Transition Design Class

We are living in an age of permanent emergencies— Russell Jacoby

picture imperfect (2007)

Monday, 20 May 13

To say that our civilization is becoming dysfunctional scarcely conveys

the gravity of the situation

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Image by David Shrigley

Monday, 20 May 13

poverty

toxic waste

destruction of biodiversity

loss of cultural identity atomospheric pollution

mass manufacture

of junk

concentration of economic power

massive energy consumption

garbage

loneliness

nuclear holocaust

destruction of nature alienation

congestion

toxic food

authoritarian regimes

existential despair

loss of community

loss of commmunity

Monday, 20 May 13

The transition from a civilization of permanent emergency and increasing dysfunctionality to one that is ecologically, socially, culturally, economically and

existentially sustainable is the great challenge of our time — its a design challenge

Monday, 20 May 13

Transition Design: a grassroots and community based design framework to facilitate the transition to a sustainable society

Monday, 20 May 13

What are the boundaries of

design?

What are the boundaries of

problems?

Charles Eames (1907-1978) Ray Eames (1912-1988)

Transition is a design challenge

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Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred situations

Herbert Simon, Sciences of the Artificial (1969)

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Design is the primary underlying matrix of life”

—Victor Papanek

“

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Design, once narrowly defined as a marginal activity concerned

with aesthetic appeal of a limited range of consumer goods, can now

be seen to be at the core of all our conceptions and plans for our

personal and collective social lives....I seek to recognize design as a

fundamental constituent of all human action”

—Victor Margolin,

The Product Milieu and Social Action (1995)

“

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Monday, 20 May 13

Victor Margolin, design theorist

& historian

Just as social theorists have ignored the

ways that design enables or inhibits social action, so too the worldwide design

community has yet to generate profession-

wide visions of how its energies might be harnessed for social ends.

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wholeness = sustainability fragmentation = unsustainability

Transition Design: making social form whole

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Friday, 18 March 2011

Radical Holism

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A contemporary scientific and philosophical perspective on what ‘wholes’ are and how they behave:

• self-organize

• emergent

• holarchic

• fractal

• interrelatedness

• diversity

• adaptive

• developmental

• autopoeitic

• sensitive to

initial conditions

• whole is expressed

through each part

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holarchy = the whole in the part

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The context within which problems arise...Everyday Life:

....and solutions can be developed

where does transition design begin?

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Monday, 12 April 2010Monday, 20 May 13

In the modern world needs are controlled not from within the domains but by external, centralized institutions. Monday, 12 April 2010

Relationship between the ‘parts’ of everyday life

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Everyday Life emerges as we strive to satisfy our material and non-

material needs. Because ‘satisfiers’ change according to place,

culture and era, everyday life takes on many different forms.

Everyday life In communities that retain control of the satisfaction

their needs — traditional communities — is fundamentally

different from that of contemporary society....

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Traditional communities 1: endogenous need satisfaction through mutualistic relationships

The ‘parts’ of everyday life — people, nature, artefacts — come to form integrated, organic unities

idleness,affection

idleness, identity, affection

freedom,participation

affection, subsistence

subsistence, affection

subsistence,affection

subsistence,participation

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Traditional communities 2: need satisfaction takes place at different levels of scale

region

region

city

region

village/n’hood

village/n’hood

household

village/n’hoodvillage/n’hood

village/n’hood

village/n’hood

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Monday, 20 May 13

House built by family with specialist contributions from other villagers eg carpenters. Food

stored in bins and barrels in cellars. Roof space used to dry & preserve food, to store fodder

& fuel. Lavishly decorated with rugs, has ‘chapel’ & guest room. Spinning, dyeing & weaving

take place, & surrounded by vegetable plots & fruit trees. Households cooperate each other

in many ways eg in birth, marriage and death, & share animals, ploughs & labour.

Ladakh: Household

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Matters of concern to whole village democratically decided on a village level, and

discussed by representatives of households or groups of households at the village

council, presided over by head, a position held in rotation. Irrigation regulated by elected

villager, who determined when households could divert channels into their own fields.

Ladakh: Village

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Spiritual centre, concentration of monasteries and mosques. Also trading centre for this

and surrounding regions

Ladakh: City

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Ladakh: Region

Households had their own holdings but harvesting these involved the entire village, or

sometimes several villages. Harvesting accompanied by constant laughter and song. Used

shrubs, plants and bushes found in the deserts and mountains for fuel and animal fodder, for

fences and the roofs of their houses, for dye, medicine, food, incense and basket weaving.

Summer grazing for livestock in the mountains. A family member based with the animals for

the whole season, and periodically visited by his family who would return home with dung

used as fuel during the winter.

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Satisfaction of needs internally controlled (emergent)

Satisfaction of needs externally controlled (imposed)

the transition to modernity

Satifisfiers of the needs for freedom and participation

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Satifisfiers of the need for identity and participation


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Satisfiers of the needs for subsistence, participation, creation

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Satisfiers of the needs for subsistence, participation, creation




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Household, Village, Neighbourhood, City and Region are hollowed out and begin

to disintegrate as satisfiers are appropriated by external, centralized institutions

the decline of the domains of everyday life

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The fragmentation of the Domains of Everyday Life

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Monday, 20 May 13

Neither participatory nor self-organizing centralized social ‘wholes’ (eg nation state, corporations) come to penetrate and control everyday life, which becomes fragmented and homogenized.

Counterfeit social holism

Monday, 20 May 13

poverty

toxic waste

destruction of biodiversity

loss of cultural identity atomospheric pollution

mass manufacture

of junk

concentration of economic power

massive energy consumption

garbage

loneliness

nuclear holocaust

destruction of nature alienation

congestion

toxic food

authoritarian regimes

existential despair

loss of community

loss of commmunity

Monday, 20 May 13

Transition Designers 1: Designing strategies to protect what remains of self-organizing, mutualistic place-based need satisfying activities, and thereby protect the Domains from further disintegration

Monday, 20 May 13

Transition Designers 2: Facilitating the restoration and reinvention of the Domains of Everyday Life through designing place-based, mutualistic and self-organized need satisfying activities

Monday, 20 May 13

Transition Designers 3: Connecting and integrating projects, creating ecosystems of interdependence and mutual benefit, parts and wholes of everyday life at all levels of scale enfolding and reciprocating one another, moving everyday life towards a moment of transformation...

Monday, 20 May 13

poet

video artist

architect

engineer

chef

ecologist

horticulturalist

psychotherapist

philosopher

soil scientist

designer

sociologistbiologist

economist

cleaner

waitress

machinist receptionist

Who is the transition designer and what are their skills?

Monday, 20 May 13

Archetypal phases in good design process

1/ Investigation

The problem is defined; the situation is analyzed; parameters within which solutions to be

developed are established (hopefully by assessing what is and is not working in a given context

through dialogue with ‘users’).

2/ Ideation and concept development

Consolidation and distillation of information gathered during investigation; multiple concepts for

solutions visualized, developed, prototyped, iterated and discussed with users; design chosen

3/ Realisation and implementation

Plan and timeline developed to realise solution; prototyping; delivery and assessment of solutions

effectiveness and ongoing refinement (iteration) when possible

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transition design skills1/ Needs and their satisfiers

Skilled in identifying, developing and reappropriating satisfiers for needs in Households, Villages,

Neighbourhoods, Cities and Regions. To do this, Transition Designers work with multiple

specialists from relevant fields and with communities striving to satisfy their needs.

2/ ‘Butterfly’ intervention

Complex systems are ‘sensitive to initial conditions’: the tiniest influence can potentially ramify

throughout and transform a system. The Transition Designer is attuned to the points in everyday

life at which intervention is most likely to trigger widespread transformation with least effort.

3/ Indicators of sustainability

Transition Designers would be skilled in identifying/analyzing ‘indicators of sustainability’ and

their opposites in everyday life: self-organization and top-down coercive control; mutualistic and

atomized relationships; emergent and imposed social form. These contradictory tendencies are

likely to be present simultaneously. Transition Designers have to be skilled in disentangling the

two and cultivating favourable tendencies.

4/ Identifying potentialities

Transition Designers would be skilled in identifying the “buds and shoots of new potentialities” of

ways of being in the world, the “clues, fragments and whispers” of a future sustainable society,

and ‘amplifying’ these.

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Transition Designers: work to protect and restore the ‘wholeness’ of everyday life, which is a measure of its sustainability

Monday, 20 May 13

Monday, 20 May 13

The whole in the part at different levels of scale of everyday life

Authentic social holism

The communal oven: multiple needs satisfied in an integrated way,eg. subsistence, affection, freedom, participation

The farm: multiple needs satisfied in an integrated way, eg. subsistence, affection, idleness

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Counterfeit social wholes & the fragmentation of everyday life

Counterfeit social holism

The bread factory: a single need (subsistence) is inadequately satisfied

The industrial farm: a single need (subsistence) is inadequately satisfied

Monday, 20 May 13

Transition Design Class

Documents

Transcript of Transition Design Class