Redirective Tactics for Designing Transitions: A Typology of Sustainable Future-Making Pathways

Against the backdrop of a global socio-ecological crisis, transition design seeks to envision and realize more desirable future worlds. Framing transition design as a redirective practice , this article draws on the concepts of defuturing and ontological design to present a typology of design tactics. These tactics are organized within a proposed framework for sustainable future-making that outlines diverse approaches to imagining and designing for transitions. The seven tactics—refusal, elimination, revival, amplification, maintenance, modification, and invention—serve as both a provocation and a heuristic, bringing coherence to multiple pathways toward more sustainable futures. Together they emphasize the need to address the ontological inertia and directionality of what has already been designed and continues to defuture. To support redirective future-making in practice, the framework offers creative prompts for envisioning alternative futures and strategic guidance for realizing them. • Transition design engages in future-making by envisioning sustainable futures and realizing change toward them. • Drawing on the concepts of defuturing, ontological design, and redirective practice, the article highlights that transition design must address latent agency and inertia of what has already been designed. • A framework of redirective design tactics is proposed to inform future-making practices in transition design. • The tactics serve as both creative prompts for imagining alternative futures and strategic approaches for realizing them. • The framework functions as both a provocation—to recognize and engage diverse, entangled forms of future-making—and a heuristic through which transitions can be navigated.