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The Transition Design Framework provides a logic for bringing together the transdisciplinary knowledge, skillsets and practices relevant to understanding, seeding and catalyzing systems level change. It is comprised of four key mutually reinforcing and co-evolving areas of practices, knowledge and skill sets relevant to understanding, seeding and catalyzing systems-level change: 

Vision: because we need to have clear visions of what we want to transition toward  

Theories of Change: because we need a variety of theories and methodologies that explain the dynamics of change within complex systems  

Mindset and Posture: because we will need to develop postures of open, collaboration and self-reflection in order to undertake this work 

New Ways of Designing: which will arise out of the previous three areas 

If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons:

Offering: Initiating Moves; any physical or vocal action - 

Endowing: Naming or giving a quality to something not yet predicated in the scene - 

Justifying: Naming or giving a quality to something already in the scene, that requires naming or qualification - 

Extending: Stopping the narrative to focus, explore and extend upon one aspect of the scene, or to add detail to it - 

Advancing: The opposite of Extending: moving the narrative on to the next step - 

Shelving & Reincorporating: Memorising narrative elements and Offers and bringing them back into the scene later - 

Accepting: Responding Moves that acknowledge, validate or extend upon other’s Offers - 

Blocking: Negating or refusing an Offer, or undermining the basis of an Offer without accepting any of its assumptions - 

It’s a complete set of cover songs of The Beatles’ immortal album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” but every lyric has been modified to tell the story of “Star Wars Episode IV” in order. To be clear, the first song tells the story of Princess Leia starship absconding with the stolen plans; then each subsequent song continues to recount subsequent parts of the movie, ending with the final song narrating the destruction of the Death Star—and it all matches the track order of The Beatles’ original album. Here are the first few songs, matched to clips from the movie with the lyrics subtitled, to give you a sense of how complete is the execution of this crazy idea. You can see the rest of them on this YouTube page.

Back in the late 1970s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?

As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design.

Good design is innovative

Good design makes a product useful

Good design is aesthetic

Good design makes a product understandable

Good design is unobtrusive

Good design is honest

Good design is long-lasting

Good design is thorough down to the last detail

Good design is environmentally-friendly

Good design is as little design as possible

We started with a tree. An interactive installation at the ICA that allowed us to play with a number of different ideas that we had been discussing as part of a research project called Feed at our first agency Digit.

It was live in the gallery for a week and almost as soon as it switched it on strange things started to happen. By completely hiding the technology behind our exhibit with very natural looking objects visitors were immediately intrigued and comforted, but unfortunately no one dared to step onto the grass. 

After solving this problem the next behaviour pattern began to emerge. There were those who embraced the moment and stepped forward to interact and those who point blank refused to do anything more than watch from a distance.  

We have coined these behaviours ‘the Actor’ and ‘the Spectator’, and even though many spectators become actors, once they have learnt the rules and warmed to the opportunity by watching others, many prefer not to. 

The Actor and Spectator behaviour pattern repeats itself everywhere in public and has become a critical part of how we think about designing exhibits on which I will provide a little more detail shortly.