Design for Sustainability Transitions: Reflections on Practice

Transition Design or design for sustainability transitions is acknowledged as
an emerging design research and practice area. Although studied and practiced as part of research consortiums for a while, design for transitions has only recently started to be adopted by design practitioners and consultancies with only few examples worldwide. Hellon, a design consultancy based in Finland and the UK, has been actively searching for implementing ideas from design for transitions and have successfully been involved in a set of relevant projects during 2017-2021. These projects include helping the Prime Minister’s Office of Finland to consolidate a sustainability report with co-created input from all Finnish ministries, designing “Nordic Urban Mobility 2050 – Futures Game” –a gamified process for facilitating mobility transitions stakeholders to co-create mobility futures scenarios– and developing “Sustainable Futures Game” –a gamified process to assist companies to co-imagine desirable alternative near future scenarios in alignment with the intergovernmental ambition to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. In this article, as a transdisciplinary team of three design practitioners and one researcher, we present these examples as case studies and share reflections and critical insights on enablers, challenges, and opportunities for implementing design for sustainability transitions in practice and provide suggestive evidence for the contributions of design-led approaches in transitions contexts. In the case study, the projects’ design facilitated collaborative imagining of desirable futures and the visual artefacts created provided easy entry for the participants into the complexity of systemic change processes. In the end, individual designers taking incentive in actively pursuing projects and allowing organizational environments as well as collaborating with academic partners have been identified as key enablers of undertaking DfST in commercial design consultancy practice contexts.