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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Thank you to the young people from Revoke, who hosted the event and participated.
This was a participatory experience that brought together UAL scholars and researchers, NGOs working in social purposes, refugee partners and participants from the RTN network, PGT students and MA Service Design Alumni. We gathered around ideas, music, rituals, magic, stories, theatre of the oppressed, and movement, all with a critical emancipatory twist.
The event celebrated the end of the AHRC networking project by sharing lessons learned from the journey of imagining transition actions in the context of displaced populations, across UK and Indonesia.
We celebrated Pluriversal Ways of Knowing methods opening a discussion that considers lived experience, creative practices and epistemological diversity as ways to not just disrupt academic colonizing systems of knowledge, but also, as catalysers of political activation and spiritual connection.
This event ignaugurates the Pluriversal Ethics strand of research at IsITethical integrating past projects and catalysing collaboration for our next endeavours!
Dancing with the Trouble is a call to rehearse with our bodies rituals for anticipating, noticing, and addressing ethical tensions — to nurture a mindset of collaborative creativity and radical care. Beyond the duties of data management, privacy, justice, sustainability and diversity, we aim to support capacities to respond to uncertainty with music, movement and the creation of Radical Emancipatory Values.
The ritual started online, in the midst of the pandemic, framed by little Zoom boxes. Mildly exhausted from endless virtual conferences on ethics of AI, we decided to explore ways of embodying ethics, instead of just talking about it. In collaboration with street dancers, aikido masters, HIIT trainers and choreographers, we created a series of 12 values with accompanying movements that could be danced on screen.
Inspired by Indigenous AI Protocols, Donna Haraway and ritual design, together we celebrate rituals embracing the magical, illogical, delightful and laughable to inspire healthier AI.
Together we are building on this ritual to design a novel pedagogy for teaching responsible innovation and circumspect reflection in universities, industry and beyond.
Celebrations
We have celebrated the ritual online and in person in:
Arts, Activism and Social Justice Summer School, University of Bristol
Architecture School, Lancaster University
Digital Cultures BA, Lancaster University
Human Show Podcast
We discuss how to use creative ways to form a space of exchange and how to exercise ethics. What is the end of me and the beginning of someone else? We also cover ethics for more-than-humans – if nature can produce technologies, then why would it not have its own ethics too?
Publications
Read more about the ritual on our Pivot paper:
Luján Escalante, M. A., Moffat, L., Harrison, L., & Kuh, V. (2021). Dancing with the Troubles of AI. Design Research Society available here
‘Envision the Transition’ is a result of the work developed by the Refugee Transition Network (RTN), an international networking project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
The project aims to apply Transition Design (TD) frameworks in the context of forced displaced population and urban refugee management.
After conversations with academics, co-designers and community-led organisations, we have devised 5 principles to help engage with other disciplines and communities in a real-world context:
Decentring designing from participatory processes.
Based on these principles, ‘Envision the Transition’ is the first session in what will become a 12-week programme. Titled ‘Transition Living Lab’, this series is designed for migrants, other displaced people and anyone else looking to inspire change in their own communities.
Objectives
This workshop aims to collectively imagine our inner change-making practice by bringing together traditional ecological knowledges and utopian imagination. We will experiment with techniques not only to share experiences and combine ideas, but also to incorporate and support the inner work of all our participants.
We will also explore how can we better connect with ourselves and with each other aligning our disciplines with our traditions.
In October and November 2023, the Refugee Transition Network conducted two ‘Envision the Transition’ co-creative workshops with displaced people in the UK and Indonesia, involving over 30 participants.
Additionally, a ‘Training the Trainers’ workshop was held to build the capacity of eight displaced youth in Indonesia, who then became facilitators of the ‘Envision the Transition’ workshop.
These workshops were in collaboration with third-sector organisations: TERN in the UK and Archipelago Collective in Indonesia.
Envision the Transition: UK with TERN
In October 2023, in collaboration with TERN, we engaged five refugee women from Croatia, Chad, Syria, Ukraine, and Sudan in a one-day co-creative envisioning workshop with the Design School at London College of Communication.
The initiative served as a pilot for the Transition Living Lab, a model for training displaced people interested in becoming changemakers and agents of transition within their communities, utilising creative methods in a learning-by-doing approach.
‘Envision the Transition’ was conceived as the introductory session of a longer programme of activities that would serve as building blocks for the Transition Living Lab.
The workshop employed a methodology design that brought together elements of Transition Design, the Systemic Design Framework (extended double diamond), Utopia as Method, and Pluriversal Design.
The goal was to test assumptions and activities, receive feedback, and learn from the experiences of displaced people – identifying their main needs and drivers.
The workshop activities relied on Traditional Ecological Knowledge artefacts that participants brought, to develop utopian and pluriversal visions of the transitions they aimed to lead, understanding transition in terms of ecological and social justice.
Envision the Transition: training the trainers workshop
In November 2023, we collaborated with the Archipelago Collective in Jakarta, Indonesia, to prepare eight displaced youths to become facilitators of the two-day version of the ‘Envision the Transition’ workshop in Indonesia.
We introduced the trainers to the main key concepts and frameworks that informed the design of the workshop. Additionally, we covered skills in creative facilitation, group management, relational leadership, and a response-able pedagogy for change-making, encompassing its three principles:
Art thinking,
Meaningful engagement,
Ethical anticipation.
Envision the Transition: Indonesia with the Archipelago Collective
The third iteration of the Transition Living Lab method took place in Jakarta, Indonesia, involving 25 displaced youth as well as youth from the local communities.
The workshop was delivered by the core research team in Jakarta and co-facilitated by the eight displaced youth who were previously trained. This extended version of the workshop aimed to test assumptions and learn from the displaced youths’ experiences of living in Indonesia as a transit country.
The Refugee Transition Network will launch an online Student Companion Resource in the summer of 2024.
The resource will feature 18 good practice cases, including 10 by academics and practitioners, as well as student projects from four higher education institutions across Indonesia and the UK. It will be available in two languages: English and Bahasa. The aim is to share collaborative creative methods for engaging vulnerable communities.
The Refugee Transition Network project includes a pedagogical component. We have found that, although academic journal articles and project reports are published across disciplines and sectors for a range of audiences, there is a lack of learning resources for students and practitioners focused on careful and collaborative creative methods to meaningfully engage vulnerable communities.
In response, we are currently developing this online Student Companion Resource that compiles a range of good practice cases and lessons from academics and practitioners working with communities to co-create solutions for complex problems.
The Student Companion Resource will highlight eighteen short, good practice cases focusing on creative methods for community engagement. Ten of these cases are produced by academics and practitioners, and ten are postgraduate student projects that responded to the Transition Living Lab for displaced youth.
This resource will be published in English and Bahasa for postgraduate students and early career researchers.
On 26 September 2023, the Refugee Transition Network hosted the Pluriversal Borderlands roundtable, featuring 12 international presenters from the UK, Spain, Canada, the US, Australia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The event gathered 30 organisational representatives from the third and public sectors.
Discussions focused on the applicability of the Transition Design framework and methods for engaging vulnerable communities. The roundtable was highlighted by insights from the originators of Transition Design, Professor Terry Irwin from the School of Design and Director of the Transition Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies and Research Director at the Design Innovation Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney.
The discussions covered topics ranging from co-design and place-making with vulnerable urban communities to global systems change for displaced populations.
Approximately 30 representatives from various organisations attended the roundtable. Professors Irwin and Tonkinwise provided reflections and responses to both presenters and audience members, discussing the applicability and value of the Transition Design framework in practices involving displaced people and urban refugee management.
Transition Design as an emerging framework proposes collaborative design-led practices as a vehicle to create new narratives and approaches needed to address complex (‘wicked’) problems and transitions towards more sustainable futures.It has been developed and used with Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems (TEK) found in indigenous and local communities to re-design visions of their own development and systemic change. However, there is little evidence of its application in the context of forced displaced populations.
Our interest was to explore how transition design informs co-creating processes of new, much needed, narratives about urban refugee management, that would support a shift from the focus of “what refugees lack” towards “what refugees bring”.
Project Objectives
To create the Refugee Transition Network (RTN) with relevant academic and non-academic partners, such as researchers, stakeholders, practitioners, observers, and refugee-led organisations. Through the network, we intend to further reinforce relations, create memorandum of understanding, and assemble a steering group with relevant partners for future research projects.
To gather cases of good practice and successful methods in the use of Transition Design and the ‘City as Commons’ in the context of urban refugee management to create a bilingual (English and Bahasa) teaching resource.
To gather initial insights from creative workshops applying the Transition Design framework with practitioners and communities of refugees, in the UK and Indonesia.
Project Activites
Our work was presented at the The 20th International Association for the Study of Forced Migration Conference (IASFM20) at Yogyakarta,2025 where we chaired a the track “Creative and Designerly Methods”.
Upcoming: Refugee Transition Network is releasing a pedagogical methods book entitled Pluriversal Ways of Knowing: A Methods Book: Creatives ways to make communities for transition, to be published in 2025.
A Methodological approach to incorporate traditional ecological knowledges (TEK) in supporting community-led participatory government for disaster preparedness and resilience
Value Mapping for the Pluriverse
Lead by: Malé Luján Escalante, Chris Mortimer
Project Partners
Resilience Development Initiative – Indonesia Padjaran University, Bandung-Indonesia Universiti Sains Malaysia : Computer Science Department, Penang, Malaysia, Thammasat University: Urban Research Unit, Bangkok,Thailand National Institute of Geological Sciences, University of the Philippines Lancaster University, UK
Value Mapping for the Pluriverse is a tool to support participatory, cross-sector, cross-disciplinary collaboration in integrating TEK into strategies and policymaking for Public Protection Disaster Relief (PPDR) agencies and communities. The tool is a table-top exercise to map past emergency response actions with an added speculative exercise of integrating traditional and indigenous knowledges into a systemic map in order to identify leverage points of anticipatory actions.
We held a series of pilot workshops across 4 countries of Southeast Asia, which started a process of follow-up collaborations in research that still continues.
Value Mapping for the Pluriverse has been adopted in other projects related with other context beyond emergency preparedness and risk management. It was tested in the context of integrating TEK in Envision the Transition, a utopian imagination methodology to support the inner work of changemakers involved in transition actions. See More here LINK TO TRANSITION
Related Publications
Luján Escalante, M. A., & Mortimer, C. (2022, August). Value-Mapping Transitions into the Pluriverse: Design Notes on Participatory Methods, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Emergency Community Resilience within the Ring of Fire. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022-Volume 1 (pp. 50-62) available here
Lead by: Malé Luján Escalante, in collaboration with Supra Systems Studio and UAL:LCC Design School
The Future of Money Award has run for over a decade, exploring different facets of design, money, and speculative thinking. In 2022, it was hosted by Supra Systems Studio, in collaboration with the Design School at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
Every week seems to bring a new plan to reinvent money. These plans are hyped as revolutionary: they promise to liberate us from inequality, disrupt global finance, and bring down outdated institutions. These new monetary systems are designed from the ground up with fresh inbuilt logics to support their imagined use. Seductively shiny, they ask us not to look too closely at what their long-term implications are.
But the existing world of money isn’t going anywhere. State currency is still real. Bitcoin is still valued in US dollars, and folding paper cash still exists. Money is a public infrastructure and common language – it only has value because we have a shared sense of its meaning. If we want to change the world, we must start with what’s here right now, and think about how the system really works.
Instead of solving it by stacking new breakage on old, can creative practice challenge how existing financial systems work?
The Future of Money design competition invited people to use future-oriented creative methods and create a project which makes a change to an existing financial system, considering how this system operates, and why, and designing a modification to the system, its’ communication, or how it is distributed.
The Futre of Money 2022, Award Winners
Memoirs to keep
Yashwanthi Balamurugan Sumithra, Xi Zhang, Syeda Madiha Hussain, & Yini Zheng, MA Service Design, UAL:LCC
Failed Economies
Angela Rodríguez, Andrea Miranda, María Gabriela Sulbarán, Karl Gavidia, Jeiver Gavidia, Graphic Design, Universidad de los Andes, Venezuela.
Financial Transaction Markup Language
Martin Disley, Chris Elsden, Chris Speed, Institute for Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Fanoo Child Banking
Carmen Diaz, Zhiyu Lin, David Povilaika, & Julia Yu , BA (Hons)Design Management, UAL:LCC
Pay Delay
Omair Malik BA (Hons) User Experience, UAL:LCC.
Green Uni
Pam Chen, BA (Hons) Design for Art Direction, UAL:LCC
CBDCS for SDGS
Glenn Sæstad, MA Strategic Design, Oslo School of Architecture and Design
___, in Excess
Astrid Chung and Benedetta Scollo, BA (Hons) Design for Art Direction, UAL: LCC and Aldo Heubel, BA (Hons) Crossmedia Design at ArtEZ University of the Arts
Hidden Value in the Information Age
Haipeng Yan, Hanli Zhang, MA Data Visualization, UAL:LCC and MsC Data Science & AI for Creative Industry, UAL:CCI
Public Program
To complement the competition, we have curated a public online program of lectures and creative futures workshops,. Videos for the lectures are available in the links below. Attending the public program is not a requirement for submission, but it will help to situate your work within the design discussions.
If you’ve participated in the program, we’d love to hear your feedback about it here.
‘Financial Instruments’ – DMSTFCTN. In this lecture, DMSTFCTN will explore opaque financial practices and discuss their evolving artistic approaches to money and its systems. Video available here.
‘Selling Stories’ – Oliver Smith (DMSTFCTN) and Marion Lagedamont (UAL) This workshop explores the use of storytelling as a way to reframe our approaches to the future of money, revealing its infrastructures and hidden systems.
‘Counting Things That Money Doesn’t Count’ – Diana Finch, Bristol Pound, in conversation with Dr. Nigel Dodd (LSE) and Charlie Waterhouse (Extinction Rebellion) A conversation exploring the history and development of Bristol Pound and the role of communities in shaping the future of money. Video available here.
‘Dancing About Money’ – Alaistair Steele (UAL) and Dr. John Fass (UAL)What are the opportunities and pit-falls, for people and planet, of current and imminent changes in the forms money takes?
‘Participatory Futures’ – Laurie Smith, Head of Foresight Research (NESTA).As the world struggles with increased complexity and uncertainty, this lecture explores how NESTA uses contemporary methods which can allow us to collectively imagine alternative, democratic and inclusive futures. Video available here.
‘Money for Mars’ – Scott Smith (Changeist) & John Willshire (Smithery) Humans are on the edge of living in space full-time, but we have little recent concrete speculation about the new financial instruments and products that may emerge, especially considering how time, connection and needs change radically off-Earth. This workshop explores how to develop speculative financial products for New Space economies.
‘Indigenous Futures’ – Felipe ViverosThis lecture will explore some of the key ideas and guiding principles behind global projects exploring new economic paradigms, from UBI to gross national happiness in Bhutan, presenting a general overview of how these new policies are working on the ground. Video available here.
‘Failed Economies’ – University of Andes ULA & IsITEthical? ExchangeThis workshopexplores the realities of being a creative in a country where money has failed.
‘Reimagining the purpose of tax for a climate and biological emergency’ – Becky Miller This lecture introducing a speculative tax system in order to investigate the use of design artefacts in facilitating conversations with financial and climate futures. Video available here.
“When Money Talks Back” – Ruben Pater (Untold Stories)This workshop explores of the power dynamics behind the visual representations of money in many of its forms, and an invitation to use graphic design to open a line of communication allowing these representations of money to “talk back”.
