Conference Agenda

Recent research highlights the potential of prototyping for promoting sustainable transitions. However, scholars argue that it is essential to modify, and possibly redefine, the conventional use of prototyping to address complex system transformations. This paper enhances the understanding of prototyping within Transition Design for sustainability. Drawing on Social Practice Theory and practice-oriented design, we conceive prototyping as a design practice and define it through three key components: materials, competencies, and meanings. This perspective shifts the emphasis from individual prototyping artefacts to a more comprehensive, contextual understanding of the practice, aligning with the systemic nature of transitions. The empirical findings derive from participant observations, archival analysis, and interviews with twelve researchers and practitioners involved in prototyping activities for sustainable landscape transitions, as well as two academic experts. Our thematic analysis reveals significant insights into the evolution of prototyping practices, offering an initial conceptual framework for its application in transitions.

Sustainability transitions are marked by growing pains: tensions between planetary and local scales, global urgency and lived experience. This paper argues that techno-centric, metric-driven, and scalable approaches obscure inequalities, conceal the labour of maintenance, and overlook affective dimensions. It proposes a counter-infrastructural approach that understands sustainability as emerging through infrastructural, ecological, temporal, embodied, and relational dynamics. Drawing on interdisciplinary theory, participatory workshops, and experiential experiments, the study shows how process-oriented practices can reconnect individuals to energy systems. Bioregional thinking, community-led initiatives, repair and maintenance, and sensory engagement are explored as alternatives that foreground resilience and interdependence. Through lenses of scale, care, and embodiment, design is positioned as mediator between abstract environmental metrics and lived realities, raising questions of governance, ethics, and emotions. Designing with trouble reframes sustainability not as a problem to solve but as ongoing negotiation, where uncertainty, incremental care, and situated knowledge enable more just and inclusive transitions.

This paper addresses a challenge for Transition Design (TD): how to make long-term, systemic frameworks tangible and actionable in small-scale, community-led practice. We introduce and evaluate the preliminary results of a methodological framework that scaffolds TD backcasting with seven principles of Social-Ecological Systems (SES) resilience for urban gardens. Grounded in a community garden case study in Shanghai, we analyse data from semi-structured interviews and a co-design workshop to evaluate this method in practice. Our findings reveal that this method functions as a dialogic tool, enabling participants to diagnose systemic issues, negotiate trade-offs, and co-create near-term actions with a longer-term vision. The paper provides a critical analysis of the new tool, including its differential effectiveness during visioning versus action planning and presents a theoretical framework for further replication and iteration. Ultimately, this research aims to contribute a theoretically-grounded and empirically-tested method for structuring co-design processes aimed at fostering community-led sustainable transitions.

Despite the advancement of sustainable design, a critical paradox persists: many practices remain embedded in industrial paradigms, failing to address deep-seated socio-natural contradictions. Grounded in the Eco-Marxist "metabolic rift" framework and informed by recent Agricultural Innovation Design (AID) research, this study proposes a key path for mending these rifts. The research offers a systemic framework for intervening in complex social-ecological systems. The primary conclusions are: (1) metabolic rifts are fundamentally rooted in relational alienation, characterized by the disruption of healthy and reciprocal metabolic relationships between society and nature; (2) structural sustainability requires reshaping metabolic relationships across social, ecological, and intergenerational dimensions; (3) the proposed “restoration paradigm” shifts design logic from product-centricity to relationship restoration through a “mapping-catalyzing-consolidating” path; and (4) designers are redefined as “relationship catalysts” who synchronize community needs with natural ecological cycles to construct resilient systems.

While design transition discourse foregrounds systemic change, pedagogy frequently remains rooted in a solutionist mindset, in which the design brief often functions to perpetuate norms.

Drawing on the Erasmus+ project Speculative Urban Futures, we reimagine the design brief as an infrastructure for epistemic plurality. Students collaboratively develop and circulate briefs across groups, harnessing divergence as a means of expanding the design space and unsettling normative expectations.

We argue that embracing this tension is central to navigating the “growing pains” of design transitions. By embedding theoretical complexity within viscerality, playfulness and speculation, design education can shift from transmission to transformation—equipping students not simply with the ability to generate solutions, but to radically reframe what counts as a problem in the first place.

The paper concludes by advocating for a surreptitious practice-based approach in which the brief functions as a critical device for cultivating alternative worldings in design pedagogy.

Conventional participatory planning and design practice imply linear accumulation of data, facts, and representations, predicting meaningful futures through consensus-driven strategies. Transformation is framed as the transparent management of knowable information towards a providential destiny. By reducing participatory reasoning to factual transfer and discursive negotiation, reductionist approaches fail to address the systemic complexity and contingent character of socio-ecological challenges. They overlook disruptive shocks (financial crises, pandemics) that reorder systems. We propose disruption as a co-design method: a deliberately staged technique that exposes boundaries, surfaces dependencies, and fosters collective sense-making under uncertainty. Drawing on 4E cognition and relational design theory, we propose an operative epistemology where knowledge emerges through recursive sense–model–act loops, boundaries and constraints function as enabling conditions for creativity. Methodologically, disruption is operationalized through event–constraint–speculation sequences in a game-based co-design toolkit, empirically demonstrated in the Rurban-Lab case. This is a proposal for ecologizing co-design.