Stine Moons and Esther Noëth
Transition design brings a dynamic time and scale element to the characteristics and tools of systemic design. Where boundary setting is an essential element of systems thinking and systemic design, the boundaries between systems become playing fields for interventions in transition design. When designing in the context of sustainability transitions, actively zooming in and out between nested systems turns out to be a necessary skill to both analyse systems in transition and intervene across scales. This skill is often mentioned in literature but remains underdeveloped in practice. It is an almost poetic idea often expressed in metaphors such as creating waves or the butterfly effect. At the same time, the fractality and self-similarity of scale-linking evoke images of endlessly repeating patterns and feelings of awe. To enhance the actionability of designing across scales, we explore this concept of scale-linking, using the strength of these metaphors and awe-evoking images.
In this workshop, we work from abstract metaphors towards a set of skills necessary to design across scales and dynamically zoom in and out on the organisational level. We use the innovation process in the context of the transition to the circular economy as a medium to test our ideas in a realistic context.
KEYWORDS: sustainability transitions, nestedness, innovation, systemic design application