Niki Wallace
Advancing research and practice in Design for Transitions (DfT) is crucial in the face of escalating polycrisis, where design has a responsibility to act but a deficit in the necessary competencies to do so. Slow-paced change in design education and the sector’s growing skills gap add to tensions between problems, practice, and its intended outcomes. This provides an urgent backdrop against which this research explores competencies and criteria for designing systemic interventions in DfT. This paper presents the findings from Participatory Action Research that has been shaped by iterative cycles of action, informed first by mapping and desk research before moving to more active participation and data collection. Academic experts, advanced practitioners and post-graduate students have been engaged through interviews, focus groups, and prototyping activities within a Transition Learning Lab to explore: ‘what it takes’ to design systemic interventions; the competencies that enable this practice; the pedagogic strategies that build these competencies; and the tensions arising between complex problems and the practices that seek to intervene in them. Through thematic analysis and reflective doodling, an emergent set of criteria for designing systemic interventions has been assembled as the core elements of a framework. Working with participants from both academia and practice, the framework has been applied to historical and in-progress projects to test its clarity and usefulness and is presented here as a ‘multiplicity framework’. This paper begins by briefly unpacking DfT as a practice of assemblage that draws together elements that enable its practice through a ‘multiplicity’ that is greater than the sum of its parts. The paper then presents descriptions of the different criterion that make up the elements of the ‘multiplicity framework’. The framework contributes an explicit structure for the design of systemic interventions and in doing so, aims to ensure rigour and responsibility for this systems-oriented design approach.
Keywords: design for transitions; systemic interventions; assemblage; design criteria;