transformation design Archives • coloursontheinside

Transformation Design II – trend steering

theoryArved31. October 20160

Transforming the world is no end in itself. It aims at keeping or raising the ability and number of people to live healthily on this limited surface. This goal can best be obtained when keeping some standards and constraints, which science has turned out for years. The problem with this is, it’s mostly numbers. Numbers are too abstract for most people to grasp and translate to values.

Therefore, people who have the knowledge to grasp the numbers can translate these to aforesaid standards and constraints. From them, one can derive a list of things not to do. Environmental Organisations have been doing this for a long time. But because being asked to stop doing things is at least uncomfortable, if not outrageous to most citizens, these methods have yet failed to reach a critical mass.

#RIOTTECH – or how the digital age supports alternative voices even offline

tremendous thingsArved19. September 20164

The digital age brought massive changes to the way we live. Globalisation and technical progress have had many effects on most aspects of life. Not all of those can be described as positive in the way of helping the majority. So said majority went to the streets, demanding political change and fair wages.

In 2011, the Arab Spring gained momentum very fast by using twitter and Facebook to quickly organise demonstrations. Later that year, the occupy movement also was successful because many of the participants were digital natives. Also, they had support from anonymous.

But Twitter is not the only possibility offered to demonstrators by technology. There’s also Instructables. And 3D printers. Here are some riottech projects, found in the streettoolbox.

Transformation Design I – origins

theoryArved13. September 20162

I recently got accepted for the master studies in Transformation Design at the Braunschweig University of Art. So a lot of people have asked me what Transformation Design actually is.

For one, it’s new. There is a Wikipedia article about it, but it hasn’t been translated to any language other than English yet.

So, since it was -and still is – difficult for me to describe in simple terms what’s it about. Therefore, I’m going to present it here, one part after another.

Today, I’ll start with how the idea came up, and from which core elements it started evolving.