Food waste remains a critical global challenge, undermining sustainability and straining food systems. This study investigates adaptable consumption as a transformative strategy for reducing household food waste, emphasising its role in enhancing resilience within food systems. Adaptability of consumption empowers households to adjust food-related behaviours in response to changes in food availability, household needs, and other disruptions. Through cultural probes and semi-structured interviews with 11 Dutch households (43 participants), this study identifies five actionable opportunities for supporting consumers in more adaptability toward food waste reduction: 1) supporting flexible meal moments, 2) reclaiming food edibility, 3) reintegrating food into routines, 4) integrating feedback loops, and 5) playing into life-changing moments. These opportunities represent critical moments in time, behavioural routines, or dynamics where food waste-reducing behaviours can be successfully introduced and fostered. The study identifies practical recommendations within each opportunity, including implementing sensory-driven food labels to guide safe consumption decisions, introducing storage tools to minimise waste, and leveraging digital tools to provide actionable feedback, which can support households in adopting sustainable and waste-reducing practices. By integrating such interventions, stakeholders can enable households to adopt concrete, sustainable practices that align with systemic goals for food waste reduction and resilience.

In recent years, designers have increasingly engaged with sustainability transitions, using design and innovation activity to drive systemic change. However, we still have a limited understanding of how designers can best frame complex system dynamics to understand which innovations will foster desired changes. This study aims to better understand how design decisions are made when innovating for transitions and how to support this process. We take a research-through-design approach to explore the dimensions of scale and time and propose a conceptual framework to specify how to include these dimensions in framing transition challenges for design. In our view, exploring and specifying 1) systems principles that drive the future system, 2) organizational roles that stakeholders can play in the transition, and 3) changes in people’s behavior and capabilities that drive the transition, is key to identifying what future practice(s) to design for to foster desired transitions. We discuss the design activities and process artifacts developed and used to support our investigation into framing for transitions in a way that aligns short-term innovation efforts with long-term systemic change. Our contributions advance our understanding of framing in transition design, and we hint toward some of the design activities and process artifacts to support this.

In a world facing interconnected crises, there is a growing need for approaches that enable long term systemic transformation. Transition design is one such approach. As a specialised field at the intersection of design and sustainability transitions, it aims to guide societies toward desirable futures through systemic interventions. This dissertation advances transition design theory and practice by exploring how designers can stage their expertise to foster societal transitions. Through research in a transition in the Dutch food system, it examines visioning, framing, and evaluating as key areas of design expertise particularly relevant to transition processes.

With one-third of global food production wasted yearly, food systems face increasing strain. High levels of food waste deplete resources, harm the environment, worsen food insecurity, and incur significant economic costs. Reducing food waste is, therefore, critical for easing pressure on ecosystems and mitigating the effects of climate change. In the Netherlands, household waste is particularly prevalent, embedded in entrenched consumption patterns, making systemic change both urgent and complex.

Against this backdrop, the dissertation makes several contributions. It introduces adaptable consumption as an innovative practice to reduce food waste and enhance food system resilience, supported by an intervention portfolio. It provides methodological guidance for designers working across timeframes, actor networks, and scales, helping identify where and how to intervene in complex systems. Finally, it proposes evaluative qualities to assess whether interventions are desirable, plausible, and networked within transition pathways. These contributions enrich the emerging knowledge in transition design while equipping designers with practical tools for engaging with societal transitions.

In recent years, more designers have been engaging in transitions, for which design expertise is used to develop visions of long-term desirable futures. However, little is known about how design expertise is positioned in transition visioning processes. In this case study, we follow a design agency in envisioning a future food system for a consortium working on the food transition. Based on our findings, we unpack several tensions that emerge between the transition context and design expertise. Such as the tension for designers to explore alternative futures that challenge the current system yet support stakeholders in seeing their place in the future. We conclude by reflecting on avenues for methodological development to optimally position design expertise for visioning in transitions.

In recent years, more designers have been engaging in transitions for which design activity is used to develop innovations that steer change. However, little is known about how designers develop innovations to foster change along a desired transition path. In this short paper, we explore how designers can develop joint innovations that steer a transition of the Dutch food system to embrace flexibility and cater to enough. We present a new practice called Adaptable Consumption, which aims to realign food safety, quality, and sustainability. Based on our preliminary findings, we discuss how our process inspires reflections on the transition and reveals key indicators for collaborative change. We conclude by reflecting on areas of the process that need further exploration in order to stage the process and design expertise effectively in this highly complex transition context.

Designers are increasingly tackling complex societal challenges and fostering system transitions. Transitions are long-term, multi-level, multi-phasal system changes involving numerous actors, requiring innovations that develop new relationships within the system. Therefore, the process of designing for transitions requires new ways of bridging system analysis and system synthesis. This paper explores the concepts of ‘transition readiness’ and ‘value conflicts’ as valuable indicators to bridge this gap and support designers in fos-tering system transitions. Synthesizing insights from literature and previous experience, we propose a first step towards an integrative model for mapping a system transition in a way that inspires design. Our model, called the Transition Readiness Profiles, anticipates the dynamics of a system transition and helps identify how and where design can inter-vene to accelerate the transition. It analyzes the transition at the individual-, organization-, and system level to understand the system dynamics and reveal what organizations can bring forward to foster the transition relative to others. The Profiles capture the relational dimension of a transition by mapping readiness, value conflict, and stakeholder relation-ships and dependencies.