ABSTRACT. Wildfires in boreal forest ecosystems are intensifying as climate change and extractive forestry practices produce drier, more vulnerable landscapes. Current responses centred on fire suppression and fuel reduction treat fire as an isolated event and not as a symptom of a deeper ecological imbalance. The project positions soil moisture retention as a critical leverage point shaping fire behavior, asking how design can contribute to a transition from an extractive to a regenerative regime in forest management that aligns with the forest cycles of regeneration and renewal. Developed in collaboration with PaperShell, a Swedish material company converting paper waste streams into certified biochar, the project connects speculative thinking within industrial networks. Two design interventions are proposed: Percolare, a ceramic-biochar piece that acts on the topsoil, slowly releasing carbon; and Carbon Pod Cycle, a biochar module system starting in forest nurseries and influencing roots to slowly build conditions for regeneration.

ABSTRACT. The project integrates design research and industrial prototyping through the involvement of competencies from different Departments of the University of Bologna and industrial know-how, supported by testimonies of experiences in extreme contexts (both terrestrial and space-related) and by the involvement of SMEs with technical-creative competencies coming from other sectors. The project focuses attention on the micro-habitat dimension, taking orbital space environments as the scale of action within which human life must adapt. In this context, it was necessary to rethink ways of living and working, as well as the relationships that might be configured in the future, raising questions about the evolution of orbital habitat and its entanglements with geopolitical dynamics. The work required a continuous movement of zoom-in and zoom-out, in which Transition Design and Advanced Design accompanied readings, decisions, and transitions across levels.

ABSTRACT. Unplanned dialysis initiation affects 45.4% of kidney replacement therapy patients under Thailand's Universal Coverage Scheme, representing a systemic failure spanning clinical, cultural, institutional, and financial dimensions. This paper presents the early adoption of Transition Design methodology in Thai public health policymaking, conducted in collaboration with Thailand's National Health Security Office. Through design ethnography, systems analysis, and six co-design workshops involving over 40 stakeholders, the project surfaced the lived experience, feedback dynamics, and cultural forces sustaining crisis-driven care. Findings reveal that unplanned dialysis is not a clinical failure in isolation but a predictable systemic outcome produced by reinforcing loops across workforce capacity, patient behaviour, family dynamics, and institutional incentives. The process generated a portfolio of twelve innovations operating across multiple levels of scale. The paper demonstrates how Transition Design can complement policymaking by enabling collective sensemaking, multi-stakeholder co-design, and long-term transition planning in complex public health systems.

ABSTRACT. Regenerative transitions demand sustained, multi-stakeholder participation across timescales and institutional levels, beyond conventional design disciplines. Drawing on five embedded case studies — post-conflict territorial development in Nariño (Colombia); co-design with collectives at risk of exclusion in Valencia; an international design cohort (WDO-YDC); institutional co-design at CDTM Valencia; and the citizen-driven legal recognition of the Mar Menor lagoon as a subject of rights — we ask how participation is sustained over time and across nested scales. Through retroductive cross-case thematic analysis, we find five empirical patterns: (i) fractal participation architecture; (ii) attuning, trust and material conditions; (iii) translation as a participatory-design competency distinct from facilitation; (iv) endurance portfolio with capacity-building, narrative-relational or legal-institutional mechanisms, among others; and (v) agonism and agency gradient extending to more-than-human stakeholders. We read these through temporal (infrastructuring) and spatial (institutioning) lenses, with implications for facilitators, institutional sponsors and design educators. The framework is extended in a companion paper.

ABSTRACT. The built environment remains locked into a 'take-make-waste' economy, in which materials are extracted, processed, and discarded rather than kept in productive use. Despite the growing recognition of the benefits of circularity, circular building projects have consistently failed to catalyze broader systemic transformation. Drawing insights from 25 interviews with 30 actors and four workshops with 38 participants from Canada's construction industry, I examined how actors engaged in project ecosystems can enable the transition towards a systems-wide circular economy. I found that the key to understanding these challenges lies in designing project ecosystems, not isolated projects, and recognizing the different roles of direct actors, who physically handle materials, and enabling actors, who shape institutional frameworks. I propose a process with three stages that build on each other: enabling actors reduce systemic frictions, direct actors then have new opportunities to implement pilots, then direct actors can share learnings from pilots with enabling actors to further reduce frictions. This approach provides a pathway to address the coordination challenges in project ecosystems and support a transition towards a circular built environment.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that climate breakdown and planetary overshoot render insufficient an architectural understanding of place centred primarily on atmosphere, formal singularity, and sensory specificity. It proposes instead a regenerative urbanism grounded in urban bioregions, territorial metabolism, and long-term Transition Design. The article makes three contributions. First, it reinterprets Kenneth Frampton's six points of critical regionalism not as criteria for judging singular works, but as principles for socio-technical transition. Second, it develops a bioregional brief as an operative framework linking scale, cycles, governance, and practices of care. Third, it formulates three 2050 scenarios—City-Watershed, City-Soil, and City-Material—as normative imaginaries for backcasting and collective deliberation. Methodologically, the paper builds a translation matrix that moves from architectural theory to bioregional transition thinking. It concludes that the relevant place for the twenty-first century is ecological, metabolic, political, and territorial, and that critical regionalism remains useful only if rescaled toward systems change, institutional transformation, and regenerative futures.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary socio-ecological systems are increasingly characterized by non-linearity, deep uncertainty, and tightly coupled interdependencies. In conditions of polycrisis, incremental and reactive governance models prove insufficient to address long-term systemic challenges. While anticipatory governance emphasizes foresight and scenario-building, it often remains expert-driven and technocratic. Conversely, participatory governance expands inclusion and legitimacy but frequently lacks structural integration with future-oriented capacity-building. This paper proposes "PaNticipatory Design" as a conceptual and operational framework that integrates anticipation and participation into a unified systemic design approach. Drawing on anticipatory systems theory, futures literacy, adaptive governance, responsible innovation, and complexity theory, Panticipatory Design reframes participation as distributed sensing and sensemaking infrastructure. It conceptualizes anticipation as an emergent property of heterogeneous networks—including human, institutional, ecological, and artificial agents—rather than as a purely expert-driven function. The paper adopts an exploratory comparative qualitative design to analyze two complementary cases: the AI-supported FutureSeeds Scenario platform in Brazil and the institutionalized participatory governance ecosystem in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. Together, these cases illustrate how technological, institutional, and pedagogical infrastructures can enable distributed anticipatory capacity. The study argues that long-term systems change requires the intentional design of participatory infrastructures that embed anticipation within governance processes. By articulating a bridge between foresight methodologies, institutional innovation, and intelligent technologies, Panticipatory Design contributes to Transition Design theory and practice, reframing anticipation as a collective, distributed capability essential for regenerative and adaptive transitions.

ABSTRACT. To address the implementation gap in community-scale TransitionDesign (TD), this paper introduces the Resilience Compass, a novel card- based facilitation method integrating Social-Ecological Systems (SES) resilience principles with TD backcasting. Iteratively developed through urbangarden workshops in Shanghai and Auckland in 2025/26, the tool translatescomplex sustainability principles into accessible, localized prompts. It scaffolds non-expert participants through both imaginative visioning andsubsequent action-planning. The primary contribution is methodological: providing a tangible, practice-ready artefact that empowers grassrootspractitioners to operationalize systemic transitions. Ultimately, this researchadvances TD by demonstrating how theoretical ecological frameworks canbesynthesised into generative, community-led design interventions.

ABSTRACT. Environmental conservation initiatives often struggle to sustain impact because they prioritise technical solutions over the relationships that enable collective stewardship. Participatory and co-design approaches attempt to address this gap; however, participation frequently remains procedural rather than relational. This paper argues that durable conservation outcomes depend on relational practice: the intentional cultivation of connections among people, place, and the more-than-human world.

Within the Design for Conservation (D4C) methodology—a participatory, transdisciplinary framework supporting community-led environmental action—conservation challenges are reframed as crises of disconnection. The Reconnection stage serves as a guiding anchor, establishing trust, shared values, and collective agency before problem-solving begins. We examine five relational tools in depth: Thriving Earth Meditation, Mindset Cards, Botanical Empathy, Maramataka Dial, and the Climate Change Game. Drawing on facilitation across diverse educational and community contexts, we analyse how these tools engage participants in embodied reflection, systems thinking, and culturally grounded dialogue that foster empathy, psychological safety, and multispecies awareness.

By operationalising relationality as a concrete design practice rather than an abstract principle, D4C demonstrates how participatory design can cultivate the collaborative capacities necessary for regenerative, community-centred transitions to long-term environmental stewardship.

ABSTRACT. As rural populations age and formal systems of care become increasingly strained, low-growth rural communities face widening gaps in caregiving, emergency preparedness, and social support. This paper argues that fire stations in rural U.S. towns can function as regenerative infrastructures of post-growth care by institutionalizing relational, commons-based forms of care which can occur through incremental and symbiotic transformation. Through a qualitative case study of the Slaterville Fire Station in Caroline, New York, this paper examines how care-centered approaches to emergency preparedness can reimagine traditional rural institutions into sites of regenerative social infrastructure. The paper contributes to transitions design discourse by foregrounding care as a critical dimension of socio-ecological transition and by bridging conversations across post-growth, aging, rural studies, and regenerative futures. More broadly, the paper illustrates how the reimagination and repurpose of existing local institutions can serve as a place-based approach toward post-growth and care-oriented futures.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces Safe-but-Uncomfortable (SBU) as a designable configuration for cultivating transition-oriented postures — humility, patience with ambiguity, openness, care, and reflexivity — in challenge-based education. Drawing on a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods study of the Challenge-Based Innovation (CBI) course at Fusion Point Barcelona (AY 2025–26), we trace a five-phase student trajectory: Encounter, Initial Discomfort, Reframing, Shared Language, and Transfer and Future Orientation. SBU comprises three interdependent design dimensions — high demand, high support, and sensemaking infrastructure — that together create the conditions under which transition-oriented postures become necessary, practised, and stabilised. The paper contributes a named, designable framework for transition-oriented education and a trajectory-based approach to evaluating posture development beyond post-project case narratives.

ABSTRACT. Transition Design often positions everyday life as the context in which sustainable futures must be enacted. This framing risks treating current everyday life as depleted, homogenized, and in need of repair. This paper asks what transitional potentials become perceptible when everyday life is studied instead as already transitional. Through ethnographic engagements with nine Danish middle-class households living in single-family houses, the paper analyzes how the households hang together, organize food provisioning and eating, and move to and from their homes. The analyses show everyday life as differentiated, locally-global, and infrastructurally entangled. Rather than offering a general model of household transition, the paper develops three empirical-analytical strategies for Transition Design: contrasting, diversifying, and tracing. The paper argues that engaging in Transition Design requires critical proximity to everyday worlds, allowing designers to recognize, care for, and understand openings and closures already present in everyday householding practices.

ABSTRACT. Design psychology has been present for decades through practitioners ‘humanizing’ design and comforting users. As impromptu-practiced, it has been enabling the current economic paradigm and its consequent side-effects including environmental degradation and social exclusion. By contrast, Intentional Design Psychology has been conceptualized to purposefully bring critical transdisciplinary voices together, generating collective designs able to support and be supported by adaptive and resilient psychologies. In this paper, Intentional Design Psychology’s concepts and loose ideological framework are discussed as provocations for rethinking aspects of Transition Design’s framework. To expand chosen Transition Design’s Mindsets and Postures, Tools and Practices, the paper presents an in-depth exploration of shaping and shifting behaviors through the practices of Di/de with Care (detaching, destroying, disassembling and discomforting) and Community-led Behavioral Change. The aspiration is to enrich Transition Design’s framework and its mission toward regenerative futures whilst inviting theorists, practitioners and researchers to play with Intentional Design Psychology’s ideas.

ABSTRACT. Virtual care is increasingly positioned as both a sustainability lever and an access intervention in contemporary healthcare systems. Yet transitions to virtual care risk thinning the relational fabric of caregiving if safety escalation pathways are ambiguous, continuity is unclear, or access gains are undermined by new digital and navigational burdens. This paper proposes care weaving as both conceptual lens and methodological approach for designing low-carbon virtual care that sustains—and potentially strengthens—caregiving traditions. Drawing on transition design, sustainability transitions theory, and care ethics, and grounded in in-progress qualitative design research within a large multi-market healthcare system, we develop a three-layer design framework treating clinical safety and care continuity, operational viability, and affordability and access equity as braided, non-negotiable transition constraints. Early findings suggest that these layers are deeply interdependent: when any is treated as secondary, the others destabilize. We propose prototype able design principles and transition measures that move beyond satisfaction metrics, contributing to the conference theme of weaving regenerative futures by treating virtual care not as a channel addition but as a sociotechnical regime shift that must reconfigure everyday practices, operational governance, and structural conditions of access.

ABSTRACT. Sustainability transitions demand not only new strategies and governance structures but fundamentally new ways of seeing, relating, and acting within complex systems. Yet the mindset and posture shifts that make transition-oriented work possible are rarely treated as objects of intentional design; they are assumed rather than cultivated. This paper introduces the Transdisciplinary Sustainability Transitions Framework (TSTF), a staged, experience-based process architecture that treats cognitive and relational transformation as primary design intentions rather than incidental outcomes. It sequences participatory engagement to enable identifiable experiential thresholds, moving from fragmented awareness through discomfort and reframing toward distributed agency, across personal, relational, and systemic scales. Drawing on three cross-sector organizational case studies, the paper demonstrates how deliberate process design can scaffold the inner shifts that transition-oriented work requires. Findings suggest that in an era of accelerating complexity, the critical bottleneck is no longer the quality of sustainability strategies but the transformation of the people who must enact them, and that this transformation can be deliberately facilitated through well-structured, scalable, practice-oriented process design.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces Durational Design as a conceptual framework for pedagogy and practice that considers deep time, temporality, and the long-term implications of design decisions, bridging the material practices of Industrial Design with the long-horizon systems thinking of Transition Design. Responding to accelerated consumption, product obsolescence, and temporal short-sightedness within contemporary design culture, the framework explores how designed artifacts can foster more tangible relationships with deep time, extended futures, and intergenerational scales of time. Organized through three pathways—materializing duration, accessioning non-linear temporal frames, and subliming duration through speculative anticipatory devices, Durational Design positions objects as active mediators of temporal perception and imagination. Drawing from practice-based research and curricular experiments at Carnegie Mellon University, this paper demonstrates how dimensions of Durational Design—including deep time thinking, speculative artifacts, and anticipatory experiences—can foster a new temporal literacy within design education and inspire new mindsets and postures for transition.

ABSTRACT. This article will recount the experience of a university community garden, Mãos na Terra, on the island of Madeira. It will contextualize some of the systemic issues affecting the island from a social and environmental perspective before focusing, in particular, on the crisis currently impacting local agricultural production. The concepts of agroecology and syntropic agriculture are introduced as a possible approach and way of envisioning a garden from a more sensitive, regenerative, and less extractive perspective. The article will focus on the the idea of a garden as a learning community, where slowing down and resting play a central role, while at the same time exploring topics such as composting, agrobiodiversity and the delicate relationship between food, cultivation and health. It will then reflect on what ‘transition’ might mean for those who volunteer in the garden, what it might mean to be a community in a public space such as a garden, and what cooperation might entail.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines a question of authorization within strategic design and design-driven professional contexts: who is legitimized to think long-term, define futures, set priorities, and act upon them? Design is approached as a situated practice, embedded in organisational and political dynamics, where the capacity to influence direction is unevenly distributed. The paper focuses on women’s professional, entrepreneurial, and educational trajectories to investigate how access to decisionmaking, recognition, trusted networks, capital, and structural positioning affect the possibility of exercising strategic authority. Drawing on desk research and qualitative interviews, the analysis moves from situated experiences to recurring patterns, and from these patterns to systemic conditions. The tensions and polarities emerging across the study reveal how expertise, recognition, and authority do not always align, and how relational, care-oriented, and long-term postures are enabled or constrained. The findings suggest that women’s contribution is shaped by how strategic authority is accessed, authorised, valued, and sustained.

ABSTRACT. Climate instability, ecological degradation, and widening social inequity require transition methodologies capable of engaging with material, cultural, and ecological systems simultaneously. This paper introduces Transitional Textile Design (TTD), a textile-specific extension of Transition Design grounded in participatory practice, material culture, and decolonial systems thinking. Developed through a pilot study within Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s ger districts, the framework integrates ethnographic fieldwork, participatory workshops, systems mapping, material analysis, and collaborative prototyping to explore how textile systems can support socioecological transition. Rather than treating textiles as passive commodities, TTD positions fibers and textile practices as active socio-material infrastructures connecting ecology, labor, domestic life, and cultural identity. The study demonstrates how participatory textile practices and material experimentation can function as mechanisms for systemic healing and situated innovation. The paper further proposes TTD as an adaptable educational framework for materially grounded and communityled transitions across diverse cultural and environmental contexts.

ABSTRACT. Design education trains practitioners to read space visually, producing designers who can describe environments but struggle to anticipate how a body inhabiting them adapts over time. This paper describes a pedagogical exercise in which forty-one interior design students at Universidad Marista de Mérida documented four domestic sequences (meal preparation, hygiene, cleaning, and rest) through written description and self-recorded video. Drawing on enactive cognition and affordance theory, the exercise de-automatizes habitual bodily knowledge through verbal articulation and self-observation. Four findings emerged: silent compensatory adaptations to spatial constraints, hidden temporal structures in habitual routines, a shift from allocentric to egocentric spatial imagination, and unprompted connections between domestic gestures and broader systems of energy, labor, and care. The paper argues that this perceptual shift, from invisible bodily habit to conscious systemic awareness, cultivates the epistemic foundation for pluriversal design practice, with implications for Transition Design curricula and educator unlearning.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how white fragility and performances of allyship shape efforts to engage Indigenous wisdom within transition-oriented design practice. Drawing on reflexive accounts of encounters with Māori knowledge holders in Aotearoa New Zealand, it examines the affective, relational, and ethical dimensions of engaging across different knowledge systems. While transition design increasingly recognises the importance of worldview change and relational approaches to sustainability, less attention has been given to how privilege, entitlement, and desires for moral legitimacy can constrain such work. Through moments of discomfort, contradiction, vulnerability, and relational opening, the paper argues that meaningful engagement with Indigenous wisdom requires more than inclusion or good intentions. Instead, it calls for humility, patience, accountability, and an acceptance of uncertainty and partial understanding. From this perspective, transition design emerges not simply as a framework for systems change, but as an ongoing ethical practice of unlearning, relational accountability, and becoming otherwise.

ABSTRACT. Este artículo examina cómo la formación en diseño puede contribuir al cultivo de mindsets y posturas pedagógicas necesarias para involucrarse en procesos de transición socioecológica de largo plazo. A partir de una experiencia pedagógica en curso desarrollada en un taller de pregrado en la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, el estudio propone una indagación pedagógica informada por el Transition Design, el aprendizaje situado y la ética multiespecie. Mediante dispositivos multimodales de walking-based research —incluyendo caminatas sensoriales, registros fotográficos y audiovisuales breves, dibujo etnográfico, notas de campo, cartografías críticas y bitácoras reflexivas— el curso busca desplazar el diseño centrado en soluciones hacia prácticas más atentas, relacionales y reflexivas. El artículo identifica cuatro principios pedagógicos emergentes: atención situada, aprendizaje multiespecie, reflexividad crítica y cartografía relacional y multimodal. Los hallazgos preliminares sugieren transformaciones en la manera en que los estudiantes perciben interdependencias ecológicas, representan el territorio urbano y cuestionan supuestos antropocéntricos en la práctica del diseño. El estudio contribuye a las discusiones contemporáneas sobre pedagogías orientadas a las transiciones socioecológicas en la educación en diseño.

ABSTRACT. El trabajo de cuidados no remunerado constituye una infraestructura social indispensable y, al mismo tiempo, un mecanismo persistente de desigualdad. Su organización generizada restringe el tiempo, el bienestar y la autonomía económica de las mujeres, y permanece débilmente articulada con los debates sobre diseño institucional. Este artículo examina Cuidemos | Banco de Tiempo, un sistema municipal de cuidados en San Pedro Garza García, México, para mostrar cómo la evidencia situada se tradujo en servicios, procedimientos y arreglos interinstitucionales. Desarrollado como estudio de caso con evidencia documental y cualitativa pública, el artículo sostiene que “Gafas Moradas para Innovar”, como enfoque de diseño centrado en las personas con perspectiva de género, permitió convertir hallazgos etnográficos en requisitos de diseño y componentes operativos. El trabajo contribuye a Transition Design al tratar el tiempo, el cuidado y la coordinación institucional como materiales de diseño en cambios sistémicos de largo plazo, sin sobre afirmar causalidad.

ABSTRACT. Los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) representan un desafío global urgente que no puede abordarse sin la participación de las generaciones futuras. Pese a los avances normativos, la integración profunda de la educación para el desarrollo sostenible en los sistemas escolares sigue siendo limitada, especialmente en términos de implementación sistemática. ODSnauta recorriendo Chile es un herramienta educativa de base territorial, que busca promover el conocimiento y el diálogo reflexivo en torno a los ODS desde la realidad geográfica, social y cultural de Chile. Articulando gamificación con aprendizaje situado, el juego involucra a los participantes como agentes activos en un escenario donde el conocimiento sobre los ODS está profundamente conectado con la reflexión crítica y el territorio. Desarrollado a través de un proceso de co-creación, ODSnauta contribuye a la formación temprana de capacidades, colaboración y marcos interpretativos orientados a la sostenibilidad, como parte de procesos de transición socio ecológica de largo plazo.

ABSTRACT. Se presenta la Experiencia Diseño en Perspectiva desarrollada según un enfoque basado en las transiciones, implementada en la formación de diseño de la Universidad de Palermo (Argentina), dentro de una asignatura cuatrimestral de Maestría en Gestión en Diseño. Se alinea con el Track 4 (Educación para el cambio sistémico de largo plazo: planes de estudio, herramientas y marcos de trabajo) porque documenta la implementación y evolución de la experiencia pedagógica y de investigación, actualmente en curso, que opera como dispositivo curricular en el posgrado de Diseño; plataforma de investigación aplicada; mecanismo de producción; y transferencia de conocimiento, surgida como parte de las acciones de un acuerdo de cooperación interinstitucional celebrado en 2014 entre Universidad de Palermo (Argentina) y Carnegie Mellon University (EE.UU.).

ABSTRACT. El presente artículo analiza la transformación de la formación en diseño en América Latina mediante la integración del diseño para la transición, el enfoque sistémico y pedagogías orientadas a la sostenibilidad dentro de programas universitarios de diseño. La investigación se basa en una experiencia pedagógica desarrollada con estudiantes de quinto semestre de las asignaturas Diseño de Futuros y Diseño, Tecnología y Sociedad. A través de un enfoque de investigación-acción, se reformularon metodologías tradicionales del diseño, como el brief y el user persona, transformándolas en herramientas sistémicas y relacionales capaces de abordar complejidad socioecológica, transiciones de largo plazo y contextos territoriales. El estudio incorporó ejercicios de alfabetización informacional crítica, mapeo sistémico, construcción de escenarios, evaluaciones comparativas y encuestas pre/post. Los resultados evidenciaron cambios significativos en la comprensión estudiantil sobre sostenibilidad, rol profesional y complejidad contemporánea. El artículo sostiene que transformar la educación en diseño requiere no solo nuevos contenidos, sino también cambios epistemológicos profundos en las metodologías proyectuales dentro del contexto latinoamericano.

ABSTRACT. En este artículo se presentan los avances del proyecto “Talleres comunitarios de Diseño y Textiles: Comunidades de Aprendizaje Diseño Industrial UAQ-CONAFE” . Es una iniciativa de vinculación social entre la Licenciatura en Diseño Industrial (LDI) de la Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro (UAQ) y tres Centros de Servicios de Educación Comunitaria (SEC) del Consejo Nacional de Fomento Educativo (CONAFE), en el estado de Querétaro. El programa educativo de Diseño Industrial se distingue por su vocación humanista orientada a la resolución de problemas sistémicos complejos y a la vinculación social. Gracias al apoyo recibido por el “Fondo para el Fortalecimiento de la Investigación, Vinculación y Extensión FONFIVE 2025” que emite la UAQ bianualmente, se ha impulsado la creación de espacios de aprendizaje colaborativo, conceptualizados como talleres comunitarios orientados hacia la transición y el cambio sistémico. Trascendiendo las aulas universitarias y extendiéndose hacia tres comunidades de alta marginación en el estado.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that education should be understood as transition infrastructure for regenerative futures. While Transition Design foregrounds longhorizon change, wicked problems and new mindsets, educational systems are often treated as delivery mechanisms for sustainability knowledge rather than as infrastructures that shape subjectivity. Drawing on ontological design, infrastructure studies, sustainability transitions theory, critical pedagogy, decolonial thought and pluriversal design, the paper introduces the ecosystemic learner as an ontological orientation characterised by ontological humility, relational responsibility, epistemic plurality and critical reflexivity. It then proposes a staged curricular framework organised around encountering, relating, questioning and designing. These stages are linked to pedagogical approaches, possible signs of formation and assessment practices that resist competency capture. Practice-informed vignettes illustrate tensions between aspiration and infrastructure, voice and agency, and project and system. The paper concludes that regenerative futures require educational infrastructures capable of forming transition-capable subjectivities.

ABSTRACT. Design education is required to support sustainability transitions in a context of ecological degradation, social inequity, and economic instability. This paper presents findings from an ongoing project involving Swiss design programmes. Through Design Action Labs, students, educators, and researchers explored how design programmes engage communities in pursuing sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals. The findings suggest that sustainability learning emerges through encounters and dialogue with communities. Learning takes place amidst conflicting priorities, incomplete knowledge, uncertainty, and interdependent relationships that reshape how participants understand taking action through design. Participants highlighted the importance of dialogue, systems awareness, and coordination across social and ecological contexts. The study suggests that sustainability learning is not only a matter of content and competencies, but also of the conditions through which learning takes place. Rather than knowledge to be acquired, sustainability is learned through participation and enacted in the relationships and practices that shape everyday life.

ABSTRACT. As the urgency of transitions accelerates, so do demands placed on designers to contribute; yet research indicates there is a significant skills gap in key ‘green design skills’ across the UK’s design economy. The need for a green design skills transition as part of the UK’s green transitions will be crucial, and the Design for Planet Transition Learning Lab (‘the Lab’) has emerged in response to this need. The Lab’s activities are part of a Participatory Action Research Through Design project, and the Lab’s pilot—which includes the co-creation of learning prototypes—is the focus of this paper. The paper unpacks how the Lab operates as a systemic intervention: first by specifying the leverage points it seeks to intervene in and describing associated activities and timescales for intervention; and second, by describing how its assemblage constitutes a systemic intervention, by detailing how it meets each of the nine criteria from a ‘Multiplicity Framework’ for designing systemic interventions. Lastly the paper presents tensions and risks that are arising from the pilot and shares early insights that engage with the complexities of a skills transition and the Lab as an intervention.

ABSTRACT. This article proposes a conceptual framework for rethinking Transition Design/Design for Sustainability Transitions from a relational and territorial perspective within university education in Uruguay. Amidst the global polycrisis, it argues that transitions must be territorially rooted midst local ecosystems and cultures to achieve meaningful systemic change. The authors present a conceptual corpus based on three pillars that make up a territorial approach: (i) Relational and Wise Webs, (ii) Dialogue of Knowledges and Integrality, and (iii) Territory and Discourses. These pillars are exemplified through two case studies from Uruguay—the La Paloma recycling cooperative and the "Fishing Transformations" project—demonstrating how participatory methodologies and diálogo de saberes foster collective agency and transformative social innovation in ways that resonate with and amplify distinct territories. By integrating university functions, the work highlights the designer’s role as a facilitator of "relational infrastructures," advocating for situated and wiser design practices that decolonize transitions in Latin America.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that Transition Design (TD) education remains incomplete when decoloniality is treated merely as an external critical lens rather than as a structural reconfiguration of how TD is taught, learned, and assessed. Grounded in more than a decade of pedagogical experimentation, the paper develops its argument through interdisciplinary studio courses, campus-as-city projects, and an emerging community-based research initiative. Its three-layer curricular logic positions epistemic critique as a foundational learning outcome, framework mastery as situated competence, and situated practice as a co-learning environment. The campus-as-city model functions as a concrete pedagogical device for making complex concepts such as multi-scalar mapping, interdependence, and leverage points accessible within students’ immediate institutional context. The paper’s central contribution lies in exposing a key tension: curricula may become plural in content while remaining colonial in structure. This insight sharpens TD’s decolonial commitments by insisting that power, knowledge validation, and assessment must be transformed, not simply acknowledged.