Framing System Dynamics for Designers Innovating in Transitions

In recent years, designers have increasingly engaged with sustainability transitions, using design and innovation activity to drive systemic change. However, we still have a limited understanding of how designers can best frame complex system dynamics to understand which innovations will foster desired changes. This study aims to better understand how design decisions are made when innovating for transitions and how to support this process. We take a research-through-design approach to explore the dimensions of scale and time and propose a conceptual framework to specify how to include these dimensions in framing transition challenges for design. In our view, exploring and specifying 1) systems principles that drive the future system, 2) organizational roles that stakeholders can play in the transition, and 3) changes in people’s behavior and capabilities that drive the transition, is key to identifying what future practice(s) to design for to foster desired transitions. We discuss the design activities and process artifacts developed and used to support our investigation into framing for transitions in a way that aligns short-term innovation efforts with long-term systemic change. Our contributions advance our understanding of framing in transition design, and we hint toward some of the design activities and process artifacts to support this.