ABSTRACT. The talk "Cumulus Design Declaration: Education for the Transitions" by Roberto Iñiguez explores design education's transformative role in addressing global challenges. Building on the Cumulus Design Declaration, advocating a shift from human-centered to planet-centered design, the presentation emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and regenerative practices. It highlights the urgent need for design education to embrace inclusivity, sustainability, and resilience in response to climate crises, technological disruptions, and social inequities. By aligning educational frameworks, the talk envisions design as a catalyst for creative action, fostering meaningful societal transitions and addressing today's complexities.

ABSTRACT. Scholarship and practice at the intersections of design and sustainability transformations have been evolving for decades in different forms, under different names and across multiple geographies. During this evolution, the hope that intentional interventions can help shape the direction of complex societal change has remained remarkably persistent despite evidence suggesting that the needed change is not happening or is happening very slowly. Prompted by this observation, in this talk I reflect on a question that has become increasingly important in design scholarship and practice over recent years and yet grown paradoxically more elusive: what is the role of design in long-term, large-systemic transformation processes characterized by complexity, uncertainty, and emergent behavior? I will argue that futures are not empty spaces waiting to be intervened in, designed, and shaped, but that they are always in-the-making through ongoing processes of change, assumptions we collectively hold, and dynamics no single actor can fully control. With this recognition, I will invite a reconsideration of both design and agency at a time of systemic destabilization.

ABSTRACT. Change-makers in sustainability transitions must engage diverse stakeholders with challenges decades ahead, when climate impacts will intensify beyond current experience. Experiential futures enable participants to step into radically different worlds and critique today's situations in light of desired future states. Despite successful examples, they remain rare in climate resilience contexts. This paper reflects on HeatCon, a place-based experiential climate intervention held across three iterations (2021–2023) in Berlin. Drawing on team reflections, participant reflections, and emerging impact stories, we describe learnings from early iterations, key design decisions guided by an intention-based framework, and emerging impacts across policy, civil society, culture, and personal transformations. We reflect on the potentials of experiential climate interventions, necessary conditions, and design recommendations in the form of the transferable Intention Framework and the HeatCon Zine. Practiced regularly, experiential climate interventions support sustainability transitions as they build the collective capacity to catalyze climate action.

ABSTRACT. Community-based initiatives often begin with energy and purpose, yet struggle to endure as funding, leadership, participation, and institutional support shift. This paper examines how transition work remains generative under such conditions. It introduces Generous Design as a relational, practice-oriented framework for understanding how stewardship, care, reciprocity, and shared authorship can be sustained across evolving initiatives. The inquiry is grounded in the 17-year trajectory of Octopus Garden, a volunteer-led community garden in Pittsburgh, and two related initiatives: Latham St. Commons, a neighborhood-scale commons, and Night Owl Bakers, a youth-centered learning and livelihood program. Rather than treating these projects as replicable models, the paper reads them as a long-horizon ecology in which practices take root, widen, translate, and recombine under constraint. It contributes to Transition Design by foregrounding the quiet, situated labor through which communities keep learning, adapting, and redesigning from within.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how infrastructure redesign might both advance and draw critical direction from broader disciplinary realignments in support of just transitions—an umbrella movement rooted in the interconnectedness of socio-ecological systems. Across the United States, elevated urban highways built during postwar urban renewal have outlived the conditions that produced them, with escalating costs and enduring legacies of demolition and displacement. Through the case of SR-65, an elevated highway constructed through Pittsburgh’s Manchester community, we interrogate the violent origins of the highway's construction, ongoing debates surrounding its future, and offer speculative scenarios for its repurposing as multivalent socio-ecological infrastructure. Rather than prescribing a singular masterplan, the paper employs long-term, scenario-based methods developed through Carnegie Mellon University's Design for Transitions studio. The paper contributes to broadening discourse around aging infrastructure while demonstrating how architectural design might be situated in support of just transitions toward reparative, convivial, and regenerative urban futures.

ABSTRACT. Traditional knowledge systems support local production, cultural continuity, environmental adaptation, and community resilience. However, disasters and broader socio-economic transformations increasingly threaten the continuity of these knowledge systems. Building upon the authors’ doctoral research conducted following the February 6, 2023 earthquakes in Türkiye, this paper examines the vulnerability of traditional knowledge in post-disaster contexts and argues for a shift from reactive recovery toward preventive resilience-building. Drawing on sustainability transitions, Systemic Design, cultural sustainability, and traditional ecological knowledge literature, the paper proposes a framework for the preservation and adaptive development of traditional knowledge. The framework consists of four phases: systemic mapping, adaptive development through participatory design, intergenerational transmission structures, and long-term stewardship. By conceptualizing traditional knowledge as a dynamic socio-ecological system rather than a static cultural artifact, the paper positions knowledge continuity as a strategic concern for resilience and cultural sustainability. The framework contributes a designled approach for supporting long-term socio-ecological transformation.

ABSTRACT. Across disciplines and borders, a shared conversation is unfolding about how to meaningfully engage the urgent, ongoing, and global crisis of climate change. Global proposals, from geoengineering weather to international emissions targets to global energy transitions away from fossil fuels, highlight the politically complex, expensive, slow-moving, and technically demanding nature of climate response. This paper outlines influential climate design frameworks that have helped designers, scientists, and communities approach solutions to the climate crises and introduces our new Climate Action Tactics (CAT) framework, developed through years of collecting on-the-ground climate response projects that have been organized into five tactics categories: community infrastructure, situated technology, knowledge sharing, reimagining waste, and regenerative repair. The CAT framework helps designers and communities propose and implement local climate solutions by understanding their site-specific context and develop steps to evaluate and implement climate residency ideas with local networks.

ABSTRACT. Amid accelerating socio-ecological crises, regenerative transitions require more than technical innovation; they demand new epistemologies, institutional infrastructures, and practices capable of reweaving relationships between communities, ecosystems, and knowledge systems. This paper proposes Tech-Community Driven Regenerative Living Labs (TCD-RLLs) as living infrastructures for societal transition in vulnerable territories across Latin America. Grounded in Transition Design, regenerative development, and ecologies of care, the paper argues that vulnerability should not be understood solely as a condition of risk, but as a situated context from which regenerative capacities can emerge. Drawing on ongoing experiences in protected natural areas and socio-ecologically vulnerable communities in Mexico, the Living Labs function as spaces for knowledge co-production, community agency, technological experimentation, and regenerative learning. By integrating scientific knowledge, local ecological wisdom, participatory governance, and place-based action, they enable long-term transition processes. The paper concludes by proposing a regional ecosystem of regenerative living infrastructures capable of supporting systemic transformation, territorial resilience, and regenerative futures across Latin America.

ABSTRACT. As artificial intelligence, platform infrastructures, and smart-city paradigms reshape how communities know, deliberate, and act, they jeopardize the vital civic and ecological conditions of shared learning that sustainability transitions demand. In response, the paper proposes adaptive civic-ecological intelligence as a commonsgoverned capacity cultivated through living neighborhoods. The paper develops a Transition Design scaffold composed of three linked contributions: the living neighborhood as an operative scale of everyday flourishing; civic relational diagnosticsas a method for translating situated experience into civic objects and resources; and Neighboring With, a speculative platform and neighborhood data trust for stewarding civic memory, proposal formation, and collective action. Together, these mechanisms offer a practical pathway for enacting cosmopolitan localism by enabling civic federated learning among locally governed neighborhoods oriented toward regenerative urban futures and wise cities.

ABSTRACT. This paper offers a pluriversal, design-oriented perspective on integrating Indigenous epistemologies into policy design processes. By embracing diverse knowledge systems and centering Indigenous ways of knowing and being, the research calls for a fundamental shift in how policies, institutions and communities respond to the polycrisis of climate breakdown, cultural erasure, and social fragmentation. It proposes Living Trails, a pluriversal, place-based facilitation framework that Indigenizes policy-making by centering relationality and reciprocity. This transition design approach aims at weaving Indigenous and academic expertise with policy knowledge across local, regional, and planetary scales. Grounded in cosmopolitan localism, the work addresses the extraction of local knowledge out of geographical contexts and argues that regenerative futures need to be rooted in place, ritual, and culture. The paper advocates for global solidarity and shared learning through empowering bottom-up approaches in a world of many worlds.

ABSTRACT. As the climate crisis intensifies, transitioning to renewable energy is essential. While policy-driven initiatives dominate the discourse, this research investigates the potential of collective Do-It-Yourself (DIY) grassroots development as a catalyst for inclusive energy transitions, particularly within school communities. Utilising the Making Energy Together (MET) project, the study employed ethnographic methods across five secondary schools in Finland and South Korea between 2021 and 2023. Findings demonstrate that hands-on, collaborative design of solar-powered installations transforms participants from passive consumers into collective agents of change. Beyond technical skill acquisition, the process fostered new social collaborations, rendered energy tangible, and prompted critical reflection on unsustainable institutional practices. By repositioning students and staff as legitimate actors, collective DIY serves as an important stepping stone between micro-level activities and macro-systemic change. The study concludes that design-led, mundane interactions with renewable energy technologies can be powerful for destabilising established energy behaviours and building sustainable community futures.

ABSTRACT. Infrastructure design and planning tools tend to reproduce the conditions they were built inside: who counts as a credible proposer, what formats evidence must take, and which scales of knowledge travel. The Living Infrastructure Field Kit, a participatory mapping platform co-designed with more than 50 neighborhood, watershed, and institutional partners over four years in Greater Los Angeles, holds place-sourced knowledge and technical data in the same artifact, with neither subordinated to the other. This paper reports what that has made possible: communities leading over US$7 million in feasibility grants, and the first community-led group to succeed in a program no group had navigated—a shift not just in funding but in who is recognized as capable. It traces a reckoning with the gap between a tool about living infrastructure and one that is of it, and asks what this work might offer elsewhere.

ABSTRACT. Transition Design scholarship emphasizes the importance of mindset and posture in supporting long-term societal transitions. However, less attention has been given to how shifts in mindset and posture emerge through practice as designers navigate changing institutional, relational, and geopolitical conditions. Drawing on a multi-sited inquiry across Global South and Global North worlds, this paper argues for an expanded understanding of positionality as a dynamic relational condition that shapes how designers act within transition-oriented practice. In response, the paper introduces two complementary contributions. First, it proposes the figure of the unfinished designer to describe practitioners who continually reposition themselves across shifting institutional, relational, and geopolitical conditions. Second, it introduces the Unfinished Design Model, a framework structured around four dimensions: situatedness, relationality, mutability, and recalibration. The paper contributes to Transition Design by offering a practice-grounded account of how shifts in mindset and posture emerge through the ongoing recalibration of positionality.

ABSTRACT. Transition Design's posture and its tools pull in opposite directions. The framework asks designers to recognize themselves as inside the systems they map; its instruments still treat the system as something faced from a distance. Second-order Cybernetics supplies the epistemological ground the posture lacks: once the observer is part of what they observe, design becomes conversation, and posture cannot be set in advance. It becomes an ongoing obligation that persists through uncertainty and past the designer's withdrawal, answerable to the people who live with what the engagement leaves behind. The paper develops this across three axes: how each field conceptualizes systems, frames designing, and theorizes change. Two cases ground it: the Ojai water security workshops in California and Relational Repair in New South Wales, Australia. It calls the resulting posture implication-as-obligation, and leaves open whether the two fields integrate or hold in tension.

ABSTRACT. Relationality is opening disciplinary pathways offering innovations in a wide range of fields but requires frameworks from which to develop applicable operational tools. Research aimed at such endeavour is presented in this paper; specifically, a taxonomical Relational Tree which classifies bioinfrastructures in hierarchies according to their role as providers for prosperity from which it is possible to define a sequence; a Relational Cycle built from qualities that –it is hypothesized– in conjunction, provide emergent properties towards self-fulfillment. Several design cases are analyzed to validate and/or calibrate the framework as a transitional design tool. Insights include identification for the process to: situate design problems; view soil as having the capacity to include a wide range of interactions; differentiate relations depending on information; distinguish tangible and intangible structures; identify dynamic processes and consider prosperity as cyclical with no specific starting stage; all of which offer applicable scaffolds in many disciplinary fields.

ABSTRACT. Transition Design seeks to catalyse systems-level change toward sustainable, equitable, and desirable futures, yet it lacks concrete temporal models for how design engages problems as they unfold over time. This paper proposes ecological succession—the directional change of species composition and ecosystem structure following disturbance—as a theory of change for designers. Drawing on the theories of alternative stable states and Panarchy, we reframe the designer as a "disturbance regime" who targets and releases entrenched institutional "lock-ins" rather than an expert who prescribes a final form. Through a case study of Biophilic Tactical Urbanism in a U.S. public schoolyard, we show how low-cost, temporary, nature-based interventions function as "pioneer species" that build social and ecological "soil." We then extend the model across scales—from a single site to municipal policy and regional planning—and offer a transferable set of stewardship strategies, repositioning the designer from an architect of objects to a steward of transition.

ABSTRACT. Healthcare institutions are experiencing chronic strain, fragmentation, workforce pressure, and growing difficulty responding to complex care challenges through incremental improvement alone. In the United States, federal workforce analysis projects continuing shortages and maldistribution across several health professions, while burnout remains a persistent concern for nurses and other clinicians. At the same time, digital health, artificial intelligence, automation, and new care models are being introduced into systems whose professional identities, governance structures, and values often remain oriented toward existing models of episodic, institution-centered care. Systems-level healthcare transition demands more than new tools or process improvements. It requires cultivating ecologies of imaginaries. These are plural, networked arrangements for future-oriented engagement in which stakeholders actively rehearse and co-author alternative futures. The argument is grounded in a large-scale nursing innovation experience developed within a broader, future-backed inquiry into an AI-native academic medical center, tracing how a single future-oriented encounter can span research, workforce engagement, institutional communication, and ongoing organizational stewardship.

ABSTRACT. Designers have always been well-positioned to reimagine and transform systems. However, in an accelerating polycrisis, we have a gap in our practice: ‘holding’ people and relationships through societal transition. To handle the complexity of designing for multiple horizons (Wahl, 2017)—what’s emerging, dying, sustaining, and maintaining—we must tackle this growing pain. Left unaddressed, it risks reinforcing extractive design logics that privilege outputs over care and divorce design from human experience. Drawing from the concept of ‘holding’ in human development (Winnicott, 1962), therapeutic contexts (Slochower, 2013), public problem solving (O’Brien & Crawford-Zakian, 2023), and crisis leadership (Petriglieri, 2020)— this paper argues that invisible ‘holding’ muscles are crucial for transition designers and we can learn from ‘holding’ practitioners at intimate scales: chaplains, doulas, mediators, and beyond. ‘Holding’ demands experiential, relational pedagogy that defies conventional academic and studio structures. This paper proposes five speculative approaches toward radical transdisciplinary collaboration — bridging this skill gap while interrogating what design practice becomes when slowed by care.

ABSTRACT. The WHO Commission on Social Connection reported in 2025 that one in six people worldwide experience loneliness. In this article we evaluate a design workshop which aimed to develop design concepts that addressed unwanted loneliness among older adults through a relational design perspective. The workshop also challenged ageism and ableism. Its structure was interdisciplinary, intergenerational and international. Participants applied contextual analysis and evaluated the design proposals generated by six groups. The international workshop took place in Mexico City with 18 participants. Over five days of work, participants attended lectures by aging experts, and joined roundtable discussions with older Mexicans, applied the contextual analysis tool, did fieldwork and held sessions for analysis and synthesis. Six design directions were generated through core concepts, key insights and contextual dimensions. We show how transition-oriented learning environments can cultivate the mindset and posture shifts required for long-term systems change.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents the first regional-scale network analysis of public design practice in Latin America, drawing on 84 academic and grey literature sources to map 865 nodes and 1,265 edges across nine countries, 174 innovation units, 573 projects, and 109 individuals. Three interlocking findings emerge: geographic fragmentation shaped by uneven documentation infrastructure; selective visibility that records institutional presence while omitting methods and temporal trajectories; and the structural invisibility of practitioners despite their central role in carrying knowledge across administrative cycles. Drawing on Transition Design, we argue that documentation is not a byproduct of institutional activity but a design intervention in its own right: one that shapes the conditions for cumulative learning and open institutional continuity. We propose practitioner stewardship as a professional posture and introduce an independent repository as the practical infrastructure through which that stewardship can be enacted across Latin America.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the Tenuta Lab as a place-based, design-mediated educational format developed to support transition-oriented learning in agro-food and rural systems. Positioned at the intersection of Living Lab experimentation, systemic design, and sustainability education, the model integrates immersive field inquiry, multi-actor co-learning, and artefact-based co-analysis within real territorial contexts. Across multiple editions conducted between 2023 and 2026, the format has been applied in heterogeneous rural and agro-food environments, including sites characterised by governance complexity and transition pressures. Empirical evidence from lab outputs and learning artefacts indicates advances in systemic problem framing, cross-disciplinary translation, and stakeholder interpretation capacities. The paper argues that design-mediated Living Lab education can function as a pedagogical infrastructure for building transition capabilities when supported by explicit facilitation structures, visual analytical tools, and iterative reflection practices. The Tenuta Lab contributes to design and food system design studies by operationalising participatory and systemic design principles into a repeatable educational architecture for sustainability transitions.

ABSTRACT. Individuals in industrialized societies are subject to an “extinction of experience” (Soga & Gaston, 2016), characterized by a lack of physical and perceptual engagement with the natural world and ecological systems. Research shows that such interaction with the natural world can strengthen human–nature connections and support pro-environmental attitudes (Brown et al., 2019; DeVille et al., 2021), yet students in industrialized cultures are infrequently offered such opportunities. This paper is a case study examining Forest Field Day, a place-based pedagogy incorporated into a university design studio course drawing on qualitative analysis of student reflections and behaviors and project outcomes. Built on sustained physical and conceptual investigation of a local landscape, students identify and document specific tree species, conduct ecological and cultural research on them, and translate their findings into visual and symbolic representations. Through this engagement with a single species, participants’ abstract concept of “nature” develops into a situated understanding of the local ecosystem. This paper draws on student reflections, observed behaviors, and project outcomes to consider how structured, experiential learning may foster ecological literacy and connection to place. The findings suggest that direct sensory engagement with a local environment can support shifts in understanding and extend into everyday behaviors and practices. This paper positions this intervention as a small-scale, practical pedagogical intervention focused on embodied, place-based learning can act as a leverage point for broader perceptual and behavioral change.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents the Strategic Design Master’s Program at SRH University Heidelberg’s Berlin campus as an educational model that prepares students to act as change agents in addressing and navigating complex systemic challenges. Grounded in an extended concept of design and structured around three principles—future skills education, practice-based learning and leadership, and a systemic approach to complexity—the program equips students to operate as strategic actors within organizations and society. Real-world projects conducted with industry, civil society, and governmental partners address open-ended, high-complexity challenges aligned with transition design imperatives, including change management, social innovation, climate philanthropy, democratic resilience, and cultural change. Systematic leadership development further prepares graduates to drive transformative processes. The program is presented as a replicable framework for integrating transition design thinking into graduate-level design education.

ABSTRACT. Design has been addressing sustainability for over 50 years, and today it is mandatory to include it in its curriculum at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). Even more recent terms like Regenerative Design and Ecosystemic Design are being proposed. Despite the efforts involved, this study presents an analysis of the understanding and application of related topics by three groups within the CIDI (Center for Industrial Design and Innovation): professors, students, and alumni. Making the current state visible allows us to propose strategies for transitioning towards a training of future industrial designers where sustainability, regeneration, and ecosystemic thinking are cross-cutting themes.

ABSTRACT. Este artículo documenta una intervención curricular desarrollada en el curso de Investigación Aplicada de la Licenciatura en Diseño Industrial de la Universidad Rafael Landívar (Guatemala, primer semestre 2026), orientada a explorar la pertinencia del Diseño de Transición como articulador entre investigación aplicada, práctica reflexiva y compromiso territorial. A partir de siete proyectos centrados en el acceso y la calidad del agua, se analiza cómo los cuatro componentes del marco — visiones para la transición, teorías del cambio, mentalidad y postura, y nuevas formas de diseñar— emergieron en la práctica pedagógica. Los resultados sugieren que es viable incorporar lógicas transicionales en cursos de corta duración, y que la vinculación entre investigación científica y docencia potencia soluciones apropiadas a contextos socioambientales complejos. Se discuten las limitaciones del modelo del Doble Diamante como andamiaje exclusivo y se argumenta la complementariedad del Diseño de Transición para ampliar el alcance sistémico del diseño industrial en América Latina.

ABSTRACT. Design education faces a critical gap between traditional pedagogies and sustainability transition demands, as current curricula perpetuate linear problem-solving and Western-centered epistemologies while failing to cultivate relational capacities for addressing interconnected socio-ecological crises. This action research, conducted with UNAM undergraduate students across three Mexican territories (2024-2025), integrated visual ethnography with environment-based learning through three phases: sensory immersion, collective mapping, and sympoietic design pathways. Data sources included sensory journals, botanical drawings, participatory cartography, reflective writing, interviews, and participant observation enabling slow knowledge development. Results demonstrate students developed five interrelated capabilities: sensory perception grounding relational awareness; embodied knowledge deepening environmental empathy; affective dimensions transforming understanding into committed care; cultural knowledge legitimizing sovereign epistemologies; and critical-ethical reflection enabling ecological transitions. Findings reveal eco-aesthetic practices function as transformative pedagogical mediations, cultivating sympoietic-ethical virtues essential for transition design by preparing designers as humble participants in multi-generational sustainability transitions rather than individual problem-solvers.

ABSTRACT. La muerte por suicidio en Yucatán es un problema de salud pública sostenido por más de tres décadas, con una tasa que duplica la media nacional. Aunque existen más de una veintena de iniciativas dedicadas a su prevención, el sistema opera de manera fragmentada y sin visión compartida. Este artículo presenta los avances de una investigación cualitativa y exploratoria que articula la teoría de sistemas como base ontológica con el diseño de transición como marco de agencia metodológica, asumiendo el mapeo sistémico participativo como acto deliberado de diseño. El trabajo de campo combinó encuesta electrónica, entrevistas semiestructuradas y un taller de co-creación. Los hallazgos revelan un régimen socio-técnico bloqueado por un bucle vicioso de fragmentación y una ausencia institucional interpretada como falla de gobernanza. La discusión dialoga con precedentes latinoamericanos y esboza una visión de futuro centrada en el localismo cosmopolita y la revalorización de los saberes mayas.

ABSTRACT. Design can transform territories. This becomes possible through the activation of relationships, meanings, and practices that shape community life, particularly in popular urban contexts. This paper analyzes a case developed in the Chachafruto neighborhood (Manizales, Colombia) which, from a care-based Transition Design approach, proposes that the appropriation of public space in a popular urban context, depends on the progressive construction of affective bonds and collective capacities for agency through three dimensions: care of the self, others, and environment. The case study was carried out through university-community projects, in which the role of design as a mediator of social change processes was examined in a context characterized by low levels of community participation. The results demonstrate that the most significant transformations are not reflected in immediate physical changes, but rather in processes of trust-building, the strengthening of community agency, and the resignification of public space as a shared place of care and coexistence.

ABSTRACT. Este artículo presenta una estrategia construida por la Asociación Nacional de Universidades e Instituciones de Educación Superior de la República Mexicana (ANUIES) y la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (UNESCO) para transformar la educación superior en México y hacer efectiva la participación sustantiva de las juventudes en la vida cotidiana de las instituciones educativas. La propuesta busca responder a las exigencias de las juventudes de ser partícipes en la resolución de las grandes crisis contemporáneas generando espacios para la participación mediados por métodos colaborativos de diseño entretejidos con dinámicas de juegos cooperativos. La estrategia es, simultáneamente, un proceso formativo, un proyecto de impacto social y un proyecto de investigación. Finalmente, la estrategia está diseñada para ser escalada y replicada, con tal de lograr la institucionalización de la participación sustantiva en las Instituciones de Educación Superior (IES) hacia el 2030.

ABSTRACT. Quienes presentan este artículo han desarrollado anteproyectos para la creación de nuevos programas de estudios de posgrado y licenciatura con una relación directa con el diseño para las transiciones en las escuelas de diseño de dos universidades públicas, la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM). Si bien, los documentos llegaron a ser propuestas debidamente justificadas, únicamente la licenciatura fue aprobada en 2023, mientras que los planes de posgrado no prosperaron. Con base en estas experiencias, en este artículo se reflexiona sobre los aspectos que influyeron en la no concreción de los programas de posgrado, potencialmente impactando directamente a la innovación de la educación en diseño en las universidades públicas mexicanas. Las propuestas de nuevos programas de posgrado para la UNAM y la UAM sugerían transformaciones académicas y buscaban posicionar el diseño como una disciplina para la transformación.

ABSTRACT. This panel presents the HUMETAV project — a collaborative initiative developed between the Tecnológico de Monterrey, the University of Guadalajara, and the Museum of Environmental Sciences — as a working model for applying Transition Design principles to complex, real-world socio-ecological challenges in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area.

Rather than treating Transition Design as a purely theoretical framework, HUMETAV deployed it as a practical research and co-design tool, bringing together stakeholders from academia, the creative industry, and local government to map wicked problems, identify leverage points for systemic change, and develop funding proposals grounded in long-term visioning. The result was not only a set of actionable proposals, but a transferable methodology for collaborative, place-based transition work.

The panel will be structured around three complementary perspectives. Jorge Sanabria, who conceived and designed the HUMETAV methodology, will walk through the research framework, the facilitation process, and the key design decisions behind the project. Eduardo Santana, Director of the Museum of Environmental Sciences, will reflect on the institutional role of the museum as a platform for civic engagement and socio-ecological inquiry, and what it means to embed systems thinking into public science infrastructure. Marina Vicario, who leads Red LaTE and participated actively in the project, will bring the perspective of networked, community-engaged practice — exploring how transdisciplinary collaboration can bridge research and on-the-ground transformation.

Together, the panelists will open a dialogue with the audience about what it takes to move Transition Design from theory into practice, and how the HUMETAV model might inform similar initiatives in other cities and contexts.

ABSTRACT. En esta conversación revisaremos las perspectivas regenerativas que se tejen a través del diseño para la transición, reflexionando sobre proyectos reales en diferentes locaciones. Se discutirán reflexiones y críticas sobre los futuros deseados y los procesos que se puede lograr desde acciones en el presente.

El diálogo contará con la participación de Daniel Wahl quien es mundialmente conocido por su labor en la emancipación de las Culturas Regenerativas, asi como Maria Elena de la Torre y Carlos Cobreros quienes colaboran en la creacion de Laboratorios Vivos Regenerativos en Jalisco y Querétaro.

ABSTRACT. Este trabajo parte de la premisa de la necesidad de construir el diseño para las transiciones desde el territorio, definido en términos de una construcción social ligada estrechamente a la naturaleza. En ese marco, se plantea una experiencia emergente: Los laboratorios híbridos ciudadanos, que pretenden abordar los retos de la periferia de la Ciudad de México ante el Cambio Climático, sin embargo, plantean una serie de retos ligados a las lógicas territoriales. La discusión se centra, en la necesidad de construir procesos para las transiciones desde lo colectivo, en un marco académico e institucional donde se entrecruzan los procesos de investigación-acción participativa así como de formación de estudiantes que necesitan herramientas para abordar los discursos para las transiciones fuera del ámbito meramente académico.

ABSTRACT. We live on a suburbanizing planet, where urban peripheries are rapidly expanding. Across regions, these “in-between” places grapple with complex challenges tied to uneven mobilities, fragmented infrastructure, reconfiguring social relations, and ecological degradation. Conditions for long-term transitions are being formed along these peripheries.

This workshop engages suburbanization as a consequential terrain for weaving regenerative futures. Drawing on a civic design practice in Aurora, Colorado, one of the most diverse suburbs in the United States, the session surfaces patterns and insights that position suburbanizing and peripheralizing environments as seedbeds for systemic change.

Participants will explore these dynamics through regionally specific transition contexts. The workshop includes a mapping exercise in which participants locate themselves and their work across central–peripheral conditions, both geographically and within design practice. Building from this, participants will engage with design-led approaches for working within suburbanizing and peripheral regions in ways that are place-responsive and attuned to long-term change.

Central questions guiding the workshop include: Where do we locate ourselves within central–peripheral dynamics, and how does that shape our design practice? What practices are essential for designing within urban peripheries? The workshop will remain adaptive, evolving in response to participants and shaped in situ by the collective knowledge and context of the group.

ABSTRACT. Signs are everywhere of a radical crisis in the basic arrangements of contemporary life. But circumstances of breakdown can also reveal resources essential to building a more livable future for ourselves and others. This talk will track such openings between four places in the global North and South, in the United States, India, Ghana, and Spain, key nodes in the global fight for a zero waste future. I will explore what we can learn from activists, naturalists, creatives and many others involved in this movement. Their efforts shed light on four imperatives for a difficult present: the need to acknowledge real problems, to imagine them radically otherwise, to improvise creative responses, and to organize collective alternatives. By paying attention to such work, we can begin to understand what it takes to make possible deep structural change in how our societies and economies are organized, what it takes to build a more livable world.

Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His work aims for ecological awareness, a sense of appreciation for the many beings and elements that sustain our worlds. He has written several award-winning books, including Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down, and A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. Anand also serves as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective, a community for radical ecological imagination and collaboration, meant for researchers, activists, creatives, anyone. He lives with his family in Baltimore, where he is currently working on a new book project on the global fight to build a zero waste future, anchored in stories from the United States, India, Ghana, and Spain.