Shifting Conversations for Sustainability Transitions Using Participatory Design Visioning

Abstract

Sustainability transitions require structural changes in society. There is a need for utilising new and established methods of futures inquiry. This paper presents how design visioning has been used to initiate, stimulate and shift stakeholder conversations in the Visions and Pathways 2040 project which aimed to develop innovation strategies and policies to achieve low-carbon, resilient futures in Australian cities. We recommend that teams working in sustainability transitions research should ideally have internal design capacity or, they regularly engage with outsourced design capacity throughout the project. Since it is not possible to directly engage all stakeholders in transition projects, the research teams should reflect on the extent of participation and the implications of this extent on the politics of the project on an ongoing and transparent way. We identified exploring the implications of thinking styles, professional backgrounds and organisational associations in visioning exercises as a future research direction.

Developing Policy Pathways: Redesigning Transition Arenas for Mid-range Planning

“…Albeit codesign is mentioned as an area from which TM draws, its long development of means and procedures to augment deliberation has been utilized far below its potential (cf. [36][37][38][39]). The need for improved instrumentation was underscored by the mid-range focus, which would arguably entail more concrete pathway steps and actions.…”

“…The aims of making transition management procedures and principles 'travel' to different contexts and making TA processes better in addressing the urgency in accelerating sustainability transitions call for more variety in how transition management is pursued [2,30,38,39]. The transition arena process for supporting the Finnish energy system transition is an example of such an effort.…”

O Design da Informação no projeto de cenários futuros mais sustentáveis no ensino em Design Gráfico

“…Por outro lado, alguns estudos (e.g., Ceschin, 2014;Gaziulusoy & Ryan, 2017;Mok & Gaziulusoy, 2018), apontam que os designers podem atuar em projetos de transições para a sustentabilidade utilizando suas habilidades próprias de abdução e de comunicação visual. Em projetos com múltiplos atores que visam a construção de uma visão comum, os designers são fundamentais nos processos relativos a como informações são recebidas, analisadas, sistematizadas e sintetizadas.…”

“…Em projetos de transições, uma vez que o design tem como propósito influenciar mudanças, os designers assumem papéis essencialmente dialógicos como facilitadores, comunicadores, networkers e negociadores (Ceschin, 2014). Por conseguinte, a atividade chave de design nesses projetos é o próprio processo de desenvolvimento de soluções e cenários futuros: tratase de um design orientado ao processo, em vez de orientado ao resultado (Gaziulusoy & Ryan, 2017). Esses papéis, no entanto, representam a necessidade de desenvolvimento de competências de design específicas (Ceschin, 2014) Ceschin (2014), Gaziulusoy e Ryan (2017) e Mok e Gaziulusoy (2018) evidenciam a importância do design, em projetos de transições, na construção de uma visão comum por meio da comunicação visual.…”

Catalysing Pathway Creation for Transition Governance

“…In recent years design for sustainability transitions has entered onto the transition research and governance scene. Design research has engaged the field in various ways, for instance, it has generated experiential future scenarios and change pathways (Gaziulusoy & Ryan, 2017a, 2017b, and has pursued long-term local experimentation engagements aimed towards low carbon transition have drawing from community design and practice theory (Jalas et al, 2017;Manzini & Rizzo, 2011). It has further built anticipatory strategic design initiatives in order to target the critical aspects of evolving transitions (Mok & Hyysalo, 2017).…”