Category: Transition Living Lab – Workshops

  • SOLAR – Strengthening Opportunities for Learning and Actualisation for Rough Sleepers

    SOLAR – Strengthening Opportunities for Learning and Actualisation for Rough Sleepers

     Chung Yin Rachel Leung, UAL:LCC MA Service Design

    I am always passionate about designing for and with vulnerable or marginalized groups. I am grateful for the opportunity with the Transition Living Lab to co-create a training program for the displaced people. It has been an inspiring journey for me to explore how service design approaches complex social needs through the Systemic Design Framework. Designing with care for vulnerable groups with appropriate topic, language and materials has been an invaluable reflection on the role of service design, and its strengths and limitations.

    This experience has fueled me to embark on my final major project with the Ealing Council addressing the challenges faced by rough sleepers with No Recourse Public Funds around Havelock Estate in Southall. The project aims to explore upskilling through volunteering opportunities for rough sleepers so that they can work on their personal development and mitigate the challenges they are facing. The service idea is going to be tested with Hope for Southall Street Homeless and the Bixley Community Garden Southall. I anticipate the idea can be transferred to newly accommodated individuals or people with addiction who need support in establishing healthy routine. A handbook on how service designers can approach complex social needs will also be delivered.

    Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelgooda/

  • Shaping Emplace Youth Initiative

    Shaping Emplace Youth Initiative

    Ali Reza Yawari, Muna Baroud, Emplace, Indonesia

    The Transition Living Lab – Design framework has been instrumental in shaping Emplace Youth Initiative’s approach to youth empowerment and refugee integration. Through our co-facilitation involvement with the Refugee Transition Network team and partner institutions in 2023, we were introduced to the Transition Design framework, which focuses on shifting mindsets and identifying intervention points within systems over time.

    Together with our partner institutions, we applied this framework through hands-on workshops recently in 2024. We have created spaces where refugee youth are encouraged to envision and design systems of environmental justice, rooted in their cultural values and traditional knowledge. These workshops have been transformative, not only equipping participants with creative and designerly competencies but also boosting their self-confidence and sense of belonging. Many attendees including members of Emplace reported positive feedback in feeling reconnected to their sense of self and purpose, breaking out of isolation, and fostering meaningful friendships through this workshop.

    The Transition Living Lab model, with its focus on experiential learning and co-design, has allowed participants to see themselves as agents of change, capable of envisioning new futures and leading systemic transformations. By shifting the narrative from a deficit-based view to a strength-based approach, our workshop encouraged and highlighted the invaluable contributions that displaced youth bring to their communities. This collaborative environment deepened their understanding of local challenges as well as nurtured leadership and innovation that can empower them to shape their own futures.

    Ali Reza Yawari – Emplace Co-Founder and Executive Director
    Muna Baroud: Emplace Co-Founder and Programme Coordinator

    Link to Emplace LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emplace-initiative/

  • Decolonizing Knowledge

    Decolonizing Knowledge

    Sakshi Mathur, UAL:LCC MA Service Design

    Working on Transition Living Lab for me was an exploration in Pluriversal Design. The project we worked on demanded an acceptance of many worlds, realities, ways of being and knowing to be taken into consideration as a core thought upon which the foundation for our workshops were laid.

    For me this way of thought became the rabbit hole that is now shaping my understanding and perception of the world around me; the past present and future of it. Facilitating the Dance for pluriverse workshop where we used dance to express the ethos of a community, was one of the many cascading moments that began re-shaping my way of knowing and knowledge, beyond my frustrations with the colonized worldview I grew up with.

    The thought lead me to unravelling the influence colonization (and therefore universalisation) had had on knowledge from the colonized (and other universalized) regions. The theory of pluriversality defined my exploration of decolonial thought within the context of knowledge, more specifically traditional ecological knowledge for my MA Service Design, Final Major project at UAL.

    My methodology was based on recognition, realisation and contextualisation as steps towards decolonization. My approach has involved questioning my definition of decolonisation, what is accepted as knowledge, the ways of communicating knowledge across cultures and generations, and lastly the idea of knowledge ownership through the lens of analysing language and terminologies.

    To understand and express the effects if colonisation on traditional ecological knowledge, I am focusing on a small community of honey collector from the ecological rich and volatile Bali Island in the Sundarbans (The largest mangrove forest in the world). The cultural practices in harmony with their environment and colonial influence made them the ideal subculture to help navigate the complex structure of their knowledge development, its communication, and interpretation by them as well as the universalized researchers.

    Transition Living Lab was my first learning to approaching communities through pluriversal thinking, and it has now made pluriversal living my definition of decolonial action.

  • Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) and Community Leadership

    Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) and Community Leadership

    Chris Mortimer, Management School, Lancaster University

    Dr Chris Mortimer, is an experienced academic leader teaching and researching in the Management School of Lancaster University with a history of working in the higher education industry in the UK and in China. Her specialist teaching areas are Organisational Behaviour within the international arena.
    This workshop will explore the role of transition design in understanding the complex relationships between individual actors, the systems in which they are located as an innovative response to social exclusion as social innovation.

  • Experiments in Utopia as Method

    Experiments in Utopia as Method

    Transition Lab Workshops

    Viv Kuh, Responsible Innovation, University of Bristol

    Artist/Celebrant Bec Gee and Lecturer/Creative Futurist Viv Kuh have been working together on utopian futuring methodologies since 2022, supporting people to collectively imagine and critically engage with utopian futures as a means of reflecting on contemporary practice and values. Their work is inspired by Ruth Levitas’ (2013)Utopia as Method and was initially developed to support scientists and engineers to imagine the futures their research may create, but has since found resonance with researchers, artists, designerss and practitioners from a range of other contexts. 

    Vivienne Kuh and Bec Gee developed the Narrative Futuring method to help scientists and engineers “feel the futures” their research is helping to create. Using utopian envisioning as method, Narrative Futuring helps us imagine the people, places and emotions that may exist one day as a result of the pioneering technologies being developed right now.

    In this workshop, participants will learn about the Narrative Futuring method and use it to create some utopian visions for our plural futures with some of the emerging AI systems in the present day. Narrative Futuring is quick, dirty and iterative, enabling practitioners to swiftly generate multiple possible futures within which we can all play and explore, anticipating the joys and perils in the imaginaries of our shared techno-moral futures.