Transition Design · About Project
Transition Design: A New Challenge for Service and Interaction Design Education project is a long-term collaboration between the Department of Information and Library Science at Masaryk University and the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Oslo. After a four-year hiatus since last joint project on service design education, the two partner institutions have started to collaborate again on new approaches to education – this time focusing on Transition Design.
Transition Design is a new design approach that integrates insights from service design or design for social innovation into theory and practice, seeking to enrich it with a longer-term perspective and design reflexivity. According to one of the founders of the concept, Terry Irwin, we are living in a "transitional times". She refers to the present, our the society facing climate change, poverty, planetary devastation or an ageing population, suggesting we have to come up with new solutions that are not bound by the ideology and discursivity of existing socio-economic systems.
The project has thus produced several outputs during 2020-2022, introducing how new ways of designing can be transmitted to students at Czech and Norwegian universities:
- Theoretical course Service Design Workshop at Masaryk University and courses Research through Design and Transition Design at the University of Oslo,
- based on these courses following the framework of Transition Design (vision, theory of change, mindset and attitude of the designer and new ways of designing), a methodological publication was created, focusing on this new perspective in theory and practice,
- an international conference took place in Prague in June 2022 with the participation of Transition Design leaders Terry Irwin and Dan Lockton,
- a set of cards was created focusing on transition design methods,
- and several academic articles were published.
“Design is the process of deciding on and then realizing preferred futures.”
Cameron Tonkinwise
This website has been made possible by a financial contribution from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Grants 2014-2021 Education Programme.
