Transition Design — HUMETAV: Tackling down wicked problems for a Museum of Natural Sciences
Case Study [Code: TC-B003] by Jorge Sanabria-Z
“We will never be truly healthy, satisfied, or fulfilled if we live apart and alienated from the environment from which we evolved.”
― Stephen R. Kellert
It is becoming increasingly complex to counteract environmental problems' causes and consequences. Tracking down the starting points of poverty in a region or documenting the correlation between industrial development and pollution are examples of research efforts that are conducted from many perspectives without fully reaching to accurately identify all variables and their level of influence on a phenomenon.
These so-called wicked problems, often emerge from webs of socio-technical systems which origins are fuzzy, non-controllable, and unpredictable; their changeable behaviors call up for disruptive methodologies that provide multi-perspective analysis to better understand them and act accordingly to their characteristics. Such is the case of the Transition Design approach (Irwin, 2018), a transdisciplinary approach developed by Terry Irwin, Gideon Kossoff, and Cameron Tonkinwise, aimed at addressing the wicked problems facing 21st-century societies, by generating strategies to ignite positive system-level changes and societal transitions toward more sustainable, equitable, and desirable long-term futures.
At the end of 2020, an alliance between the Tecnologico de Monterrey and the University of Guadalajara, together with the Museum of Environmental Sciences, in Jalisco, Mexico, resulted in the conception of the HUMETAV project, an initiative centered on empowering young people and their communities to solve local environmental problems. HUMETAV stands for the Spanish acronym which translates as “Urban Hub as a Techno-creative Entrepreneurship Model on Advancement and the Living”. It involves people from the surrounding neighborhoods of the Museum, in collaboration with members of educational institutes, the creative industry, and the government.
In order to perform a diagnosis of the wicked problems linked to the context of the Museum of Natural Sciences, the TD-HUMETAV workshop was conducted for 4 weeks during the winter of 2021, with the support of the Transition Design Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. As a complement to the 9 wicked problems that were targeted during the workshop, the analysis of additional 4 wicked problems was carried on by industrial design students during the undergraduate course Design and Ethnography Methods, in the School of Architecture, Art and Design of the Tecnologico de Monterrey, over a period of 4 months. Unlike the winter workshop, which focused on the analysis and proposal of transition projects aimed at building ideal future scenarios, the design students also developed solution proposals, represented as functional prototypes.
The ultimate objective of this diagnosis was to provide inputs in the form of project proposals that will be developed based on the HUMETAV Model, through the three stages of proof of concept, pilot test, and implementation. These stages will in turn serve as a validation of the HUMETAV Model.
Activity instructions
Answer the following questions by taking into account the process of applying the Transition Design approach from the standing point of a future designer.
1. What advantages do you perceive in using the Transition Design approach in comparison to other design methodologies?
2. What do you think are the takeaways from working on a real-world project with the Museum of Natural Sciences?
3. How does the experience of targeting wicked problems in the context of a city, impact your vision about the future transformation of society?
#HUMETAV #Transition Design #Museum of Natural Sciences
The didactic materials presented here are meant for students of undergraduate or graduate school technocreative programs, as part of basic immersion for the product or service design processes in future scenarios.
References
AV (s.f.). Museum of Natural Sciences. Website. https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/museo-de-ciencias-ambientales-3
CentroCultural (2019). Centro Cultural Universitario. Website. http://centrocultural.org.mx/work/museo-de-ciencias-ambientales/
Irwin, T. (2018). The Emerging Transition Design Approach. DRS Design Research Society. Catalyst. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1589&context=drs-conference-papers
