Design for transdisciplinary sustainability

Transdisciplinary research can be identified as a “label” denoting “collaborative research and problem solving that cross both disciplinary boundaries and sectors of society” (Bruun et al., 2005, p. 31). In a transdisciplinary process, expert and lay knowledge and perceptions merge and form a new type of transcendent understanding around a given problem context and system of interest. The sources of knowledge in transdisciplinarity are thus heterogeneous, deriving from various fields such as the natural sciences, social sciences, lay actors, and various sectors.

In summary, expanding the meaning-making for transdisciplinarity calls for expansion amongst the three general dimensions, knowledge-making, decision-making, and awareness-making. Furthermore, within these domains of action, common issues call for focus. These are 1) the need for opening processes for

networking, sharing, and collaboration; 2) increasing the value sensitivity in such participative processes; 3) managing and facilitating them in a transparent manner (in relation to ownership and power); and 4) inducing dialogues supported with design artifacts (e.g., tools and instruments, concepts and language, rules and roles).

Transdisciplinary design dialogues, implemented through various project collaborations open to the wider public, can help to introduce more qualitative considerations regarding “whole-system health, happiness, well-being, meaning, and quality of life” (Wahl & Baxter, 2008, p. 83) into decision-making and design processes. Collaboration in interprofessional and transdisciplinary design projects (see Blunden, 2009, 2010) can offer a context to mediate on the concepts of sustainability with various experts and other participants. To promote such inquiry, however, the focus in design action must be drawn to activities that facilitate a wider exchange of perspectives and thought, being able also to induce transformations with the general public.

Designing transdisciplinary platforms for sustainability

One crucial step in any action for transformative sustainability is to create platforms to support and expand collaboration across expert fields, but also across other interest groups and interested citizens to induce transformation (see Figure 10). These may be projects or other collaborative constellations of work that connect with specific stakeholder contexts and communities.

Figure 10. Creating platforms for transdisciplinary meaning-making and action.

Source: Author

Project-specific learning can be analyzed on “dramatically different levels of duration” (Ylirisku, 2013, p. 83) but also with a focus on very different units of analysis. According to Blunden (2010), projects can be perceived as “aggregates of artifact-mediated actions, which are always directed or mediated by relations to

other people” (p. 10). As a result, Blunden (2009, 2010) proposes that we join two concepts — project and collaboration (they are “in any case mutually constitutive”) — as a “new unit of analysis,” to form the new theory on activity (Blunden, 2010, p. 10). These two concepts also emphasize shared premises and sets for framing (see Bateson, 1972). These two aspects become the two main aspects to consider in developing transdisciplinary activities in general.

In inter- and transdisciplinary learning, the important components are collected from the participating actors. By identifying collaborative interests and finding the shared tools and concepts, the collaboration can proceed. The problem of such a reduction, however, is that it may fail to identify valuable information or aspects of the process. As a result, research and action on transdisciplinarity calls for

expansive meaning-making and open collaboration. These features help it to transcend from the modernist setting and stagnated institutional, conceptual (i.e., models) or disciplinary structures and processes that resist transformation.

In the context of sustainability — to challenge its modernist contradictions — the role of design should aim higher, toward changes in “worldview, intention, and lifestyle, facilitated by dialogue and education” (Wahl & Baxter, 2008, p. 80). For the still mainstream modern consumer design in which meanings of things are hidden in rational and scientific or desirable and fashionable representations that prove to be shallow or even contradictory at closer inspection, the introduction of postmodern fluidity — if accompanied by critical thinking — adds pressure to extend the mediation in each dimension of design reasoning, to embrace the contemporary networked reality. If we perceive design action involving the interplay between “things and words, distinction and recognition, sharing and innovating” and “object and context” (A.Telier, 2013, p. 76), then its focus must be on existing human practices. From this viewpoint, supporting such an approach to design action, creation is where “participants can access, modify, align, and navigate the constituents of an object, and when needed, expand and contract it” (A.Telier, 2013, p. 76), and at the same time share existing and constitute new knowledge.

In summary, the aim of sustainable design should be to create the supportive approaches, strategies, methodologies, and contexts that enable better awareness, more informed collaboration, and more reflective interaction, with a wide public audience and several stakeholder groups, co-aligned under a new direction. This is where design action, if critically approached, can contribute. Overall, design education and practice seem to offer several invaluable components to both interprofessional work and sustainable transformation. However, questions have been raised on how well sustainable development addresses the underpinning conflicts of modernity (see, for example, Wironen, 2007) in approaching development and human progress. Similar voices have been raised to address design education as a whole (see, for example, Michl, 2014). To understand what might be a more sustainable approach to education and development, we must look into what constitutes education for sustainability. This moves the focus on contemporary design education and the setting of its contents.

2.3. Learning Design for Transdisciplinary