Framing Across System Scales and Timeframes

Abstract

In recent years, designers have been increasingly active in dealing with societal transitions, using design and social innovation to drive systemic change. Transitions are long-term processes of systems change toward more desirable alternatives. In transition design, designers conceptualise and implement transition interventions to influence people’s and society’s behaviours, practices, and lifestyles. However, little is known about the design processes that lead to such interventions or the reasoning patterns that support a design process toward conceptualising transition design interventions. In the present paper, we explore how a transition design rationale—a design rationale tailored to the complexities of transition challenges—supports designers in making design decisions and clear argumentations for how proposed interventions foster desired transitions. We present two studies that investigate the development and application of a transition design logical framework. The first study was a grounded theory study on design reasoning, in which designers in a consortium developed interventions to foster the transition of the Dutch food system to less food waste. In this first study, the designers applied the transition design logical framework to strengthen the design reasoning for intervention proposals. The second study consisted of two evaluative workshops with designers who applied the framework to design interventions that fostered desired systems changes. The findings indicate that our transition design logical framework supports designers in framing the transition context in a way that makes it manageable to design for, increasing confidence in the efficacy of proposed transition interventions. We found that a key challenge for designers’ reasoning toward transition interventions is articulating individual and system behaviour changes integrally. We conclude the paper by reflecting on avenues for methodological development to further support transition design reasoning toward interventions. Additionally, we call on the systemic and transition design communities to continue refining and expanding a shared repertoire of behaviour change mechanisms that can effectively drive systemic changes.