Design in Transition—Workshop

Design is often understood as a process that produces solutions or answers to our problems. But in a world saturated with complexity, constant change, and in-between situations, perhaps today we can practice design as a way of accompanying and conversing with a situation in order to understand it more deeply.

Through engaging with this process, we may discover possibilities beyond “solutions”—possibilities we did not previously recognize:

Design can ask questions instead of solving problems;

it can pause a situation rather than resolve it;

it can propose alternative framings or perspectives;

and it can participate in creating new meanings, new worldviews, and even new worlds.

In this workshop, we focused on a single change or in-between situation in our personal lives—perhaps a shift in living arrangements, a transition in work, or a change in a friendship.

We tried to understand our current relationship with that situation, and through a conversation with everyday objects, we explored other dimensions of the transition that we might not have noticed before.

We tried to set static things into motion, to cast the near into distant, and to shift relationships between things; so that room could be made for seeing and discovering possibilities beyond those we were already familiar with.

We had agreed from the beginning not to leave the workshop with a polished, definitive answer.

Instead, we left with questions—questions that could stay with us through our transitions and help us move beyond rigid, fixed images, toward imagining new possibilities for living with our in-between states.