Already in Transition: Empirical Re-scriptions of Everyday Life in Transition Design

Transition Design often positions everyday life as the context in which sustainable futures must be enacted. This framing risks treating current everyday life as depleted, homogenized, and in need of repair. This paper asks what transitional potentials become perceptible when everyday life is studied instead as already transitional. Through ethnographic engagements with nine Danish middle-class households living in single-family houses, the paper analyzes how the households hang together, organize food provisioning and eating, and move to and from their homes. The analyses show everyday life as differentiated, locally-global, and infrastructurally entangled. Rather than offering a general model of household transition, the paper develops three empirical-analytical strategies for Transition Design: contrasting, diversifying, and tracing. The paper argues that engaging in Transition Design requires critical proximity to everyday worlds, allowing designers to recognize, care for, and understand openings and closures already present in everyday householding practices.