Terry Irwin
IxDD 2020: North America
In this talk, Terry Irwin will introduce Transition Design, a transdisciplinary approach for addressing the complex, wicked problems facing us in the 21st century. Wicked problems are systems problems and include things like climate change, terrorism, forced migration, poverty, racism, police brutality AND pandemics like COVID-19. These problems are interconnected, interdependent, exist at multiple levels of scale, and ALWAYS manifest in place and culture-specific ways. Transition Design also argues that entire organizations, communities and societies need to transition toward more equitable, sustainable and desirable long-term futures and that wicked problems are barriers to these transitions. The emerging Transition Design approach frames wicked problems in radically large systems contexts that include the past (how the problem evolved), the present (how the problem is manifesting at different levels of scale) and the future (in which the problem has been resolved). To demonstrate the approach, Terry will discuss a recent hypothetical research project to map the spread of and response to COVID-19 in the U.S. through the lens of Transition Design. The project includes a “systems” map of COVID-19 in 5 key areas (political/governance issues; business/economic issues; infrastructure/technology/science issues; social issues; environmental issues) and a second map showing the historic evolution of the problem. These two maps, when combined with a third phase of long-term visioning, create a radically large problem context that reveals new insights and opportunities for developing “ecologies of systems interventions” that solve for multiple issues and problems simultaneously.
