ABSTRACT. Around the world, people are working to address complex social, ecological, economic, and political challenges through a growing range of systems change approaches. Yet much of this work continues to happen in parallel, within separate communities, disciplines, and networks. At a time when the scale and urgency of global challenges continue to intensify, the need to connect these efforts has never been greater.

In this keynote, Terry Irwin will explore the opportunities that emerge when the communities of Transition Design and Design for Sustainable Transitions, Systemic Design, and Regenerative Design come together to share knowledge, build collaborations, and strengthen one another's work. She will introduce a framework of domains for intervention that can inform more powerful approaches to addressing complex problems, catalyzing sustainability transitions, and advancing the evolution of the fields represented at TD2026.

Terry will conclude with a call to create the connections, collaborations, and shared infrastructures needed to support long-term planetary change.

ABSTRACT. Design education for sustainability transitions has matured rapidly in systems thinking, futures literacy, and reflective practice, yet many learners still struggle to translate these capacities into effective action inside real power structures. In practice, designers and practitioners frequently oscillate between grassroots experimentation without institutional traction and institutional engagement that dilutes original intent. This recurring pattern points to a persistent pedagogical gap: power is ever-present in systems change, but is rarely taught explicitly as a design literacy. This poster introduces Intervention Design Thinking (IDT) as a power-literate educational framework that helps learners read, compare, and design interventions across distinct power postures, supporting more strategic, ethical, and durable systems change.

ABSTRACT. Considering death and dying as a wicked problem fundamentally shifts engagement from passive recipient to active participant. Where traditional grief counseling often positions individuals as patients seeking recovery, design-led approaches reposition them as co-creators of their own healing pathways. This shift from a patient/client posture to a maker/designer posture emphasizes the legitimacy of an individual’s unique journey through loss. It acknowledges that grief, like all wicked problems, has no definitive solution—only better or worse ways of living with complexity. Hence, this practice-based project in progress explores how design methods can support individuals navigating death, dying, and loss. Our research considers these critical life transitions as deeply personal design challenges requiring space for exploration and emergent meaning-making rather than clinician-driven treatment plans. We employ participatory design methods (Wacnik et al., 2025), including co-design sessions, journey mapping grief experiences, and prototyping rituals or memory objects through hands-on play.

ABSTRACT. While design has evolved from object-centric to participatory and systems-oriented approaches (Ceschin & Gaziulusoy, 2019; Irwin, 2015), implementation remains limited. Designers operate within institutions and markets driven by unsustainable logics; even well-trained graduates struggle when wider ecosystems lack transition capacity (Boehnert et al., 2022). Current design education focuses narrowly on training individual designers while communities, policymakers, and industry partners remain positioned as external "case studies" or guests, rather than co-learners. This raises a critical question: can such limited stakeholder inclusion achieve ecosystem-wide transitions

ABSTRACT. The poster presents a new teaching method that combines role-playing and advocacy for non-human organisms with a discussion on posthumanist literature. The main aim of the study is to examine whether a gamified role-play discussion format can enhance students’ engagement and understanding of posthumanist principles in design education. In this research, posthumanism is defined as a theory that rejects the concept of human exceptionalism and emphasizes the interdependence of humans with non-human entities. In design, which traditionally focuses on human needs, posthumanism offers a perspective for promoting more just and environmentally responsible approaches. Despite the growing awareness of the importance of posthumanist approaches in design, designers still lack appropriate teaching methods (Forlano, 2017; Nilsson et al., 2025). Tabletop games, on the other hand, feature numerous qualities that promote effective learning, which seem especially suitable for teaching posthumanist content. The study contributes an empirically tested, low-threshold teaching format that combines posthumanist theory with analogue game-based learning in design education.

ABSTRACT. Organizational approaches to sustainability and circular economy are frequently framed as ethical or environmental add-ons that sit outside core economic logics. This separation contributes to shallow implementations, such as CSR reporting or compensatory tree-planting, that fail to address underlying socio-ecological harms or transform everyday practices. This work argues that when sustainability is treated as a shared, systemic responsibility across overlapping sectors and ecologies, it can generate synergistic environmental and economic outcomes and more effectively support long-term sustainability transitions. The framework supports the track's focus on regenerative futures by demonstrating how organizations can shift from extractive circularity to ecosystem-integrated responsibility practices that actively restore local socio-ecological capacities.

ABSTRACT. Biodesign is an interdisciplinary field that integrates living organisms such as bacteria, fungi, algae, and biological processes into the design and performance of materials, products, and architecture. Art and design academic institutions across the United States have been engaged in the work of biodesign and biomaterial development for decades, contributing to the development and market of sustainable materials, buildings, and spaces. At California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, California, developments in biomaterials, products, and building processes have long been a focus of the transdisciplinary MFA Design program..

ABSTRACT. LANDING PAD is utilized as a hyper-regional case study within New York State (NYS), United States, the nation’s fourth most populous state, where dense post-industrial landscapes, aging building stock, and enormous material flows amplify the consequences of linear construction practices. Salvage has the potential to operate as a systematic practice through which valuable building materials, and components are recovered from decaying structures at the end of use, preserving integrity and enabling reintegration into future architectural contexts rather than being lost to demolition-driven waste streams. The Gap: From Linear to Circular Construction

ABSTRACT. What data and design practices support viable collective stewardship of land and people; an experimental commons? Our ongoing record-making projects experiment with place-based and embodied methods that uniquely support the entangled livability of people and plants at Festival Beach Food Forest (FBFF), a volunteer-run permaculture food forest on a public park in Austin, Texas. FBFF works to regenerate the blackland prairie (one of the most devastated ecosystems on the continent) while building capacity for mutual care of the people through sociocratic governance, providing nourishment, and joyful community.

ABSTRACT. Long-term sustainability transitions are often narrated through moments of rupture: policy breakthroughs, institutional advances, or large-scale interventions that promise systemic change. Yet in fragmented, cross-border, and complex contexts, transitions rarely unfold through clean breaks alone. They depend on less visible forms of continuity such as actors, organizations, and practices that stay with the problem over time, maintaining responsibility across cycles of partial progress, intermittent delay, and extended failure.

This poster explores maintenance as a civic posture rather than merely a technical function, examining how responsibility-oriented mindsets enable punctuated moments of adaptive change within long-running, contested social-ecological systems. Using the Tijuana River watershed as an illustrative cross-border, multi-jurisdictional context, the work reflects on how transition-relevant change is sustained where formal authority is fragmented, enforcement uneven, and no single institution plausibly “owns” the problem.

ABSTRACT. The Food Futuring approach reframes design practice as an ongoing collective process of shaping directionality rather than producing linear solutions. Informed by emergence-oriented practices such as emergent strategy (Brown, 2017) and contemporary facilitation traditions (Art of Hosting - Corrigan, 2025) , the work foregrounds how openness, iteration, and relational continuity can be intentionally designed into participatory processes. The process was grounded in a locally situated, distributed methodology which networks actors engaged in different forms of change across the food system. Rather than convening a single unified stakeholder group, the work operated across a network of partial perspectives reflecting the fragmented and multi-scalar nature of contemporary food systems.

ABSTRACT. Futures thinking often remains confined to expert circles, policy documents, and speculative design studios; distant abstractions that fail to catalyze genuine transformation in how communities imagine and shape what comes next. This research challenges the concentration of future-making by asking: How might we redistribute the capacity to inhabit, shape, and interrogate possible futures across broader publics? This research presents the Layered Anticipatory Framework (LAF), developed through social simulation that progressively deepens participant engagement across three distinct phases: Immersion, Creation, and Investigation. Rather than treating futures as objects to be observed or predicted, this approach positions them as territories to be lived, designed, and studied, transforming participants from passive recipients of prefabricated scenarios into active architects and critical investigators of alternative possibilities.

ABSTRACT. Tourism and everyday mobility systems remain structurally exclusionary for individuals with mobility impairments, reinforcing social isolation, economic marginalization, and mental health disparities. Rather than being the result of individual impairment, these inequities are produced through fragmented infrastructure, inaccessible digital platforms, inconsistent standards, and ableist social norms. Sustainable mobility futures require iterative cycles of problem reframing, stakeholder alignment, and institutional learning. By integrating AI, inclusive UX, and systems thinking, Together demonstrates how design-led innovation can catalyze long-term transformation in mobility ecosystems. Mobility equity is foundational to social sustainability. Reimagining tourism through a systems lens offers a pathway toward more inclusive, resilient, and economically viable global mobility futures.

ABSTRACT. Organizational transitions are not just about reacting to crises and managing logistics—they are openings for reconsidering and redistributing power, realigning with values, and co-creating new possibilities. In Educopia’s work supporting organizations through various types of transition, we have created a matrix that maps seven transition types across five transition phases against five areas of organizational development. This matrix helps organizations identify what decisions need to be made and what activities need to be carried out at different points, so that the transition can not only go smoothly, but be carried out with integrity, thoughtfulness, and purpose.

ABSTRACT. Design education typically trains practitioners to view themselves as experts serving clients. Not only does this approach reinforce systemic hierarchies, which are especially prevalent in higher education, but it also positions designers as authorities while treating communities as mere recipients. Engaging meaningfully in transition-oriented work toward equitable futures requires fundamentally different mindsets and practices. This poster presents a horizontal design methodology developed through twenty years of fieldwork with Indigenous cooperatives, community leaders, and students in México and Florida, demonstrating the profound shifts required to move from designing for to designing with people in context. The horizontal framework draws from Indigenous research methodologies (Smith, 2021; Wilson, 2008; Chilisa, 2012), decolonial theory (Mignolo, 2011), and Latin American scholarship on horizontalidad (Corona Berkin & Kaltmeier, 2012). Central to this approach is recognizing that marginalized communities possess knowledges, strengths, and capabilities that dominant design paradigms systematically overlook. Rather than parachuting into contexts with predetermined solutions, horizontal design requires long-term commitment, reciprocity, and the humility to learn from those we work with as epistemological equals.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how design-led and systemic approaches can support sustainability transitions within Waterborne Passenger Mobility (WPM) ecosystems. While current sustainability initiatives in the sector often remain fragmented, technology-oriented, or limited to isolated pilot projects, the research highlights the need for systemic approaches capable of coordinating sustainability efforts across interconnected actors, infrastructures, and lifecycle phases. The study develops three Strategic Directions for Smart Circular WPM ecosystems: Digital Modularity and Flexibility, Integrated Data Management, and Smart Energy Management. Rather than functioning as fixed solutions or technical roadmaps, these Strategic Directions are proposed as enabling structures for system-level change, supporting coordination, adaptability, and long-term sustainability transitions. The paper contributes a transition-oriented and systemic design perspective that moves beyond isolated interventions toward broader strategic configurations capable of connecting projects, stakeholders, and decision-making processes across socio-technical systems. The findings also highlight the role of system mapping and design practice in supporting systemic understanding, coordination, and long-term transformation processes

ABSTRACT. This regenerative transitions design paper critically reflects on Becoming Regenerative (B-Regen), an ongoing, three-year UKRI-funded research project tracing how regenerative design practices emerge, evolve, and attempt to gain momentum within entrenched and often degenerative economic, policy, and infrastructural systems. Our argument is that ventures with regenerative intent cannot realise fully regenerative outcomes within infrastructures and systems designed around extractive logics; therefore systemic change and transitional infrastructure is needed to collectively reimagine and redesign the conditions of possibility. We seek to illustrate what a transition-oriented regenerative ecosystem design project looks like in practice: one that moves beyond isolated innovation and toward relational, collective, and adaptive eco-social transformation through design-led speculative workshops.

ABSTRACT. Transition Design has produced sophisticated tools for understanding systems, envisioning futures, and designing transition pathways. Yet in many place-based contexts, the most persistent barrier to change is not a deficit of vision or methodology—it is the absence of the financial and governance infrastructure needed to sustain transition strategies across time. This paper introduces the field of systemic investing to the Transition Design community as a complementary design territory that addresses precisely this gap. We argue that systemic investing provides Transition Design with a "missing implementation link" between strategy and durable, on-the-ground transformation. We illustrate this connection through two lenses: first, a set of practitioner cases from the systemic investing field that demonstrate what multi-capital orchestration looks like in practice; and second, the four-pillar practice framework developed by Territorios Futuros (TF), a systemic change consultancy in Mexico, which integrates systemic investing as its fourth and enabling pillar.

ABSTRACT. Europe is the fastest-warming continent, and its cities face an urgent need not just to adapt, but to transform. This paper presents two place-based scenario narratives developed over four years of practice-based research on climate imagination in Berlin—Berlin-Neukölln 2039 and Resilience Beyond the Current View —and shows how creative scenario approaches can serve as a tool for exploring what transformative adaptation might look like for European cities. It reflects on how iterating on these narratives shifts understandings of resilience from technical to relational, surfacing underlying values and assumptions. It also argues that transformative measures are critical to climate adaptation, but remain insufficiently considered in current plans. Iterating on place-based climate futures with creative approaches and cultural products can produce bolder visions; the most liberatory provocations ask for what we want, not what we think we can get.

ABSTRACT. This article presents Food Futuring as an emergence-oriented methodological approach for engaging multi-level actors in local food system transition. Drawing on Transition Design, Participatory Design, Art of Hosting–influenced facilitation, and emergent strategy, it examines how design-led facilitation can work with the tensions of convening diverse actors by engaging the interplay between plurality, distributed agency, and coherence. The methodology was structured as a staged sequence of participatory workshops and interspersed digital deliberation, designed to move iteratively between divergence and convergence, individual reflection and collective sense-making, and relational grounding and action orientation. Across these stages, facilitation employed light-touch structuring, dialogic formats, prioritisation exercises, and visioning activities to support shared understanding and pathway formation within a nascent multi-level network. Rather than evidencing realised system transformation, the article demonstrates how design can cultivate the early-stage conditions through which shared visions, pathways, and ecologies of intervention may emerge over time, offering transferable methodological principles for collaborative, place-based transitions.

ABSTRACT. Despite growing calls for participatory governance, most societal transitions toward sustainability remain expert-driven, missing the democratic legitimacy essential for lasting change. This paper addresses the challenge of translating abstract sustainability goals into locally relevant action by empirically evaluating a CommunityLed Transition Design Framework. Developed to bridge the gap between research and practice, the framework was evaluated through qualitative consultations. Findings reveal a central tension: while the framework effectively creates awareness for inclusion and long-term structural conditions, its practical application is severely constrained by short-term funding cycles, resource scarcity, and the realities of municipal administration. The paper moves the discourse from acknowledging a research-practice gap to actively proposing and testing a means to close it. We conclude by proposing that the framework evolve into a procedural project-planning tool, offering concrete recommendations for action to support community-led transitions.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides an account of exploration of the impact of Milan Design Week in Milan (Italy), conducted as part of the research project “Milan Design (Eco)System”. The work is presented as a practice-based case study that developed an original multi-level investigation, in which the event’s impact is placed within the broader perspective of the “Milan Design System”, intended as the city’s economic and cultural network centred on design. By drawing connections across the different levels explored, we propose a framing of Milan Design Week, and similar “hallmark events”, as platforms for designing the sustainable development of urban areas. In this framing, the notion of “impact” is used as part of a pluralistic exploration of socio-technical systems in the city, with the aim of identifying opportunities and directions for sustainable development.

ABSTRACT. Ecological restoration is a growing field and practice in India. Given the diversity of the country, an alliance based approach seemed necessary. The Ecological Restoration Alliance-India (ERA-India) was initiated as a response to the dire need of restoring degraded habitats in an ecologically sensitive way. The goal of the alliance is to develop the praxis of ecological restoration to transition to more equitable futures for biodiversity, landscapes, and people. Through this paper the authors show how a co-created system map became an important navigation tool for the alliance, by building a shared understanding of the system, to think through strategy and identify intervention points, finding gaps within their current approach, ecosystem of actors and stakeholders, and finally as a mechanism to revisit and review the directions undertaken by the alliance. It shows how the map could become a central tool, in creating opportunities for coordinated actions across the system.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary ways of living are destabilizing the climate system and other Earth systems creating increasing energy, food, and water insecurity alongside accelerating risks of disaster, disease, displacement, and conflict. Ecological economists have responded by developing models that demonstrate the feasibility of building a good life for all within planetary boundaries. The design community has yet to create a response that meets the scale of the challenge. Since ecological knowledge has historically been undervalued across design landscapes, novel practices are needed to support ecological forms of design thinking and practice. The Transition Template: Four Futures Framework (TT-FFF) addresses the gap between the imperatives described by the planetary sciences, ecological economics, and the current design industry provision. This ecological futuring exercise prompts participants to map regenerative, restorative, sustainable, and extractive futures and pathways to design within planetary boundaries. The TT-FFF guides participatory systems mapping to enable emergent ecological imaginaries at the intersection of political, economic, social, and technological change.

ABSTRACT. This article explores how environmental governance can be reconfigured by integrating more-than-human actors through hydropoetic practices grounded in aesthetic methodologies. Conducted in the midst of global metropolitan crises, it focuses on a poetic city-forest interface in northeastern Mexico and proposes the forest itself as a method for hosting deep sensing exercise, enabling water to be engaged not only as a biophysical resource but as an active relational presence shaping socio-ecological dynamics. Drawing on Theory U, the study shows how embodied and participatory practices, informed by Latin American sentipensares, can surface alternative forms of knowledge beyond conventional analytical approaches. The findings demonstrate that recognizing water as voice activates embodied knowledge and motivates the co-production of new insights, opening new pathways for collective sense-making. Through a hydrofeminist lens, the article argues that nature-driven water security can be enabled through epistemic and methodological diversification that renders visible and expands hydro-vocalities, enacting a lived understanding of our interdependence as Hydrosapiens.

ABSTRACT. Climate change is intensifying uncertainty across the built environment— affecting buildings, urban systems, infrastructure, and territorial planning—and undermining design approaches grounded in assumptions of environmental stability. Although regenerative design promotes ecological restoration and positive socioecological relationships, its capacity to address uncertain future climates remains underexplored. This paper argues that regenerative design must incorporate resilience principles to remain effective under changing climatic conditions, with transition design as an integrative framework for operationalizing this combination across architectural, urban, and territorial scales. A distinction is drawn between regenerative design—focused on specific built environment interventions—and regenerative development, which supports the long-term evolution of a place's socioecological potential. The study introduces regenerative resilience, defined as the capacity of socioecological systems to sustain and expand regenerative processes while adapting and transforming in response to change, examined through the Filobobos–El Jobo initiative in Veracruz, Mexico—a territorial case study spanning three decades. The study provides a conceptual foundation for advancing regenerative resilience as a framework for designing, planning, and managing built environments under future climate uncertainty.

ABSTRACT. Mexico's sprawling peri-urban areas face a housing crisis characterised by poorly-built, partially-abandoned developments that trap residents in precarious conditions while generating ongoing environmental harm. This paper presents speculative visions and emerging insights from an ongoing research collaboration between the University of Reading and Fundación Hogares in Zumpango, Mexico State. Drawing on Fundación Hogares' participatory methodology and their Índice de Cohesión Social Vecinal (ICSV), and situating this work within frameworks of housing decommodification (Ferreri, 2026), cosmopolitan localism (Kossoff, 2019), and caringwith practice (McAndrew et al., 2025), the paper argues that vernacular technologies and collective stewardship models offer pathways beyond the false choices that currently structure peri-urban housing policy. These are not merely technical alternatives but epistemological challenges to the dominant development paradigms that have produced — and continue to reproduce — the conditions of abandonment and vulnerability in which millions of Mexican families live.

ABSTRACT. Disaster-driven displacement now reshapes life for tens of millions of people each year, yet relief systems still treat displacement as an exception. This paper argues that mainstream disaster relief is maladaptive: its neutral-seeming distribution logics reproduce the social inequalities it claims to address. Drawing on transition design, speculative design, and a research-through-design reading of humanitarian practice, the paper proposes vulnerability-centred slack ecologies. Slack here means designed surplus capacity in time, resources, relationships, and information, built around the people most likely to be overlooked. The proposal has three parts: preemptive vulnerability cartography, relational resource flows through community accompaniment nodes, and adaptive learning architectures that integrate indigenous early-warning knowledge. The paper sets out an implementation pathway and examines tensions around data, power, and consent. The contribution is a posture shift, from response to disaster toward response to systemic vulnerability, aligned with the conference themes of regenerative futures and mindsets for transition.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary urban food systems are increasingly shaped by the entanglement of public health challenges, spatial inequalities, environmental pressures and the erosion of local food cultures. Focusing on Mexico City, this paper introduces “Who Feeds the City?”, a systemic design research project that investigates the urban foodscape through the lens of cosmopolitan localism. The study frames food access, ultra-processed food exposure and retail infrastructures as interconnected dimensions of a wider transition challenge. It presents the project’s methodological framework, based on systemic design, holistic territorial diagnosis, comparative case analysis and preliminary spatial mapping using DENUE and INEGI data. The first mapping results identify significant concentrations of food-system activities, ruralurban interfaces and the strategic role of Tlalpan District as a transitional territory between dense urban consumption patterns and peri-urban agricultural landscapes. The paper argues that mapping represents a necessary first step for understanding wicked food-system problems and designing healthier, more equitable, regenerative and culturally meaningful urban food transitions.

ABSTRACT. Strategic Design and Transition Design both expand design’s role in addressing wicked problems and advancing systemic change, yet they do so with distinct perspectives and methods. This paper explores how the two might be bridged for the purpose of teaching systemic design to students outside traditional design programs. Written from a dialogue between two educator-practitioners in urban technology, Strategic Design and Transition are compared to identify overlaps and distinctions in their foundations, methods, and ambitions through their respective literatures and two oft-cited representative case studies. The paper examines how each approach gathers and presents evidence, produces artifacts and propositions, pursues immediate and longer-term outcomes, and orients these efforts toward long-term impacts. As a position paper to support teaching, we argue that bridging Strategic Design and Transition Design offers a productive pedagogical framework for students who do not identify as designers to engage complexity, imagine alternatives, and craft interventions toward more just, sustainable, and humane cities.

ABSTRACT. This paper is intended as a theoretical contribution to Transition Design. By bridging the theoretical foundations of this field with recent contributions from ecosocialism, the paper argues that transition designers need to position themselves within popular movements that aim to satisfy collective needs outside circuits of capital accumulation. While the work is primarily theoretical, it illustrates this strategy through expert interviews by exploring the case of designers working within the Catalonian cooperative movement. As this case shows, by collaborating with popular movements to satisfy their own needs, such as housing, designers are pointing to novel forms of personal and professional engagement with transitions that may transcend the established model of service provision for or within capitalist enterprises.

ABSTRACT. Motivated by accelerating biodiversity loss, this experimental project explores whether more-than-human participatory design can help support sustainability transitions in urban systems. In particular, the experiment responds to smart neighborhood developments that prioritize technological efficiency and human convenience, while biodiversity and more-than-human needs remain peripheral. To research this, the project focused on qualitative research and evaluation through workshops in which participants became bats for an evening, searching for a place to live in a smart neighborhood in Kalasatama, Helsinki, Finland. The workshop aimed to assess whether inhabiting an animal’s perspective can shift perceptions of what constitutes a good urban neighborhood. Findings suggested that immersive, morethan-human role-playing can alter how participants perceive and value urban space. When framed as a context-sensitive niche experiment, the workshop offers a repeatable and adaptable prototype that could inform transition planning, community engagement, and urban design education, and contribute to longer-term efforts to reimagine urban environments as mutually beneficial shared multispecies habitats.

ABSTRACT. Designing for systemic transitions asks for a capacity no method supplies: perception before frameworks, judgment under irreducible uncertainty, and commitment to consequences one cannot fully trace. Transition Design names this as mindset and posture, foundational and prior to method, yet it has not specified the capacity that lets a designer sustain that posture when the conditions of the work make abandoning it easier. This paper proposes that the capacity is phronesis, Aristotle's practical wisdom, and that its exercise in design constitutes phronetic design: the cultivated capacity to perceive, deliberate, and act well within systems one is shaping and shaped by. The construct operates across four concurrent registers, being, relating, acting, and envisioning, derived from the phronesis literature and demonstrated through a three-year transdisciplinary food-systems process in Uruguay. Phronetic design reframes posture as a structured capacity available for study, cultivation, and shared commitment across the design community.

ABSTRACT. he challenge of modern transition design is as much psychological as it is systemic. In America, we are experiencing many crises affecting collective emotional well-being: widespread economic turmoil, polarizing social media algorithms, the rise of massive technological disruption driven by Artificial Intelligence, and a decline in institutional trust. All of which have undermined predictable progress and foster emotional deterioration. I propose that designers must redirect the profession from designing tangible outputs to designing a feeling, one of hope, positioning design as a methodology of hope akin to psychologist Rick Snyder’s Hope Theory. Both the design process and Hope Theory clarify a defined goal, requiring agency and belief to create pathways towards it. To design for the goal of creating a feeling of hope, I introduce an emerging conceptual framework, “The Lenses of Hope,” with three aspects: the Portrait lens to build trust; the Panorama lens to uncover shared realities; and the Bird’s Eye lens to apply long-term human progress to the current moment. All work to improve our collective emotional condition, creating the mindset to envision what does not yet exist. This framework aligns with the multi-level perspective of transition design and invites every designer across all areas of the profession.

ABSTRACT. La Cuarta Revolución Industrial ha reconfigurado el paradigma proyectual, exigiendo integración de sistemas ciberfísicos en el diseño de productos. En Antioquia, persiste una desconexión entre la oferta académica y las demandas tecnológicas del sector productivo. El objetivo de esta investigación fue determinar la factibilidad y pertinencia de crear programas de tecnologías avanzadas en el desarrollo de productos. Se aplicó una metodología mixta descriptivo-propositiva, triangulando la revisión de megatendencias con encuestas a egresados y empresarios del sector manufacturero de Antioquia. Los resultados revelaron una brecha de habilidades: la falta de perfiles cualificados en diseño generativo, internet de las cosas y manufactura aditiva frena la competitividad, a pesar de la voluntad de inversión industrial. Se derivaron cuatro estrategias curriculares que transitan del modelado estético a la lógica algorítmica y la sostenibilidad. Se concluye que formalizar este posgrado es esencial para actualizar el perfil profesional, cerrar la brecha tecnológica y facilitar la transición regional hacia una economía del conocimiento.

ABSTRACT. El siguiente artículo es un análisis crítico del proceso del diseño desde la colonialidad, revisándolo desde la Revolución Industrial hasta el capitalismo actual. Busca visibilizar que es un proceso de desigualdad generado por la blanquitud, que aliena a la clase social trabajadora y que encumbra a la élite. Asimismo, revisa cómo el resultado de su metodología (el producto en sí mismo) encasilla a las personas en clases socioeconómicas generando una identidad desarticulada de su realidad, perpetuando las desigualdades. Se busca mostrar que este proceso utiliza herramientas metodológicas de control, como Design Thinking, Sección Áurea, el Modulor de le Corbusier o los principios ordenadores, que se encuentran basadas en la blanquitud. Además, muestra cómo, producto de esta desigualdad, se deteriora el medio ambiente. Finalmente, se analiza cómo la academia de diseño y arquitectura tiene internalizada esta metodología, que reproduce los esquemas excluyentes de generación en generación.

ABSTRACT. La industria mueblera de Jalisco, México, enfrenta una contradicción estructural: su dinamismo económico convive con prácticas de gestión de residuos lineales, caracterizadas por la quema en ladrilleras, el vertido informal y la ausencia de valorización. Mediante la metodología de Investigación a través del Diseño (RtD) y el marco del Diseño de Transición, esta investigación documenta los modelos mentales que perpetúan la linealidad, mapea el sistema sociotécnico e identifica sus puntos de influencia. A partir de un proceso encadenado de herramientas de diseño estratégico, se propone un modelo circular cuyo núcleo es la transformación de residuos de madera limpia en compost industrial con aplicación agrícola, articulado en una arquitectura de gobernanza colaborativa que involucra actores internos, externos e institucionales del territorio jalisciense. La investigación contribuye al debate sobre el Diseño de Transición en contextos industriales latinoamericanos y propone el laboratorio vivo de transición como dispositivo metodológico para futuras intervenciones.

ABSTRACT. Las transiciones hacia sistemas alimentarios más justos y sostenibles requieren intervenciones de largo plazo capaces de reconfigurar las relaciones entre producción, distribución, consumo y gobernanza. Sin embargo, la disponibilidad de soluciones técnicas no garantiza por sí misma transformaciones estructurales, debido a las controversias políticas, económicas e institucionales que atraviesan estos procesos. Desde la perspectiva del diseño para las transiciones, uno de los principales desafíos consiste en escalar iniciativas locales sin reproducir lógicas extractivas u homogeneizadoras, manteniendo al mismo tiempo su anclaje territorial. Este trabajo aborda dicho desafío a partir del análisis de un estudio de caso situado en Argentina, desarrollado por el Instituto para la Agricultura Familiar del INTA en articulación con la Universidad de Buenos Aires, y propone la franquicia social como una estrategia de escalamiento situado orientada a cambios sistémicos. El caso analizado es la sala municipal de elaboración láctea de San José de Feliciano (Entre Ríos), organizada en torno a una tecnología de pasteurización de diseño nacional concebida bajo un enfoque de Producto-Sistema-Servicio Sustentable. El análisis muestra cómo esta infraestructura pública fortaleció circuitos cortos de comercialización, redujo la dependencia de actores concentrados y promovió capacidades institucionales locales. Más allá de la dimensión material, el proyecto evolucionó mediante procesos de aprendizaje y coordinación interinstitucional, incluyendo el diseño colaborativo de un sistema digital de trazabilidad. Metodológicamente, el estudio se apoya en un enfoque cualitativo basado en análisis documental y trabajo de campo. Conceptualmente, la sala se interpreta como una infraestructura pública de transición, en la que convergen dimensiones materiales y no materiales. Se concluye que la franquicia social constituye una estrategia potente de diseño para escalar innovaciones en sistemas alimentarios de manera gradual y situada.

ABSTRACT. La siguiente investigación aborda el codiseño territorial de la colección de luminarias Jíi, elaborada con látex silvestre de Shiringa recolectado de manera sostenible por comunidades nativas Awajún en la Amazonía peruana. Frente a las dinámicas históricas de extractivismo y deforestación, la investigación se enmarca en el diseño para la transición y el localismo cosmopolita para proponer un modelo productivo regenerativo. A través de una red de colaboración multiactor, el proyecto valida la viabilidad técnica, ecológica y estética del caucho natural como alternativa a los polímeros fósiles en el diseño industrial contemporáneo. Más allá de su dimensión material, el producto actúa como una herramienta de soberanía territorial y empoderamiento de género. Al hibridar el conocimiento ancestral con la manufactura circular, este trabajo demuestra que el diseño puede desafiar las cadenas de suministro hegemónicas y consolidar un paradigma basado en la reciprocidad socioambiental.

ABSTRACT. For many complex problems-- such as climate change, urban poverty, and rising loneliness-- causes interact, boundaries resist definition, and no single intervention secures improvement. Across six years of teaching systems thinking, in a graduate course at a Canadian business school and in a national Student Challenge with more than 500 participants, we have repeatedly observed learners foreclose inquiry rather than stay with complexity, a pattern we call exiting complexity. We treat this exit, not as a failure of the learner, but as a trained response in which learners revert to familiar responses to problems. These responses reflect four promises that management training makes: distance, singularity, agency-as-control, and closure. The instructor interprets each exit as a diagnostic signal and responds with one of two stances: either allowing those exits to make a claim worth revisiting or deliberately provoking early exits from complexity. Keeping learners focused on an unresolved problem is demanding because most educators were trained in the same management education as our students and feel the same pull toward a single cause and a decisive answer. We argue that structured struggle, therefore, turns our diagnosis on our own teaching, asking us to treat the urge to resolve as an exit and to stay with complexity as we ask our students to do.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents the learning approach developed at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Bristol, with a particular focus on the project The Innovation Game. The initiative seeks to prepare a new generation of professionals who not only possess sustainability literacy and systems thinking skills, but also demonstrate the mindsets and postures required to lead sustainable transitions across diverse sectors. Framed as an open and playful challenge to be completed within six weeks, the project engaged eighteen interdisciplinary teams in the co-design, prototyping, and testing of eighteen distinct board games. Each game aimed to support and educate emerging innovators to engage with a defined set of values and principles, and to inspire positive, systemic change towards sustainable or regenerative futures. While this paper offers initial insights into how students’ sense of agency and belief in collective confidence for achieving sustainable transformations may be strengthened, the Innovation Game study ultimately seeks to contribute to the development of a broader learning framework for higher education.

ABSTRACT. Graduate programs focused on systems change and the design of sustainability transitions (DxST) prepare students to tackle complex, interconnected challenges. Yet few explicitly cultivate students’ capacities as teachers and learners, despite their work being fundamentally pedagogical. This paper argues that developing teaching and learning postures is not supplementary to systems change, but central to it. Using the Teaching Design course in the Transition Design doctoral program at Carnegie Mellon University as a case study and speculative framework, and analyzing student outputs across three years, this paper advocates for a pedagogy-as-curriculum model, grounded in four design principles: designing pedagogical structures as mechanisms for practicing systems change and DxST, building strong relationships to learn and change collaboratively within real-world community contexts, prompting personal reflection to sustain lifelong learning, unlearning, and relearning, and modeling the behaviors that make sustained collective action possible. Together, they offer a foundation for programs seeking to develop practitioners, educators, and researchers capable of catalyzing systemic-level change and sustainability transitions.

ABSTRACT. Sustainability transitions within economic systems are long, uneven processes that require educational models that can weave learning across generations while bridging sectors and lived experience. Without such models, even values-aligned initiatives remain constrained by growth-oriented logics, limiting their ability to support bioregional economies within ecological limits. In part this is because prevailing educational and professional norms continue to frame economic success in terms of scalability, often predicated on extractive principles. As a result, there is a need to understand how place-based economic development education can function as a long-term infrastructure for shifting principles, investment logics, and cross-sector practice toward ecologically bounded futures. This paper details a multi-year case study of the Good Work Institute in the Hudson River Watershed, where intergenerational and cross-sector learning was designed to support post-growth economic experimentation and place-based commitment. Examined through a Transition Design lens, the case study demonstrates how Wendell Berry’s assertion that “it all turns on affection” can be enacted through design education and situated interventions. It demonstrates how educational practices can be structured to design durable attachments to place and community, and to cultivate the responsibilities of ecological life.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary systemic challenges increasingly require futures-oriented practices capable not only of representing alternative conditions but also of supporting collective engagement with their implications. While recent developments have expanded futures practice through participatory, material, and embodied approaches, questions remain concerning how future propositions can become sites of inquiry and collective reflection. This paper proposes dissemination-as-evaluation as a methodological proposition situated within embodied futures approaches and the practice-oriented framing of futures-in-use. Rather than understanding dissemination as a communicative activity occurring after design development, the paper positions it as a situation through which future propositions become exposed to interpretation, negotiation, and evaluative engagement. Drawing on an inquiry-through-practice orientation developed within postgraduate futures-oriented design studio settings, the paper discusses methodological conditions through which responsible futuring may emerge as a practice of accountability, reflexivity, and collective responsibility embedded within encounters with future propositions.

ABSTRACT. Sustainability transitions require long-term experimentation, learning, and coordination across heterogeneous actors. In technology-driven domains such as semiconductors, however, innovation and education remain strongly aligned with technical roadmaps and performance metrics, leaving limited space for vision-led deliberation and for developing the capabilities needed to steer socio-technical change. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a Transition Practice–Education Cycle (TPEC) as a process framework that integrates education and practice.

Drawing on Transition Design, the TPEC iteratively links (1) industry-led envisioning and agenda formation, (2) university-based project-based learning (PBL) and experimentation, and (3) feedback loops that translate educational outcomes into follow-on transition projects and partnerships. Rather than treating education and practice as separate domains, the TPEC frames education as a space for experimenting and prototyping transition interventions while developing the competencies of those who will orchestrate transitions over time.

We report an initial implementation in the semiconductor domain, connecting future visions, Product–Service System (PSS) concepts, and System-on-Chip (SoC) design requirements through workshops and a semester-long studio. The paper contributes an educational–practice model for advancing long-term sustainability transitions in technology-intensive sectors.

ABSTRACT. Design education is facing a critical turning point. Amid socio-ecological crises, inequality, polarization, and institutional fragility, traditional curricula oriented toward object production, market responsiveness, and short-term problem solving are increasingly unable to prepare designers for the magnitude and duration of contemporary transitions. This paper reflects on the binational co-creation of a DualDegree Master’s in Transition Design between a public Mexican university and French partner institutions within the Campus of Transition framework. Rather than presenting the program as a finalized curricular model, we approach curriculum design as a transition process in itself: a contested, negotiated, and iterative space where new professional identities, competencies, and educational postures are produced. Drawing on Transition Design, critical design competencies, and pluriversal design education, the paper proposes a relational curricular model for Latin America and identifies lessons from institutional frictions, epistemic translation, and the challenge of educating designers as agents of transition.

ABSTRACT. This paper builds on two main notions: 1) that Transition Design projects can benefit from using AI as a tool for enhancing complex thinking and creativity, and 2) that within these processes, it is relevant to deliberately assign people with the tasks that are rendered as inherently human, namely, ethical choice-making. The article presents a future scenario creation workshop carried out with student collaborators and AI collaborants. The AI collaborants, built on the Gem platform within the LLM model Gemini, assisted participants in exploring different dimensions of the STEEPLE framework (social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legislative, ethical) and building possible scenarios. Findings suggest that AI collaborants can be useful to foster exploration of diverse alternatives and can be a means to train students in complex thinking, a key competence for Transition Design. However, issues inherent to LLMs need to be considered, such as narrative style, possible bias or homogenization effects. Finally, optimal interaction modalities with AI collaborants within a participant group need to be explored further.

ABSTRACT. This paper critically examines the integration of Transition Design into postgraduate Design Management education at the University of the Arts London. The redesigned MA Design Management programme seeks to foreground systems thinking, futures-oriented methods, and reflexive leadership; however, tensions emerge in translating these ambitions into pedagogical practice within institutional constraints. Drawing on three student case studies—sustainable tourism in Bali, the AI economy, and gender-based violence in Mexico—the paper evaluates how the Transition Design framework facilitates systemic reframing of these issues while also challenging the limits of short-term academic timelines and speculative design methods. While the methodology supports critical and relational inquiry, its application risks abstraction without sustained engagement beyond the classroom. The paper argues that although Transition Design offers a promising pedagogical direction, its transformative potential depends on deeper structural shifts in Design Management education and improved mechanisms for assessing long-term impact.

ABSTRACT. Transition Design was launched in 2015 at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design by Gideon Kossoff, Cameron Tonkinwise, and Terry Irwin as part of the school’s curriculum redesign. Since that time, it has become a widely adopted area of design research, study, and practice worldwide. In this session of the 5th International Transition Design Conference, Terry, Gideon, and Cameron will reflect upon its origins, evolution, and current trajectories and engage session participants in a discussion about where design for transitions is headed and what new knowledge and practices will be needed in the coming years.

The session will begin with brief reflections from each of the three co-creators, drawing on their different perspectives and experiences over the past decade, including Cameron’s current work in Australia. These reflections will serve as a starting point for a broader discussion about what has been learned, what has changed, and what remains unresolved.

The majority of the session will be devoted to engaging participants in a collective conversation about what is working and what is not, and about how Transition Design and related approaches to systems change may need to evolve. Participants will be invited to share insights from their own work and contexts, contributing to an open exchange on emerging questions, challenges, and directions for the field.

ABSTRACT. La Ciudad de México enfrenta una de las paradojas hídricas más complejas del mundo: una metrópolis construida sobre un antiguo sistema lacustre que hoy convive simultáneamente con inundaciones, escasez de agua, sobreexplotación de acuíferos y profundas desigualdades socioambientales. Este panel reúne perspectivas complementarias del diseño sistémico, la regeneración socioecológica, la gestión hídrica y la innovación territorial para explorar cómo transitar hacia futuros regenerativos centrados en el agua.

El diálogo contará con la participación de Peter H. Jones, Claudia Garduño García, Delfín Montañana y Gerardo Sandoval Osio como moderador. A partir de experiencias en diseño de transiciones, regeneración, gobernanza ambiental y soluciones comunitarias para el agua, los panelistas discutirán cómo imaginar, diseñar e implementar transformaciones que restauren las relaciones entre territorio, comunidades, infraestructura y ciclos hidrológicos en la Ciudad de México.

ABSTRACT. El Taller Interuniversitario de Diseño (TiUD) funciona como un laboratorio de investigación desde 2017, promoviendo el estudio y la práctica del activismo de diseño, el diseño sostenible y el diseño de transición. Ha contado con la participación de estudiantes y profesores de diversas escuelas de diseño de toda la Ciudad de México. Con el paso del tiempo, la metodología desarrollada en el TiUD se ha ido probando y perfeccionando continuamente, con el objetivo de contribuir al avance de la ciudad hacia un mayor bienestar social.

El objetivo principal de esta iniciativa educativa es dotar a los estudiantes de diseño de las herramientas necesarias para explorar y poner en práctica nuevos enfoques destinados a promover la activación social a través del diseño como práctica profesional. Hasta la fecha, TiUD ha contado con la participación de más de 400 estudiantes de pregrado y posgrado procedentes de cinco instituciones de educación superior. Los participantes han analizado críticamente sus contextos locales, prestando especial atención a la identificación de posibles fuentes de bienestar, siguiendo un marco metodológico de ocho etapas.

Este taller ofrece la oportunidad de seguir poniendo a prueba la metodología, al tiempo que fomenta la reflexión crítica sobre su posible trasladabilidad a otros contextos e instituciones. En última instancia, su objetivo es generar ideas que faciliten la réplica y la adaptación del modelo TiUD en otras ciudades.

ABSTRACT. ¿Resultan algunos problemas, más que de mal diseñar futuros, de la insistencia en diseñarlos? La charla abraza tres ideas: diseños en suspensión, abiertos e irresueltos, que se desvisten de adjetivos y hasta del sustantivo diseño; cambios desobedientes, que se alejan de lo planificado por vías políticas (relaciones transformativas), poéticas (sentidos experienciales) y poiéticas (traídas a la existencia); y el etcéteraverso, donde el etcétera y lo etcetérico reconocen los límites del lenguaje y la representación, los márgenes del pluriverso mismo en su irreductibilidad como aquello que permanece impluralizable, inpluriversalizable, inclasificable y aun indiseñable.

La charla atiende instancias donde el diseño deja de coincidir consigo mismo y vibra al borde de la imposibilidad comparativa. Los futuros dejan de estructurarse hacia adelante para alcanzarnos desde atrás; activan el presente al pasar, y aprendemos a esperarlos activamente. El diseño entra y sale de su propio lenguaje sin fijarse, desajustándose simultáneamente, interior y exteriormente. Se suspende la insistencia en proyectarlo todo para abrirse a lo imposible. En el etcéteraverso, sin centro ni exterior: las prácticas en suspensión dejan que lo diseñable y lo indiseñable ocurra sin garantía de control.

En ese desplazamiento emergen transiciones otras, tejidas pero también fieltradas: las primeras con tramas que aún organizan y operacionalizan relaciones, las segundas como amontonamientos sin urdimbre o plan, donde lo regenerativo, más que o además de diseñarse, se reconoce en cuanto ocurre sin haber sido organizado. Sea diseñar muebles, autos, casas o políticas públicas: se renuncia de cuando en cuando a direccionar soluciones, se indefinen los problemas y las pulsiones enunciativas para interactuar con lo que queda fuera de cuanto se conoce o nombra. La decisión desobediente se introduce como acción imprevista que alterna con el paso a paso planificado.