Piloting Methods

Envision the Transition

Principles of practice: envisioning transition changemaking

Leads: Malé Luján Escalante
Chris Mortimer, Management School, Lancaster University

Envision the Transition is a methodology outcoming from the Refugee Transition Network’s interested in testing the value of Transition Design in the context of forced migration. Among of all the complexities of the context, what the project forefronted was a need to support the inner work of the transition changemaker: how can we build capacity and nurture resilience among community leaders, social innovators, our teams and ourselves. 

Principles of practice: envisioning transition changemaking

1. Utopian Imagination: this principle is informed by Utopia as Method (Levitas, 2013; Moritmer & Luján Escalante, 2024) and supports future-oriented practices that are diverse and including of other ways of knowing. It promotes democratic debate and embraces conflict rather than seeking consensus-based, sanitized visions of the future. Utopian Imagination emphasizes collective radical imagination as emancipatory act, encouraging participants to reimagine the impossible rather than extending the possible. Utopian Imagination hold spaces to imagine alternative possibilities, not to plan for a hypothetical future, but for the transformative effects of collective imagination in the present.

2. Decentering the Academic Designer Role: we advocate for transition changemaking not as  academic privilege, or as endeavour of the design leader, but as relational responsibility distributed across constellations of actors. The objective is then, scaffold publics for transition actions.

3. Relational Leadership: to think about the transition changemaking operating within networks of care rather than hierarchical structures led by outside experts. This approach moves us away of the ‘chain of value’ approach to a “value constellation” model (Luján Escalante, 2019) in order to ideate, action, relate and evaluate projects. This principle anticipates value as ripple effect of the human and more-than-human relations within the project, that is not constraint by the duration, objective and funding of the project.
   

4. Pluriversal Approach: this roots the application of TD on lived experiences, community wisdom, and traditional and indigenous ecological knowledges. It pushes a move from universal (ideas, realities, system of values) to test spaces for worlds in which other worlds fit.
   

5. Inner Practice: effective innovation for transition actions requires deep personal connections with our bodies, and with spiritual and political dimensions of change. This principle is aligned and informed by the Inner Development Goals (IDG), which highlight the need for transformative personal skills to support sustainable development.

Refugee Transition Network was piloted 5 Principles of Practice in the context of Envision the Transition Workshop at the Participatory Design Conference, Malaysia, 2024 LINK