This document discusses strategies for transition design and making sense of systems and futures. It introduces concepts like "feeling around corners" to understand potential futures and make decisions with limited information. Transition design requires understanding how interventions may unfold over time and preparing for various outcomes, both ideal and unexpected. The document suggests approaches like backcasting, scenario planning, and considering what interventions would look and feel like if going well, badly, or failing to help navigate uncertainty. The goal is to equip designers to make ethical decisions that create quality futures and to retrospectively and prospectively make sense of their actions and future implications.

1. Staging Systems to Feel Round the
Corners of Transition Design
Joshua Bloom
PhD Candidate
Carnegie Mellon University
!
Cameron Tonkinwise
Director of Design Studies
Carnegie Mellon University

2. Designing is taking
decisions based on
too little information
-Joep Frens

3. Design is making sense of
systems (in futures)
Design is making sense of things (to others)
!
- Krippendorff

4. !
Malafouris, Lambros; Renfrew, Colin (2013-07-12). How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement

5. If designers think
in terms of ‘form’ at
all it is in relation to
static object(ives).
-Terry Irwin

6. -Terry Irwin

7. @cyetain
Pragmatic and
Epistemic Action
DAVID KIRSH AND PAUL MAGLIO 94
Goals

8. Designers have privileged access to niche
temporarily materialized potential futures, as
such they need to be equipped to not only
make effective decisions about quality of life,
but also be aware of the moral and ethical
consequences of instantiating these futures in
the wider world.
!
Understanding Of Embodied Future Practices
!
This is what we mean by Feeling Around Corners

9. Ideal Future
Forecasting
Current
State
Ideal
Future
State
Gap

10. A B1
B2
Choice/Options

11. Backcasting
Now Next

12. Inertia
(forces)
A1
B
A2Á
Gap

13. Scenario
Planning
A
B1
B2
B3
Wide

14. Scanning
AÁ
B1
B2
B3

16. Now Next

17. Already Now Next
Dispositional
(constructive)

18. Dispositional
(physics)
Always Already Now

19. Undesigned
Transition
Now Next
Transition

20. Transitional
Now Next
Not Yet

21. Past Present Future
How do I make sense of
the world so that I can act
in it?
How do I make sense of the
actions I have taken in the
world?
What would make sense in
the world created by my
actions?
Posthoc Rationalization Mindfulness/Dispostionality
Retrospective Coherence Sense Making Prospective Coherence
Feeling Around Corners

22. Coherence
Always Already Now Next Not Yet
Dispositional Prospective
Retrospective Coherence
How do I make sense of
Now based in the past
Prospective Coherence
What will I need to make
sense of in a future?

23. Catastrophic
Safe
Observable Unseen Unknowable
Waste
Around
Corners
Proactionary
Make it
and See
Precautionary
Make it Safe
then See
Risk/Outcomes
Black Swans

24. What would it look like, feel like if
this intervention was going well?
!
(how would we amplify that?)

25. What would it look like, feel like if
this intervention was going bad?
!
(how would we dampen that?)

26. What would it look like, feel like
if this intervention was failing?
!
(how would we recover from that?)

27. Thank You
Joshua Bloom
jabe@cmu.edu
@cyetain
PhD Candidate
Carnegie Mellon University
!
Cameron Tonkinwise
Director of Design Studies
Carnegie Mellon University