Transition Designing as Ontological Redirection: Key Principles for Transition-Oriented Futuring

Designing for transitions involves envisioning more sustainable futures towards which designed interventions create ontological shifts towards new ways of being. This paper presents a reading of ontological design in the context of Transition Design, and emphasises key dimensions of practice to consider when imagining futures to inform transition – (im)materiality, directionality, intentionality, temporality, contextuality, pluriversality and relationality. Positioning transition-oriented futuring as a critical futures practice highlights its goals of deconstructing defutural ontologies and reconstructing them in ways that bring forth more sustainable forms of living. Ontological design presents an underlooked, but highly relevant conceptualisation of design to inform transition – revealing design’s profound role in world-shaping and future-making. By engaging with its concepts in transition-oriented futuring, this paper seeks to put ontological design further into conversation within the growing field of design futures, which has overlooked the possible contributions of design theory in how we approach futuring. Recognising the structured nature of unsustainability, ontological design highlights Transition Design as the redirection of our current systems and practices towards configurations that better enable the imagining and materialising of alternative futures.