Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organisations, markets, and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m joined today by my usual co-host, Shruthi Prakash. Hello, Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Hello everybody!

 

Simone Cicero 

It’s nice to have you. Today, we are joined by Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. Hello, Cameron. It’s great to have you here.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

It’s lovely to be here. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you.

 

Cameron is a highly influential voice in the space of design studies, sustainable design, and so-called transition design. He has spent decades advancing the idea that design is not just a problem-solving discipline, but more like a socially and politically consequential practice. Over the course of his career, he has also helped establish leading design studies programs at institutions such as, know, Parsons in New York, Carnegie Mellon, UTS. 

 

I would say you contributed to significant shifts in some of the international design curiculum. You’ve written extensively on design thinking, design ethics, design research, speculative design, sustainability. So it’s really, we’re really excited to have you here because of the relevance of your work and also because this has been a long time coming for us. 

 

We’ve been discussing having you on the podcast probably something like five years ago, or four years ago when we started. So thank you so much. 

 

Let’s start from maybe helping our listeners to understand the most important part of this conversation, the starting point, I would say, this idea of transition design and your work, how you get, have you got there, and what does it mean in a few words.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

So as you indicated, in most places design is understood as either problem solving in the way you described it or form giving or some combination of that. It’s people arriving after ideas have already been formed and they are just merely making them more usable or more saleable or more manufacturable. That’s the sort of usual way people understand the professional practice of design.

 

I sort of walked into design backwards, actually, from philosophy. I was working with Tony Fry, a design theorist, and he decided to leave the university and found a thing called the Eco Design Foundation, because he basically thought the university, the modern university, was not adequate to the challenge of sustainability. So while I was doing my doctorate, I was working with him at the Eco Design Foundation. And I learnt about design from him. 

 

He has an understanding of design, is often referred to as ontological design, that when designers design things, they’re not just designing things, they’re then designing a bunch of consequences that flow from those things. They design people, they design people into users of those things. They design people into normalizing doing what it is that the design helps them do.

 

So when a designer designs, they’re actually designing a world, a practice. They’re actually making a difference in how we live. And so that was very much how I was sort of introduced to design. I always understood design to be this very powerful agent of change. And then I started teaching designers and was surprised that they found that very weird to think. A lot of them got quite annoyed to think that they have more power than they really wanted because with power comes responsibility and they didn’t really want the responsibility.

 

But as I indicated, the context was mostly sustainable design. This was the 1990s. It was a moment in which sustainable design was a reformist practice, trying to just minimize damage. And the Eco Design Foundation and Tony Fry really had a very high level ambition, which is that the problem of sustainability can only be responded to with a complete change in our societies. 

 

So I was sort of understanding that sustainability required systems change from the word go. And the Eco Design Foundation was quite anti-reformist, anti-eco design, even though it was called the Eco Design Foundation. And it was in that context that I came to understand and study design. Then when that ended, Tony Fry went on to other projects. I started to be a design studies scholar and started trying to create curricula that would teach designers about many more things about the world so that they could actually start to be more consequential in what they were doing. 

 

And at the same time, doing a lot of work on systems level change in relation to sustainability. So I was primarily interested back in the 2000s in sustainable service systems. So the idea that we need to decouple use and ownership. This was sort of pre-sharing economy. 

 

This was the moment in which the strategy was service-ization, that if people sell the use of things rather than the thing itself, then businesses are incentivized to actually make those things more efficient, last longer, take them back, sort of create a circular economy even before anyone was talking about the circular economy. 

 

So I was doing work on that kind of systems level change, but that also collapsed a bit. didn’t turn into the sharing economy, which turned into the gig economy, which turned into sort of the next wave of exploitation in capitalism. 

 

So when I got asked by Terry Irwin to go to Carnegie Mellon University. There was a conversation beginning about a very new type of design education. She wanted me there working with her partner, Gideon Kossoff, and the other faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University, and really thinking about a new way of doing design education. And it was there that we started talking about transition design. It has a series of different lineages that come together, which I can explain if you like, but the main intent was to start to show designers how they could, in fact, have more agency. And it is primarily vision-led. It’s trying to recover the idea that we need visions of other ways of living. We need visions of other types of societies. We need visions of other types of ways of organizing our societies and then to design toward those visions from current problems. So you’re designing transition pathways, you’re designing pathways that get from current systems and their concerns to those other types of systems. 

 

And you create a transition pathway, that doesn’t mean you’ve then got a blueprint and you just do it and bang, we’re there. It means you have to be quite attentive to complexity and adapting and constantly changing the vision. The vision, of course, must be participatory. It must be co-designed. This is not expert-led design. This is facilitated visions backcast into pathways. 

 

There were a whole bunch of people who already were talking about transitions, technology transitions, technology innovation transitions, sustainability transitions, even.

 

But none of those people at that time, this was sort of early, sort of mid-20 teens, so 2013, 2014, 2015, there was no one at that time in the transition expert, mostly research, who were really paying attention to design. So that was a very long introduction. 

 

The quick summary is you can’t do large-scale system, social system change without paying attention to human scale design. So any large infrastructure switch out, any new economy, any new way of living will always have a human-sized interface. And transitions are made or broken on those interfaces and how they are ontologically designing people toward those other systems and out of the current systems.

 

So in that case, these people who really focus on problem solving and form giving on quite small things, not even architects or urban planners, but these are product, fashion, communication designers, interaction designers. These people who focus on small things are in fact, absolutely crucial to big change. And transition design is a collection of methods and processes ongoingly being developed that just to show how smaller-scale designers are necessary and there is a possibility for them to make a big difference or major change.

 

Simone Cicero 

So the first question that went through my mind is, you spoke about the sharing economy, that was when I was in touch with your work first, and I think you were very much pioneering this conversation that was so important for the early 2010. And you also said this has been captured by capitalism, somehow we’ve seen it.

 

To me, that made me think about a conversation that I’ve been very inspired by in the last few years, that is the conversation around cosmopolitics. So the idea that in the world that there exists different cultures that are trying to enact a different political vision to how technology express itself in society. 

 

And one is the Chinese, for example, and there is this book from Yuh Hui that has been explaining this very well, this idea that we have to use technology as part of a cultural vision that we have of society. And of course, the West has chosen capitalism. That’s how technology is used in the West. 

 

And in China, they have a different vision.

 

Now India is developing a different approach as well with their UPI and digital infrastructure, public infrastructure and so on. So the question that maybe comes back is, whose transition? So who defines the transition? And you spoke about co-design and I think this is extremely interesting. 

 

Of course, we have maybe the level of politics and society and what our regional powers want the transition to be. But at the same time, when we speak with companies, for example, and I think at the end of the day, these are players that are very active in design. 

 

One thing that I think came to our minds when we talked about regeneration and transitions. It was that there tends to be like a general narrative of what’s regenerative or what’s transitional that is largely influenced by these regional ideas. But at the end of the day, companies have to develop their own idea of value and their own idea of what regenerative means for them. 

 

So how is this aspect of the systems you are embedded in?

 

and playing out with this idea of co-design that you have mentioned. I know it’s a bit chaotic as a question, but sorry about that.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

No, no, it’s a perfect question. It’s absolutely fantastic, actually, to be able to talk about these kind of things, because I think people tend to shy away from them. So I’ll answer, obviously, in a utopian way. And there is a kind of utopianism to, obviously, transition design in this regard. The utopianism, though, is a prefigurative one draws on prefigurative politics, and it’s the argument that when, it’s a dangerous argument, when people participate in creating a vision of their future, that future rarely looks anything like what a business wants. So that’s a pretty stark claim. But the claim is that if I asked you, what are the things that you need in your life that you would like satisfied, and how would you like to participate in those satisfiers? Which ones do you want kind of provided? Which ones do you want to make for yourself? Which ones do you want to know something about as they’re being produced? If you have that decision making power, quite deliberative democracy, participatory democracy kind of version, if you are literally co-designing the vision, it’s extraordinary how rarely that will chime with something that a business might want to do strategy.

 

So you suddenly see that business strategy is always the kind of reverse. The question is, how does this business exist in the future? What is it that we are going to make a value? I will pay attention to what people want, but I’m not going to give them exactly what they want because if I gave them exactly what they want, I would be giving it to them. They wouldn’t be paying for it. I couldn’t be a business. So I have to have some leverage. I have to have some arbitrage.

 

I have to have a monopoly over some part of the value chain. I need to persuade them that they shouldn’t participate in this or that, that they should let these bits be outsourced, they should let these bits be secret, they should let these bits be non-local, they should let these bits be handed over to experts who know best. There obviously is an overlap. 

 

I’m not being completely anti-business here, but it’s a bit an argument that was made ages ago by Shoshana Zuboff way before surveillance capitalism in a weird book she wrote with her partner at the time on the support economy. And it’s this kind of argument that what sort of happened in the last 20, 30 years is that we’ve all come to realize that businesses are not actually supporting our ways of living. And of course, the current version of that is in Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, this kind of argument, that the value proposition for a business and its shareholders and its investors seeking to grow their capital rarely chimes exactly with what it is that people would say they want. 

 

Now, I put that in a very abstract way, and I’ll get back to the question of transition design, but I’ll just give you a quick example, which no longer bears, in my case it did, but both my parents have now died. But for a while there, if you asked me what I wanted, I would say what I want is to be able to spend time caring for my ageing parents as they approach the end of their lives. Now that’s a fairly simple want. It’s not a difficult want. It does mean I would have to work less. It does mean I would need different sort of hours. It does mean that I would need to have my parents closer. You know, the reason I moved back to Australia from the US was precisely for that reason. But even then I’m on the other side of a city from them. 

 

You know, there were whole bunch of things that I’d want to do. And there’s no business that sort of helps. There are businesses that provide outsourced care, there are some businesses who might value their employee value proposition enough to allow me to go into some part-time work, etc. But you can suddenly see that what I might want quite literally in a democratic, and I’m not asking for anything huge here, I’m not asking, you know, to be a millionaire and sit on a universal basic income making art. I’m asking to just have the capacity to look after my parents. But there’s not really a business that can do that.

 

There is no business doing that. It’s a weird combination. It’s a weird relational system. So when you start thinking about those sorts of things, I’ve overly cherry picked that example, but when you start doing that, you suddenly realize that participatory futures are not going to be capitalist futures, that there is no good capitalism. The mechanisms by which financialization and the pursuit of growth, work, and the kind of way in which it’s about value capture just don’t fit with what it is that people are kind of wanting to do these days. And it’s causing large amounts of alienation in lots of different countries. 

 

Now as you indicated, in some countries they’ve started to realize that, and either you literally need a government occasionally verging on dictatorship to actually take out certain businesses and create the opportunity for those types of caring economies. Or you need to start moving to different types of platforms that hopefully have different ownership structures in them. You start to move to larger versions of platform cooperatives, et cetera. 

 

So all of that is to say, when you do transition design authentically, which means co-designing the vision, you do not end up with visions that a business is going to think:  “Fantastic. That’s a great way. We can both do that and we can make money and our shareholders are going to be happy”. That’s our strategy. You’re changing values for value. You’re changing out the value of money for other types of values.

 

A lot of people sort of say transition design looks like just a neutral design process that could be used for anything. And unfortunately, a lot of the examples I often use when I’m teaching it do draw on existing businesses who’ve managed to affect major transitions in new products that have created whole new practices and whole new ways of being human on the planet. So it does look, when I sometimes talk about it, as if transition design could be a business strategy.

 

But the bit that always gets in the way is authentic participation in the creation of those visions. And it’s not like transition design is Marxism, and it’s readily able to be critiqued, I think, for a lot of its naivety around theories of change, particularly in terms of political power and class. But it is also not something that can easily be co-opted if done authentically. it’s basing everything on this kind of argument that when you really allow people to participate in the identification of their needs satisfiers using Max Neaf’s kind of coupling so that they’re not obstructed needs, whenever people are able to articulate their needs satisfiers, the value propositions that emerge out of there aren’t value capturable in the same. It’s always going to be a much more participatory economy, a paracon as it used to be called, on the other side. And that is the systems change. So that’s my utopian naive answer to kind of say we’re not about revolution, but I think we do need one. But transition design at its best is trying to smuggle in values that begin to displace the value of demanding that investment always have a return.

 

Simone Cicero

One thing that I want to underline maybe to stress is that from what I understand – to some extent, transition design starting point is to give somebody the responsibility to find what the transition means for them. So it’s a subjectivity. It’s a process of creating a subjectivity of communities, for example. And in this process, as you said, these subjectivities tend to create the different visions that are not easy to encapsulate in the traditional systems – capitalism, example, or market dynamics. 

 

So I think this is worth identifying as a key point, Transition is not something you consume; it’s something that you co-create and vision, right? The first act as a subject, as a community, as a person, is to, as a company maybe, is to envision your transition, is to be actively, subjectively active in defining your future. I think this is one thing that I want to stress and then Shruthi you can maybe jump in. Yeah.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I just say I totally concur with that, yeah. And I would just qualify it not just subjective but intersubjective. It’s precisely the process of coming to a vision is the process of negotiating with others what might be a shared vision. And absolutely, I really love the way you’re pointing to the fact that it has to begin with a willingness to transcend your current way of being. It’s a recognition that the system change is not a system, it’s not a change to the system outside you, it’s a change to the system of which you are a partner, you will change also. 

 

We will have different desires on the other side of the system change. But yeah, absolutely, it’s the way you characterized it.

 

Shruthi Prakash

If I want to, I mean, I’ve also written a lot of points, but I think one I wanted to sort of touch upon was the, let’s say, designer aspect of it. So of course, many designers largely see themselves as some form of problem solver rather than being, let’s say, a part of agent for change essentially. 

 

So how does that image shift sort of look like? And I think one of the points that was earlier discussed as well, right? Like is there there in moral overarch in that sense as to what is right or wrong as it is subjective to that designer? How does that, let’s say influence that process of design? And when you start to look beyond product and towards systemic changes and evolution in that sense, then what does good design look like?

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

Right, again, great question and difficult and complex. Hopefully I won’t go into another whole lecture to explain what I think. I’m not a designer, and I’ve hung out with designers my whole life. And as I always say, I think I’m more a passionate believer in design than any designer I’ve ever met. So many designers have this weird kind of ambivalence. They kind of love what they do, but they feel guilty about it or they’re kind of resentful or just always think they’re never given enough power. So I think they’re a really interesting psychological set. It’s totally stupid to talk in this caricaturish way, but I think they have an odd combination of, at their best, a type of arrogance. I mean, a type of arrogance to think that they can be relevant to other people’s problems.

 

That it can be read as a type of generosity or it can be read as a type of arrogance. The arrogance is the one where they say, I’m Apple and I know what you want and I’m just going to make it and then I’m going to ship it to you and you’re going to realise I was right. The other is to say, look, I have a skill set and my skill set is totally at your service. Harold G. Nelson and Erik Stolterman wrote a very beautiful book called The Design Way and they have a chapter called designer service and it’s a really beautiful characterization that all designers are people who are putting themselves at service of other people. 

 

Which is why the best designers are not sitting alone in their studios just squiggling and coming up with new ideas. They’re travelers, they’re anthropologists, they’re listeners, they’re conversationalists, they’re interviewers. They’re incredibly social and gregarious.

 

Also, because when they finally do light upon a good idea with people, the rest of their job is running around persuading other people. So the best designers are rhetoricians and politicians and negotiators, which is not at all the way design is taught at design school. So in design school, they don’t spend a lot of time teaching you to be an orator, to be a negotiator, to be a hostage negotiator so that you can actually get yourself out of unsustainability into something else, which is what I think we should be teaching and what transition design tries to teach. 

 

So it has this combination of arrogance and generosity, kind of arrogance and humility. There is always kind of research base. And the example that I think often gets forgotten because it was the water in which we were swimming when Terry Gideon and I started first talking about transition design was that we all came from the context of sustainable design and particularly social design. All of us were colleagues of Ezio Manzini. We had worked with him in various ways or people who had worked with him. 

 

So design for social innovation was what we understood to be mature design practice. We did not think mature design practice were gurus doing interaction design. We thought it was designed for social innovation. So these were people who really demonstrated that the designer’s job is not to have the idea, it’s to go and find good ideas, to find people who, and this is going back to the previous question, people who find that they cannot satisfy their needs using current offerings from the market or government. So they’re feeling what we’re called by unmet needs. And then they just say, right, we are going to innovate, we are social innovators, we’re just going to do it.

 

And the designer’s job was to constantly be traveling and learning about those, lending service design, product design, interaction design expertise to those people so that those new innovations could be more robust and then shared. And that was the theory of change. So we were thinking that that’s what design was. Whenever we talk about transition design, what we have in our head is not Philippe Starck, it’s Ezio Manzini. It’s a version of people who have had experience in the difference that good design can make. 

 

And then I think that’s going to your very last question about good design. The first answer is it’s definitely going to look absolutely nothing like the current system, the current system’s version of good design, because it’s about systems change. 

 

So at the moment, I would call good design something that is always solving two problems. One problem is the current problem we have, and one problem is the problem of how we get away from the system that created that problem in the first place. So, you know, if the problem is technological dependence and someone makes an app that allows you to have downtime, like on an iPhone, they have solved one problem, but they’ve not solved the second. They haven’t actually started to create the possibilities of other ways of living.

 

They haven’t solved that problem in a way that it’s become a transition pathway. So good design is always doing two things. And in fact, it’s then doing three things, because the third thing is that it’s opening you to new desires, as I said before. It’s opening you to things that you did not know you were going to enjoy doing. 

 

So we’re doing a lot of work at this at the moment around the energy transition and what it means to try and do things like energy sharing or load shifting or even using less energy. So if you went to most middle class global consumer class houses around the world and said, do you want to use less energy? They would say no. And if you said to them, do you want to share energy? They would probably say no. Obviously, in lots of contexts, they might say yes, but then they would say, you can’t do it. The government doesn’t allow it. The infrastructure doesn’t exist to do it. 

 

But if you can even show them a speculative design that says, this is a box and when you switch it, your excess power goes next door. And now we’re gonna put it in your house. Then all of a sudden people are exposed to something they would have said in a focus group, no, I won’t do. And suddenly they’re like, I could do that. And because I could do that, I suddenly think I would do that. I’m actually changing, I’m becoming a person who might share primary resource that I invested in in order to create. And now I’ve realized, oh, I can do something. So you’re creating new desires. So good design is always about creating new desires, not just making this problem-solving technique sexy, but actually changing what we desire, opening up new practices, opening up new worlds.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Yeah, that’s super interesting. I think from the perspective of also creating, let’s say, optionality in terms of consumers, you know, take away from your solution. Simone, if I can just probe on this a little bit more, just another question, right? 

 

So I think with all of this, of course, there’s a significant, let’s say, focus on the designer. Are they – If we were to imagine a circle, they in the centre of the circle? Where do they fall in terms of this design? And considering the fact that it is interdisciplinary in nature, then how does that look, you know, without diluting designs, core competence or core skills, sort of still accommodating for the peripheries, but not becoming too slow, being too conscious or cautious or process heavy.

 

How do you adapt to the speed of it when there are so many stakeholders involved?

 

Cameron Tonkinwise

It’s a great question. It takes enormous skill, and I’m not sure we have good examples of people who can do all that is required. Therefore, obviously, a transition designer is somebody who has a network of people with different skills that they can call on to kind of affect these transitions over time. So I tend to always say there’s no such thing as a transition designer.

 

There’s only ever like a transition design network, an alliance, an affiliation. The conspiracy is how I’ve been characterising it recently. Though the one thing that I think designers, not all designers, but designers at their best, do have as a core expertise that no one else has, is an attention to material quality. 

 

So designers are the people who think the look and feel of things are important. And they spend a lot of time focusing on the details of those things. And they’re really annoying people to hang around with because everywhere you go, they’re dissatisfied. They’re looking at something thinking, you know, that typeface is not quite right or the contrast is wrong or that bevel’s not done well, or that interaction was a bit laggy. And, you know, they’re people who are noticing materials, which might be digital materials, not just physical material.

 

And they’re noticing that in terms of aesthetics, but not artistic aesthetics, social aesthetics, relational aesthetics, they’re noticing it in terms of how it makes people feel. They are at their best, inherently customer-centered, user-centered, people-centered. They are people who notice that things change people and that this thing isn’t doing a good job of changing people in the right way.

 

That’s a skill that most people have. So when people encounter designers, they tend to walk up to them and say, what is design? What do you do? And what is that expertise? How on earth do you ever learn it? Because it’s not a discipline, it’s not a science, it’s not an art, it’s this weird practice. What is it? But designers, through their training and at their best, through a lot of experience, notice these patterns of material, socio-material interaction. And that is the thing that makes the difference.

 

So in that example I gave before, a community member comes up with a social innovation and now I’m just being arrogant. They’ve probably just hacked it together. It’s not particularly refined. It’s probably a little bit frictionful. It’s clumsy. It’s probably going to always need repair. It’s not going to be beautiful. And the designer can immediately begin to see not just how to make it, as I said before, sexier, but how to make it so that it does better what these people are trying to do. 

 

They’ve just bodged it together, but the designer knows the way to put it together so that it does better what they are seeking to do with it. And that’s the service component. Now that’s an absolutely crucial thing that I just, you know, I said the other day, somebody comes up with a business strategy, and then they totally forget that when they outsource their software, you’ve just, you’re whatever strategy you’ve got, your workers are just doing it all through Microsoft. 

 

And whatever its material qualities are, that’s your business’s material qualities. Now, you know, maybe in a Wardley way, you can say, well, that’s okay, we’re gonna outsource that bit and we’re gonna have this as our own. But if what is most your own is your strategy, I would want your strategy to be bespokely materialised in the furniture, in the whiteboards in the typefaces, in the lighting, in the sound quality, in the way people talk to each other. 

 

So designers notice that material stuff and even managers tend not to notice it. Edgar Schein tells us, know, artifacts are in there somewhere in culture, but everyone just seems to gloss straight over that and no one really focuses on it, but designers do. So that’s a crucial expertise which can make all the difference to change which is weird because it’s dilettante-ish and connoisseur-ish and class-based and there are lots of things wrong with what I just said, but it is also something that most other people don’t notice except when it works well. 

 

And that’s the kind of good design that we’re talking about. 

 

Simone Cicero

I was thinking to where is good design possible from a context perspective, right? Because somehow we experience that really regenerative transformation on transitional work at the moment is largely, how can I say, like, looks like we are kind of rambling in somewhere that things don’t work, right? We are corner shop-sized experiments. This is marginal in society. 

 

Why is that? The question is, why is that? 

 

Because I think we are, at the moment, largely in a context where there is very low freedom to care, as my friend Indy would say, Indy Johar. So you really don’t have the freedom to think about new theories of value because of the systemic lock-ins. But there’s also very low willingness to care. So in general, there is a lack of imagination, lack of culture, of transition. We kind of seem to be very capable of imaging something different from business as usual. 

 

So we typically end up with the people doing this work that we have very high willingness to care, but very low freedom to care. And so they are exhausted shouting at the system somewhere, right?

 

So the question would be, how do we create context where there is large willingness to care? So maybe we can build it with culture building, imagination, the work that Steve Bittigle, for example, is doing with, as you call, mean, it will come to me, know, moral imaginations, right? Moral imaginations, right? And on the other side, higher freedom to care.

 

You know, that’s more a dimension of institutional discussion we need to have, but at very large level like UBI or things like that, but also at a very small level. So we can create a comparative, for example, I mean, I run my kind of community supported agriculture stuff, right? So I can be more free in how I think about my food and so on.

 

How do we create this context where there is high freedom to care, high because we solved some of the lock-ins and there is also high willingness to care because we created the moral imagination to think about something different. And can these contexts be somewhat businesses, companies, organizations of some kind that can maybe evolve towards creating this context or we just need to sit down and create new institutions because the ones we have are just failing to make us even think about something different.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

It’s a really beautiful way you’ve framed it. I should have heard it before. I haven’t heard it framed that way. And it’s a really clever way of understanding the dilemma and the paradox. mean, to play it back in another way, it’s also the question of that the best design is captured by the wealthiest investors to do the largest scale delivery. And that’s exactly the power that you need to create freedoms for yourself. So it’s a very beautiful way of framing the problem. 

 

The thing I was thinking while you were talking, so I worked a bit with colleagues that they were at Western Sydney University, foremost known is Katherine Gibson of Katherine Gibson Graham, feminist post-capitalism. And the post-capitalism argument is that capitalism is very good at pretending it’s the only thing when in fact there are all these other communities’ economies that have always persisted. They are, you know, they’re all the bits of the iceberg that you can’t see. But in fact, as soon as you ask people, they remember all the other types of economies they’re participating in, which is a kind of all their other types of freedoms. 

 

And in fact, also the fact that when they don’t think about the things that they say they will when you ask them, they are in fact willing.

 

Another way to put it is to kind of say, you know, our societies have a crisis in care economies at the moment, teaching childcare, elderly care, healthcare. In all those areas, you have people who I think are confronting the paradox you placed all the time. 

 

And we have not great examples of what those organizations in that space might do to resolve those paradoxes. You definitely don’t want North American style privatized insurance driven health care. We have models of sort of government run health care. We have public private partnerships. We have kind of these mixes invariably. It’s always dependent upon outsourcing a considerable parts to hidden labor or unpaid labor. Care work being done by people at home, relatives, etc. 

 

So we haven’t really resolved that, but my answer to your question is, in a way, the best resources for tackling that paradox are the people who are currently tackling that paradox in those kinds of domains. Now, they also happen to be the domains that I think have the least mature design practice. 

 

I mean, there’s this there’s some good service design in healthcare design, but it still remains strangely marginal. There is obviously some good product design within medical design. There’s not great product design in ageing care design. The kind of rush to kind of tech to solve these problems is a spectacularly good example of what I said before is solving only one problem and not thinking about the transition. 

 

So yeah, my answer would be something like – people are specialists in negotiating that paradox. They’re not your regular kind of, I’m running a management innovation podcast and we’ll get those types of businesses on. So they’re not those types of people, but I think they have a lot of the answers that we need. And then the second answer is even in our lives, we are fighting for that.

 

We are, I think the point I would take from your excellent point is we’re in a losing battle in so far as people have been convinced not to care. Or people, know, the framing I like is Annemarie Mol’s, the distinction between the logic of choice and the logic of care. And people have opted for choice over being cared for. They want some choice about that.

 

And she indicates there’s sort of nothing worse than when your doctor just says you could do A, B or C, you choose. And that’s the sort of alienation that just causes you to think that paradox is irresolvable. And I just need to be always cynical in relation to everything I purchase from the market or vote for. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question. It was a really good one and it’s made me thinking a lot. So I might’ve been incoherent. Sorry.

 

Simone Cicero 

Sorry, I was a mute. I think it’s crucial because I feel like we cannot really decontextualize the conversation on transition. So we have to see that in the context, the context, the government context, the society context, the company context, the shareholder relationship context. So I context is there. We can just ignore the context. So I think when you say there’s maybe there is not enough willingness to care. I totally agree. You know, the question is really, you know, there is a newsletter from, as it’s called, Michael Sacasas, who is one of our former guests. He looks into Ivan Illich’s work and the convivial lens to society, right? And he speaks, he has this fantastic piece that is called Ill with Wants. 

 

What is the question? At the end of the day, we come back to the question of the critical relationship to growth and technology, something that Heidegger has been breathing about. We know that there is a tension between something that requires us to step out and say, I want to be more active as a subject in defining what I value. 

 

And in the case, for example, a convivial lens to society is relationality, right? So it’s interrelatedness, intersubjectivity, as you said. 

 

So I think in the context of things, we see, entrepreneurs are just stepping up and creating businesses because in the lock-ins we have, this is how you express your capability to create value, right? And so, you know, the willingness to care is probably something beyond that. We need people that are even more entrepreneurial than entrepreneurs. 

 

So they have to actually think about a new system and actually build that system. Because otherwise they just get exhausted in trying to think about different futures that are not actually feasible. I think this is an incredible question we have on the table. How do we create this context at different stages where we can really think about something new, something different?

 

Also, I must say, without consuming the idea of regeneration or transition that somebody like the SDGs or something like that, somebody has been trying to administer to us. I think that there is this massive question of you have to think about it. 

 

You have to imagine something different for you, for your relationship, for your systems that you are embedded in. I think you captured it beautifully when you spoke about this.

 

So, I mean, really thank you for the conversation. yeah, if there is anything you want to jump in. Yeah.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

So can I make a, yeah, yeah, it just occurred to me listening that I sort of want to say I didn’t talk about universities as another space. Now, you know, I’ve just come out of, because it’s the end of the year, it will continue next year, an extended fight with neoliberal austerity and the shutting down of degree programs and the sacking of staff. And this is happening.

 

Across the place, it’s either happening ideologically in North America or it’s happening for financial austerity reasons. People say neoliberalism is over, but certainly not in the way they’re administering universities in the UK, New Zealand, Australia. I’m less familiar with how they’re happening elsewhere in the world. I see them actually growing and being stronger in South America, Central America. So universities, let’s say they’re on a decline right now.

 

They weren’t ever a great example. They were always kind of set up as an elite. That’s precisely what the universitas was. It was a clique of people who got to be scholars, which in Greek means being at leisure. And then a privileged bunch of people either were led in or paid to get in to actually get access to that leisure. And then all of that’s just been turned into kind of instrumentally skill acquisition for them going into the professional class.

 

But even in their decline, even in their most instrumental moments, there’s still a moment in which people are more or less taking time out of the economy. So they obviously probably still need to work, and they might have gone straight on from school, but it is literally a transition moment. It’s a moment in which people have pressed pause on actually just being constrained by the system to produce and they’ve committed to change, a process of change. Everyone knows that the person you are going into any type of course, even if it’s just film appreciation, at the other end of the course, you’re a different person. So it’s a time out, it’s a time of change, and it’s a situation in which a whole bunch of people are talking to each other. This is why right-wingers are terrified. I mean, right-wingers think people like me are indoctrinating our students.

 

And I wish I had been, and I will be from now on, I can tell you, because it is this incredible opportunity to do that radical imagining. Now, it has limits because it has only sort of partial application, but it has partners, it has people doing research in and out of the university. I mean, all universities these days are much more porous. They don’t have walls.

 

As a result, they are a force for transition. Transition design came out of the academic side of design, the education and research side of design for a reason, because designers still need to be trained in that weird art of paying attention to material quality. And the way you do it is by coming up with crazy ideas and a bunch of people criticizing you for three, four, 10 years. You sit there just having conversations. It’s peer-based, it’s master-led your studio master leading it. 

 

It has authority systems that are also questioned. It has a different brief every time. They’re amazing. They’re in decline. They’re in decline because the forces that are particularly not interested in these kind of radical agendas are trying to shut them down and make them have fixed guaranteed return on investment. But they are still, I think, an opportunity for negotiating that paradox that you’re talking about.

 

I just want to jump in there and say, you know, I’m the biggest critic of universities. I’m a vociferous critic of universities because I think they are so important to transitions. And they have been forces for transition, not just in the research projects that they do, but the fact that particularly design education studio classes are where students suddenly experience, you know, Dave Graeber’s great slogan: “another world is possible”.

 

They quite literally are in a studio saying, my God, I didn’t think that was possible. Exactly as I said before about like sharing power. Every design studio has that radical potential. And those of us who have the privilege of being in universities at the moment have to take responsibility for that privilege. It’s like a civilisation. Saviour duty is a ridiculous way to put it.

 

Simone Cicero 

I mean, it would be just naive to not recognize the incredible uniqueness of university context of, or, you know, they have been there for centuries now as the place where these things happen. So, yeah, they should really continue to serve this duty to society, I think. Before, before, sorry, go ahead, Shruti.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

No, no, no. was just saying, think especially if it doesn’t come from designers, it’s much harder to come from, let’s say other mainstream, you know, subjects or fields of study. think that’s the core principle of being a designer is to sort of challenge systems as you sort of know it.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise

But this was the, can I say this was the terrible, terrible thing of design thinking over the last 10 years, because design thinking kind of came and went in industry. Where design thinking landed was as the thing that other discipline students do outside of their discipline. So in universities around the world, you you’re learning to be a nurse, you’re learning to be a lawyer, you’re learning to be an engineer.

 

And then they make you go and do a design thinking class and they throw you a social challenge and you do some post-it notes and prototyping and maybe speak to somebody. So that space in which all those people just doing instrumental education are made to be exposed to different things, that’s an incredible potential. And it went under the name design. Now, it wasn’t design. It had no material quality. It was process, very instrumental and limited process. 

 

But there was a moment in which everybody at the university was told, you need to be a nurse and a designer. You need to be an engineer and a designer. You need to be a business manager and a designer. Not an actual designer, but you need to be able to think like a designer thinks. So there was an incredible moment. We wasted it. We lost it, which is also why I was fighting so hard throughout that entire period. And now we’re in a position in which what actually substantiates that space as people start to get bored of post-it notes. That is another side of potential. So if we can just get in there before the university collapses completely, that is a great moment in which design starts to become something that all professions are encountering.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Thank you, Cameron. It was a super interesting conversation. So towards the end of the podcast, we also have this section called as the breadcrumbs where, you know, we ask our guests to share some thoughts that they might have in terms of recommendations for our listeners, either books, podcasts, or anything that sort of inspires you, you know, in your journey, maybe something to share with our listeners.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

I don’t know if it’s, it is inspiring, but I’ll just begin by saying because it’s going off the boil a bit, everybody should be thinking a lot about the system change that is coming our way, whether we like it or not, which is climate change. We are going to be living in a completely different climate. We’re to be living in a completely different world with different ecosystems and supply chains and a whole bunch of different societies as a result of what’s coming.

 

We could have planned for it and we could have made transitions, but now it’s going to come. So I think it’s really important to sort of find inspiration in that space. So I’ve kind of got three like weighty tomes, though they’re not large books, any of them, that I would just really recommend anybody have a look at at the moment, or if you don’t just check out these people being interviewed. So the first is Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and his book More and More and More, An All-Consuming History of Energy.

 

And I say that because it’s a book that says there’s never been an energy transition. And he does it by thinking, and this is the important point, he doesn’t talk about design, but he talks about energy and material. So every time we think we’ve gone from an inefficient energy to a new one, that was a great transition humans are progressing, he points out that the previous energy source just gets turned into a kind of infrastructure for the next energy source, and that generally it’s additive across the world.

 

So some nations do make energy transitions, but that’s just because other places pick up the surplus resources. So, you know, we’re in a real challenge, particularly in the way non-transition designers talk about transition, particularly in relation to the energy transition. And it’s just an entertaining history. He’s a nice contrarian thinker. So I’d really recommend that. I think it’s pretty interesting. 

 

It goes very nicely with Malcolm Harris, who I think is one of the most important actual sort of communist thinkers out there. He wrote a book recently called What’s Left. It’s an attempt to kind of think through responses to climate change from different positions, market craft, public power and communism. It’s, despite his politics, it’s not biased and polemical. And it’s again, just makes the point that everything that we’re thinking about in terms of green transitions at the moment, just totally ignores the laws of capital. That’s just not the way people make money. It’s just not going to work. You have to have combinations of public power and you have to have elements of communism. 

 

And then the last is something that I was just put onto recently, a book that’s come out of the UK called Radical Abundance, How to Win a Green Democratic Future. It’s by three sort of good activists, Marxists out of the UK, Kai Heron, Keir Milburn, Bertie Russell

 

And it’s particularly drawing attention to cooperative ownership, playing a crucial part in any transition it plays to stuff that Simone and I were mucking around with ages ago. So sharing economy, platform cooperativism, but picking that up really in terms of like a pharmaceuticals company in Leon and what it means to actually start doing that. It just puts power and ownership into that mix of creating the will to care and the capacity to care because of those kind of shifts in ownership. 

 

So there, that’s pretty, you know, I’m a university lecturer, so my reading assignments are always a bit heavy. That’s what I would recommend. In the meantime, I would just listen to a lot of minimalist music and watch, you know, some really great independent films, including the ones from the 20th century that’s almost impossible to find.

 

Andre Tarkovsky, Greenaway. Yeah.

 

Simone Cicero 

You get your imagination muscle trained a little bit.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

I have to say the thing I’m most proud of is that both my daughters have gone in very different directions, but they’ve both ended up not making it their life, but making it certainly their leisure to be total cinephiles. And I don’t think we did that deliberately, but it was very successful class reproduction.

 

Simone Cicero 

No, mean, yeah, totally. think there’s never enough for watching movies around. So I think people should really do that. I totally agree. Thank you so much. was a great conversation. think I have material for some article that to share with you, with some of these visualisations we spoke about. 

 

I think at the end of the day we touch upon a few very important bits and our listeners will have to ask a few questions after listening to this podcast. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed.

 

Cameron Tonkinwise 

Yeah, absolutely. It was really great. You’ve made me think a lot with those questions, particularly that second half there. So thanks so much.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. And Shruti, thank you for your amazing questions as always.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you. Thanks, Cameron. Thanks, Simone.

 

Simone Cicero 

You’re also connecting both very late in the evening. So thank you so much. And for our listeners, as always, please head to boundaryless.io/resources/podcast, where you will find that this conversation and the others. And in this conversation, you will find all the links to the books to the scholars and all the information that Cameron shared during the conversation. And of course, until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.