Sustainable Transitions through Democratic Design

CoDesign4Transitions will develop 10 transdisciplinary Early-Stage Researchers (ESRs) at the intersection of co-design, design for sustainability, service and systems design, democratic innovation and climate transitions equipped to develop new approaches and validated prototypes for action. This is urgent to enable governments, businesses and civil society to deliver multi-level solutions required to achieve net zero targets committed to in the Paris Agreement. Design is central to achieving this because of its capacities for enabling experimentation through prototyping to reduce the risk of failure; synthesising ideas and evidence into material and visual forms for engaging stakeholders in co-creation; and facilitating innovative change. In contested sustainability transitions, design provides a connective tissue essential to engaging publics in democratic innovation towards net zero.

CoDesign4Transition offers ESRs the possibility to develop crucial new approaches to democratic design for climate transitions in a cross-disciplinary, intersectoral environment. This will provide a unique training experience for each ESR, who will benefit from access to expert supervisors and mentors from academic and non-academic sectors. The network comprises 6 leading higher education beneficiaries and 13 Associate Partners from 9 countries, who will provide advanced training including transferable skills. 10 non-academic organisations will host secondments where ESRs will develop and test design approaches to transitions and critically assess how to build design capabilities. The 4-year research and training programme comprises research work-packages investigating prototyping, materialisation and visualisation, and facilitating practice-systems change in democratic climate transitions; one on training and researcher development. Two horizontal work-packages devoted to communication, dissemination and exploitation and project management underpin the network.