History → Empathy → Innovation (3): Transcending Paradigms

9 min readAug 17, 2021

Transition(ing) design with historical empathy into meaningful innovation 2021→

In the summer of 2020, I watched a talk about Transition Design, a design framework for wicked problems given by Professor Terry Irwin from Carnegie Mellon University.

Current design paradigms like “human-centered design” can be used to help organizations become more intuitive to people in their approaches and products.

However, the challenges we face today are not just centered on humans. They are extremely complex systems challenges. Climate change, inequality, and health to name a few are extremely complex and nonlinear.

Transition design is a start to bridge this gap between complex systems challenges, history, and design.

Transition Design: Design for Systems-Level Change

“Transition Design is a transdisciplinary approach aimed at addressing the many ‘wicked’ problems confronting 21st century societies: climate change, forced migration, political and social polarization, global pandemics, lack of access to affordable housing/healthcare/education and many others. These problems are interconnected, interdependent and always manifest in place and culture-specific ways. Transition Design argues that new knowledge and skill-sets are required to address these problems, and that their resolution is a strategy for igniting positive, systems-level change and societal transitions toward more sustainable, equitable and desirable long-term futures.”

(The following are quotes and parts from Professor Irwin’s talk.)

“Transition design attempts to integrate the past, present, and future into the problem frame. It looks at the historical evolution of the problem, its manifestation in the present at multiple levels of scale, and the long vision of the future in which the problem has been resolved”

Transition Design looks like:

A shared understanding of the problem and the stakeholders affected by it
Situating the problem at a radically large Spatio-temporal context (levels of scale + time)
Developing long-term visions that act as a magnet and roadmap (guides interventions in the present/near-term)

Prof. Irwin explains that a Multi-level-Perspective (MLP) framework for Transition Design can be used for “understanding how change happens over time in socio-technical systems”.

There are 3 key levels in the MLP framework. Prof. Irwin used this to show how an event, in this example Covid 19, at the Landscape level (large events, collective beliefs, and social norms) can impact and fracture the Regime level (networks communities and groups bound by norms and rules “the status quo”) below. These can be overtime or appear to be random like nonlinear dynamics with impacts all over a system. Below the regime level is the Niche level (Small experiments and innovations or disruptions that challenge the Regime).

Sudden or dynamic changing events at the landscape level like Covid-19 or the 2008 financial crisis open up innovation at the Niche level for the benefit if you understand the system’s dynamics.

Prof. Irwin in the rest of the talk showcased her research project on Covid-19 that involved the MLP framework and systems maps done in 2 phases.

Phase 1 was mapping Covid-19 at 5 different levels: infrastructure (science and tech), social, environmental, economic, and political to understand interconnections and systems dynamics

Does any of this sound familiar? Re: In the end our professor highlighted “long term social and economic consequences”

Coincidence? … This is a general paradigm known as “Levels of analysis” in the social sciences - In this case, it’s known as the STEEP (Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political) framework

Phase 2 is where things get interesting, and it’s mapping the systems’ transition in the past* using MLP to “trace the historic* origins of root issues and insights” (Irwin)

“This creates a radically large Spatio-temporal problem context that includes the past, present, and future”

“How the problem evolved in the past can deepen our understanding and response to the problem in the present”, and their resulting map from Phase 2 is 18–22 feet long.

They take narratives* and insights on the past to help “understand the problem in the present”.

For example issues of 18th-century slavery, a broken US health care system, and deforestation all have some relation to the current impacts of Covid.

Systems produce their own patterns of behavior over time (recall patterns of history) - All “systems are always in transition”, and we only understand the scale of their impacts “in hindsight we call it history”

“Transition design research aims to produce a deeper level understanding of a problem or system and its roots + connections and combined with long-term visioning undertaken by stakeholders themselves the hypothesis is it can open up new and effective ways of problem-solving.”

Prof. Irwin says there are “No silver bullets” and that “it takes every solution you can possibly think of if well considered implemented across multiple levels of scale and over multiple arcs of time to begin to resolve a complex problem and catalyze systems-level change”.

We have to find the leverage points in the systems that don’t work for us, and burn them down to the ground (Irwin)

Donella Meadows’s piece “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” gives us a framework for identifying 12 said leverage points for systems change.

One in particular:

Our ability to transcend paradigms is what liberates us from the systems that don’t work for us or the ones we don’t want to be limited to. Something to think about when we need to overcome or break any problems, challenges, and obstacles.

Liberation from Systems — the ability to transcend paradigms — Flexibility is paramount

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

For an in depth look at transition design

Innovations for piecing together better pictures of history

It’s very telling that we know a lot more about humanity’s and the universe’s past today more than at any point of time in history. Thought by ending with some relevant innovations at different levels taking a levels of analysis and STEEP framework approach.

Innovation uncovers and makes history at the same time.

“Self-referential Innovation”

Earth Level: LIDAR

LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has applications in archaeology. LIDAR can give us 3D representations of archaeological sites or places of interest. This helps archaeologists get a sense of what different past people’s lives may have looked like and the interaction between people and their environments. This is relevant considering the potential of imaging and sensing in environmental issues like deforestation. Researchers can assess the biodiversity of a forest for example through the use of LIDAR.

Human Level: DNA Technology

The ‘Black Panther’ Revolution: “When Boseman got the role of Black Panther, one of the first things he did was ask his father to take a DNA test. He wanted to know more about his roots. “AfricanAncestry.com,” he says. “They get specific about what ethnic group you come from, as opposed to just what country.” (For the record: Yoruba from Nigeria, Limba and Mende from Sierra Leone, and Jola from Guinea-Bissau.) He says he’s also traced his American lineage as far back as he could. “To go any farther,” he says with a wry smile, “I’d have to go to property records.””

New technologies in the study of genetics, can also be used as a tool to study human history. More specifically how humans evolved and may have perhaps experienced the world in the past. This has implications on how people experience the world today and can be used to address challenges across fields. The innovation here is in DNA sequencing for understanding genetics from a historical perspective.

DNA research may provide insights into how human populations moved throughout the globe, how historic/evolutionary changes from a genetic standpoint may have occurred, and how culture came to be and evolved in various parts of the globe.

Cultural/Information Level: Symbolic Thought

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms”

A quote from the poet Muriel Rukeyzer’s book “The speed of darkness.”

Why stories? Because they combine history and context, critical events and results, both good and bad, expected and unexpected all linked through causal explanations. Stories emphasize that life is an interconnected system. (Don Norman)

Simulation much?

There are a lot of technologies at this level. I don’t even have to say the names of these technologies at the cultural/information level and you know what I’m talking about (Machine Learning/Mixed Reality/3D Printing etc).

Instead, here I wanted to talk about an innovation that led to our history in the first place. This is sort of a cop-out, but I thought nonetheless a good way to create an all-encompassing ending.

Symbolic thought is essential to our ability to understand and connect with each other’s stories through language. Its central idea is our ability to imbue abstractions like symbols with meaning.

Symbolic thought underlies collective learning, the human ability to accumulate information and ideas over generations. It’s why we don’t reinvent the wheel. Collective learning is key to our ability to innovate, create and imagine. It is what we use to create and reflect upon our history. We can be hopeful if we can harness innovations at each of these levels not in silos but an interconnected nature.

There’s one story and idea I’d like to end with here of a symbol, an Asterism: The Big Dipper. The Big Dipper points directly to the north star, Polaris. In a way the direction to an image of what many of us think about when we hear climate change. The polar ice caps melting and our friends polar bears losing their homes. Ursa Major is a bear.

The actual folktale story associated with the Big Dipper is: Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd. The “Drinkin’ Gourd” is a reference to the Big Dipper that enslaved people from the south used to direct themselves to the north for freedom.

Emphasizing the interconnectedness of Climate Change and Inequality. It’s an interesting parallel and underscores related north stars like the story of our history in struggles against injustices and the path for hope, progress, and justice.

Earth and humanity act in complex and nonlinear ways, but history can be used as the heuristic to understand how and more importantly why.

Alright, this sums it up well:

History → Empathy → Innovation, a framework for progress, justice, and healing in a complex world.