Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study and Research

Critical Analysis

In this text, the author argues in support of a new approach to design called Transition Design. This is said to be parallel to service design and design for social impact, but is said to have some differences: Transition Design is “based upon longer-term visioning and recognition of the need for solutions rooted in new, more sustainable socioeconomic and political paradigms.” This description places emphasis on visioning as a core competency. Visioning is typically considered strategic, in that a vision of the future acts as a north star as a goal, or, in the case of some discursive or speculative design projects, a black star—something to be avoided. Sustainability here is argued to be a push against neoliberal practices that assume capitalism and consumerism at their core, and that increasingly embrace computation as a delivery mechanism for value.

In positioning Transition Design in relationship to service design and social innovation, the author makes several strategic moves. First, this new approach is implicitly legitimized; qualities of the approach can be debated or disputed, but the approach itself is assumed to be acceptable. Next, the author argues that Transition Design has an increased scale of time, depth of engagement, and context that includes social and environment concerns, which serves to escalate its impact above and beyond both service and social innovation design. In selecting service and social innovation design, the author has claimed a space of making that is often more experiential—that tends to diminish the production of artifacts in favor of the production of policies, intellectual systems and structures, and invisible qualities like empowerment. This makes it compelling in the face of increasingly commoditized design services, where designers are asking themselves what their contribution will be when making things is automated.

The author explains that the details of the framework include four elements. Visions for transitions are provocations about potential futures, futures that likely push against what feels inevitable in current contexts. These probe ad question through scenarios and narratives, tools largely embraced in corporate contexts at leadership levels. Theories of change, borrowed from social innovation, describe action, as the author claims that “any planned course of action (design) is based upon a theory of change: a hypothesis is formulated about what type of change is needed and an assumption is made about the correct approach for intervention, based upon a predicted outcome.” The author recognizes that theory change has typically been viewed as a scaffold for adding control to problems that feel intractable, although the repurposing of this language is not further explained.

Included in the framework is the concept of mindsets and postures, which is a call for designers to recognize their own positioning and biases when offering solutions to problems. This is an encouragement to formally examine priorities and see if they are in support of collaborative and openness values.

The framework describes that transitions require new design approaches; these designers “learn to see and solve for wicked problems,” yet avoid imposing planned solutions and instead look for possibilities that emerge through inquiry. “Transition Designers see themselves as agents of change” and this requires working iteratively, at multiple levels of scale, and thinking over longer periods of time.

This is the most unique aspect of the framework and the call for a new type of design thinking and working—an emphasis on a time horizon of change that may far exceed any one designer’s ability for impact (or even one’s life itself). Problems of a grand social scale have developed over centuries, and will likely take centuries to untangle. It goes unacknowledged, however, that this is the most unlikely quality of this way of working and thinking to succeed within the common structures of government and corporations. Both forms of infrastructure are based on short-term thinking, with elected officials supporting policies to drive re-election, large corporations supporting quarterly profit recording, and entrepreneurial efforts—both socially-driven and financially-driven—being constrained by limited funding and a demand for short-term metric reporting as indicators of success.

This demands attention: if this framework is to be more than an intellectual exercise, strategies for circumventing these entrenched models are required. Change to these models is itself a problem that requires the elements of transition design as argued here, but this is circular logic; initial change in the spirit of this text demands a clear practical playbook, if the intellectual commitments are to be realized.

Problematic also is an assumption that the world is full of problems to be solved. The author notes that positivist approaches to theory of change have failed, yet theory of change is typically used interchangeably with the phrase and idea of logic modeling, where a causal chain is expected; simply repurposing the words doesn’t mean that the underlying approaches common in non-profits and NGOs will shift. Wicked problems imply wicked solutions, but the human condition does not exist as a problem to be solved. Both service design and social innovation assume that if a problem does exist and needs to be addressed, something new is part of the solution; the word innovation is problematic, as it finds itself attached to novelty and newness. But transition design as described here has “attached” itself to innovation and newness by embracing these other forms of design.

This continual view of problems and solutions may limit the impact of design as situated and experienced; the best use of design is often to not design anything at all, given the inevitable consequences of designerly actions and the scale at which these consequences take hold.