Cameron Tonkinwise teaches Service Design and researches Sustainable Design at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). His expertise has reshaped traditional thinking around how designers should be educated, and he has established Design Studies programs at the Parsons The New School for Design (New York), Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and UTS. Cameron has been a leading voice in the emerging practice of Transition Design, enabling human-scale designers to facilitate systems-level change toward more equitably sustainable societies.

In this session, which took place in October 2024, Cameron introduced the concepts and techniques that are part of the emerging practice of Transition Designing. Transitions are ways of understanding how our societies might make the changes necessary to become more equitably and diversely sustainable. The session focused on the relation between Transition Design and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs must design organizations that will sustain and diversify new kinds of value creation. When entrepreneurs do this, they are establishing a version of the future (when those new values will be mainstream) in the present, something that is sometimes called ‘prefigurative politics.’