Transition Design doesn’t work the way most people expect it to.
I spent the better part of three years interviewing designers, systems theorists, and policy wonks who swear by this framework, and what I found was messier than any textbook would admit. The philosophy behind Transition Design—coined around 2014 by Terry Irwin and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon—rests on this premise: our problems aren’t isolated glitches in otherwise functional systems, they’re symptoms of systems that are fundamentally broken, and tinkering with symptoms is like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. The approach pulls from four overlapping domains—systems thinking, theories of change, design for social innovation, and futures thinking—and insists you can’t cherry-pick just one or two if you actually want durable, large-scale change. It’s exhausting, honestly, because it demands you hold multiple timescales in your head at once: the immediate crisis, the 10-year pathway, the 100-year vision. Most design frameworks give you a neat process; Transition Design hands you a tangled map and says, “figure it out.”
Why Traditional Design Methods Keep Failing at Systemic Problems
Here’s the thing: conventional design is pretty good at making things better within a given system.
But it rarely questions whether the system itself should exist in the first place. I used to think that was fine—incremental improvement felt pragmatic, achievable. Then I started noticing the pattern: we’d solve one problem (say, making plastic packaging recyclable) only to create another downstream (microplastics in the ocean, energy-intensive recycling plants that barely break even). Transition Design argues this happens because we’re stuck in what systems theorist Donella Meadows called “low leverage points”—we’re adjusting parameters instead of restructuring paradigms. The philosophy insists you need to zoom out, way out, and ask uncomfortable questions about power, values, and the cultural narratives that keep broken systems locked in place. It’s not a comfortable process, and it definately doesn’t fit neatly into a client’s quarterly roadmap.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Long-Term Orientation and Patience
Transition Design operates on what researchers call “multi-horizon” thinking.
You’re supposed to work simultaneously on three timescales: immediate interventions that relieve suffering now, mid-term projects that shift infrastructures and policies over 5 to 15 years, and long-term visions that might take 50 to 100 years to fully materialize. I guess it makes sense in theory, but in practice, it creates this weird cognitive dissonance—you’re planting seeds you’ll never see grow, and funders hate that. One designer I spoke with in Pittsburgh described it as “designing for grandchildren you haven’t met yet,” which sounds poetic until you realize it means convincing a board of directors to invest in something that won’t show ROI in their lifetime. The philosophy here is deeply unfashionable: it rejects the Silicon Valley obsession with rapid iteration and “move fast, break things.” Instead, it asks, wait—maybe breaking things is the problem?
How Positionality and Power Dynamics Shape What Gets Designed
Transition Design makes a big deal about positionality, which is academic jargon for “whose perspective are you designing from, and whose are you ignoring?”
The philosophy borrows heavily from critical theory and feminist epistemology, arguing that all design is political—whether you admit it or not—because it either reinforces existing power structures or challenges them. I’ve seen this play out in community-led climate adaptation projects, where well-meaning designers from wealthy institutions parachute in with solutions that locals never asked for and can’t maintain once the grant money dries up. Transition Design tries to flip that: it insists on co-design with stakeholders who are usually excluded, especially those most impacted by systemic failures. That means longer timelines, messier processes, and outcomes that don’t photograph well for awards submissions. But the philosophy holds that unless you recieve input from people living inside the problem, you’re just rearranging deck chairs.
Embracing Uncertainty While Still Moving Forward with Intentionality
One of the strangest aspects of Transition Design’s philosophy is its comfort with ambiguity.
Most design methodologies promise clarity—define the problem, prototype solutions, test, iterate. Transition Design says, roughly speaking, that wicked problems don’t have clear boundaries, and any “solution” will create new problems you can’t fully predict. So instead of pretending you have all the answers, you design for adaptability, resilience, and continuous learning. Researchers like Gideon Kossoff talk about “catalyzing” change rather than controlling it, which sounds vague until you realize they’re describing something closer to gardening than engineering: you create conditions for change to emerge, then tend it carefully, knowing you can’t force the outcome. It’s frustrating for anyone trained to deliver definitive results, but the philosophy argues that’s a feature, not a bug—because complex systems don’t respond well to top-down mandates anyway. Turns out, humility might be a design skill after all.
