The Emerging Transition Design Approach
by Terry Irwin
This poster diagrams the Transition Design approach, which calls for more compelling visions of long-term sustainable futures. These co-created visions act as both a magnet, to draw stakeholders toward a desired future, and a roadmap for how to get there: backcasting from the vision to the present, creates a ‘transition pathway’ along which projects and initiatives in the present and mid-term can be situated, becoming ‘steps’ in a longer transition.
The approach leverages tools and practices that can be useful in framing problems in the present and future, while others are useful in designing ‘systems interventions’ that can seed and catalyze change. These interventions are situated both temporally and spatially (at multiple levels of scale, over multiple time horizons). This poster highlights some of the approaches that are emphasized in the Transition Design Seminar and that are being used in project work in Ojai California.