex relational processes to linear and technocratic solutions, erasing emotional and political struggles, and ultimately reinforcing defuturing trajectories.

This track invites responses to the ways design research and practice for transitions trouble legacies and assumptions in design theories, design pedagogies, professional identities of designers, design as a discipline, and how these troubles manifest as growing pains in research and practice. We encourage authors to contribute conceptual, empirical, and review papers exploring and describing the growing pains and dilemmas of the field guided by these questions:

• How do transition theories enable systemic change beyond previous forms of design research and what is troubled in the process? 

• What are “growing pains” in designing for sustainability and transitions?

• How are designers responding to the dilemmas they encounter when designing for transitions – particularly when engaging with issues of affect, social justice, the more-than-human, and multiple temporalities?

Keywords

Design, transitions, sustainability, systems change, futures-thinking

References

Boehnert, J., Lockton, D., and Mulder, I. (2018) Editorial: Designing for Transitions, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.008

Coops, F., Lockton, D., Gaziulusoy, İ., Tonkinwise, C., Boehnert, J., Ortega Pallanez, M., Overdiek, A., Nilstad Pettersen, I., Culén, A.L., and Juri, S. (2024) Designing (for) transitions and transformations: Imagination, climate futures, and everyday lives, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.167 

Juri, S., Zurbriggen, C., Bosch Gómez, S., & Ortega Pallanez, M. (2021). Transition Design in Latin America: Enabling Collective Learning and Change. Frontiers in Sociology, 6, 202. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.725053 

Lindström, K., Jönsson, L., & Hillgren, P. A. (2024, August). Reorientations: Practicing Grief and Hope in Post-Carbon Futures. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Full Papers-Volume 1 (pp. 187-196).

Lähteenoja, S., Marttila, T., Gaziulusoy, İ., & Hyysalo, S. (2023). Transition co-design dynamics in high level policy processes. Design Studies, 88, 101207. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2023.101207