Transitioning to sustainable futures through participatory design

Some musings in preparation for future research degree and/or projects.

Imagine the terrifying prospect of everything you know and everything you have worked for being taken away from you without your say, and without a chance to choose a different future.

That is what is happening to thousands of people around Australia as we begin our long—and painful—transition to a fossil-free existence. People in towns such as Collie in Western Australia are coming to terms with a future that they didn’t imagine and which is not being adequately planned for by our respective state and federal governments.

The recent bushfire disaster has shown that we cannot rely solely on a political solution to address the impacts of climate change. Alongside many others, this has drawn me to imagine what a people-led approach to transition might look like.

Initially I am looking to understand how others have used frameworks such as transition design, human-scale development, and participatory design to assist towns in transitioning away from dependency on fossil fuels. This understanding would then be used practically by others in setting up their own transition initiatives.

Opportunities

To address this challenge I will begin by investigating:

• Mapping of existing transition initiatives across government, business and community to understand the ecosystem of change;
• Case study analysis to understand how transition has been approached by others. This might look at methods, process and duration of initiatives, actors and mindsets involved, and lessons learned.
• Analysis of the role of design methods in tackling transition.

This is a synthesised list based on an initial reading of Gaziulusoy & Ryan (2017), Hyysalo et al (2019), Sanders & Stappers (2008) and Sellberg et al (2017).

Research plan

Ideally this project would be a collaboration with other transition experts and a community in transition so that a practical case study can be used as the basis for analysis and recommendations.

Next steps

I am currently in the process of finding a supervisor and preparing a proposal for the research degree. Please provide any suggestions for supervisors, communities, collaborators and approaches to this problem in the comments. Thank you.

References

Gaziulusoy, A. & Ryan, C. 2017, “Roles of design in sustainability transitions projects: A case study of Visions and Pathways 2040 project from Australia”, Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 162, pp. 1297–1307.

Hyysalo, S., Marttila, T., Perikangas, S. & Auvinen, K. 2019, “Codesign for transitions governance: A mid-range pathway creation toolset for accelerating sociotechnical change”, Design Studies, vol. 63, pp. 181–203.

Sanders, E.B. & Stappers, P.J. 2008, “Co-creation and the new landscapes of design”, CoDesign, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 5–18.

Sellberg, M., Borgström, S.T., Norström, A.V. & Peterson, G.D. 2017, “Improving participatory resilience assessment by cross-fertilizing the Resilience Alliance and Transition Movement approaches”, Ecology and Society, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 28.