13: Troubling Transitions, Transformative Play, and Between Worlds
Welcome to the September newsletter from the Institute for Sustainable Worlds, and the Imaginaries Lab. First, a few announcements:
Troubling Transitions: theme track at the Design Research Society 2026 conference, Edinburgh
What are the ‘growing pains’ of designing and researching for transitions and transformations in sustainability? This track invites responses to the ways design research and practice for transitions trouble legacies and assumptions in design theories, design pedagogies, professional identities of designers, design as a discipline, and how these troubles manifest as growing pains in research and practice. We encourage authors to contribute conceptual, empirical, and review papers exploring and describing the growing pains and dilemmas of the field.
I'm one of the chairs of this theme track at at DRS 2026, the Design Research Society’s international conference in Edinburgh next year, along with Femke Coops (Eindhoven University of Technology / Norwich University of the Arts), Marysol Ortega Pallanez (Arizona State University), Joanna Boehnert (Bath Spa University), Fabrizio Ceschin (Brunel, University of London), Idil Gaziulusoy (Aalto University), Silvana Juri (SARAS Institute, Uruguay / Stockholm Resilience Center), Anja Overdiek (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences), Emma Dewberry (Open University), Alma Leora Culén (University of Oslo), and Ida Nilstad Pettersen (Norwegian University of Science & Technology). This is the theme track associated with the DRS Designing for Sustainability & Transitions Special Interest Group, which has evolved from the Sustainability SIG.
More information: https://drs2026.thedrs.org/10-2-troubling-transitions
Abstract deadline: 31 Oct 2025 Full Papers: 14 Nov 2025 Conference: 8-12 June 2026, Edinburgh College of Art
Apart from this one, the DRS conference has a wide range of themes that might be of interest to readers of the blog/newsletter—it’s a fun conference and supportive community.
Library for Transformative Play launch in the Netherlands: 26 September
How can playful creative activities help teams from different disciplinary backgrounds collaborate? Playing with the Trouble is a 4-year project in which I've been collaborating with Raimon Ripoll Bosch, Jet Vervoort, Maikel Waardenburg, Josie Chambers, Jessica Duncan, Joost Vervoort, Joyce Browne, and Danvy Vu, funded by the Centre for Unusual Collaborations. We're launching our Library for Transformative Play in Utrecht, Netherlands, on 26 September, with a chance to try out games and materials designed to:
- help surface worldviews
- facilitate collective imagination
- stay with the trouble
- unmake systems
- and embrace ambiguity,
in settings ranging from classrooms to societal dialogues.
More details and link to register here: https://unusualcollaborations.ewuu.nl/agenda/playing-with-the-trouble-library-launch/
We’ll also have a Norwich event for the project early in 2026.
Sunsets and Sunrises: Lost Futures and Emerging Hopes at Tyndall Centre conference
What is going away, through both the effects of climate change, and societal transitions to more sustainable futures? Sunsets and Sunrises, a project by Femke Coops and me, is a participatory visualisation method that gives people space to engage with emotions around imagined futures that are disappearing (and appearing), as part of the phase-out and breakdown of systems, structures and practices. We developed it in the context of the IMAGINE project, and are continuing to evolve the method, including working out applications in education.
A glimpse of the project with a specific focus on climate futures, using a small selection of images from those created by 100+ participants in Norway, the Netherlands, and Italy (see previously), was exhibited at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research’s 25th anniversary conference, ‘Our Critical Decade for Climate Action’, at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, on 8 September. The poster accompanying the exhibit is available here: https://imaginari.es/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Lockton_Coops_2025_Tyndall.pdf
New Metaphors workshop for Norwich startup
Earlier this month I was joined by Norwich University of the Arts' Knowledge Exchange team for a workshop applying New Metaphors to the needs of an innovative sustainable design-related startup based in the Norwich Research Park. If you're interested in these kinds of workshops, using any of the Institute for Sustainable Worlds / Imaginaries Lab tools or methods (or new ones), please do get in touch. Also: New Metaphors 2.0 is under development, with Josie Chambers—some news on how you can get involved, coming soon.
Hoek van Holland Haven
Between worlds
I currently live in the Netherlands but work for a UK university (hybrid, just to be clear: I'm not in the UK all the time). And many people's first question is, well, how does that work? Is it feasible? Why have you made your life more complicated?
In some ways it feels like a kind of forgotten possibility, a lost pre-Brexit dream of European mobility. After all, Norwich is the same distance from Rotterdam as it is from Leeds, or Wolverhampton, or even Brighton (as the seagull flies). It's the sort of vision that I remember being part of 1990s descriptions of what would be possible with the new Europe, the feeling I got from visiting the Channel Tunnel exhibition centre at Cheriton, near Folkestone, in summer 1991 as an 8 or 9-year old, or from an early Eurostar leaflet I found that I must have picked up at some point in the late 90s. Or even from initiatives like Interreg*, explicitly recognising the value of collaborations between regions in Europe rather than only between countries as a whole. The Channel and North Sea coasts of France, or Belgium, or the Netherlands, would surely be natural collaborators for the Channel and North Sea coasts of England. When I think back, strange as it sounds, even the BBC's short-lived, forgotten Moon and Son (of course a Robert Banks Stewart creation), about a mother and son running an astrology business (while also investigating crimes) cross-channel, Kent and Sussex to northern France, sat somewhere in my subconscious. Schemes like the Transmanche Metro or, ultimately, a positivity about things such as Schengen, would have changed a lot around the UK's "Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off" imaginary. But in a country currently dominated by a "small boats" spectre—also of course about people trying to find a world in which to make a life—this kind of vision seems a long way off.
All of which is to say: in today's Britain—where media and politicians I once thought better of have allowed themselves to be captured and corrupted by charlatans and the brainworms of appeasing bullies and predators who will never be satiated—the immediate reaction to such an idea, living and working across the UK and 'the mainland' is that it is impossible or only for oligarchs. So I feel like actually doing this is in some way a prefiguration, a living-as-if this better world were more normal.
Practically, it's definitely not a frictionless way of living, but it does allow me, as I develop the Institute for Sustainable Worlds at Norwich, to reflect a bit on the 'worlds' part of the name. What is it like to live between two (albeit pretty similar) worlds? It is important to say up front: my position here is one of a very privileged person moving between two wealthy northern European societies. If my skin were not white, or if I were gender non-conforming, or not a British citizen, or didn't have a Dutch residency card, and so on, my experience would be, I am sure, very different. My aim is that the Institute becomes international in its work — while the complexities of formally being established in multiple countries are something to be explored and weighed up another day, the practicalities are that I want to make use of, myself, being (relatively) well-connected in the Netherlands, and working for a university with a good position within the East Anglian creative industries, innovation, and public sector ecosystems, to help develop something integrated that does more interesting things than could come from only one location. The Institute’s approach is going to depend on linking local and global perspectives: from communities’ imagination to planetary issues such as climate change, I believe we can address topics that are of worldwide scale yet nevertheless have impacts on people’s everyday lives at local levels. For wider European relationships between East Anglia and the Netherlands, the shared landscapes, histories, and current and future challenges of the low-lying regions, from the ever-present North Sea, to societies dealing with agricultural and industrial transitions, make research collaborations a natural opportunity for the Institute to maintain and develop. And of course there are so many tantalising ideas: Doggerland, offshore infrastructures, even the notion that just as Dutch engineers helped build the fenland landscapes of the east of England, so (as Annabel Howland told me recently) some of the sediment being deposited in the south-west Netherlands, expanding Zeeland, comes from the eroding north Norfolk coast.
Photo by Andi Sapey
Earlier in the summer I was lucky to run a workshop, New Waterscapes: Tales from Imagined Coastal Futures, as part of the joint Sainsbury Centre / Norwich University of the Arts symposium Shared Seas: Coastal Encounters organised by Candice Allison and John Kenneth Paranada. With artists, researchers, and community organisers we built speculative future North Sea land/waterscapes and explored what moments of everyday life might be like through stories. We had a Wetropolis with buildings on stilts, new seashore hermits' cabins, giant saline frogs, and a salt-based community travelling using Zorb balls. What matters to those who live in these futures, human or otherwise? What can we learn from how we imagine these futures, that might give us insight into our current contexts? Something perhaps obvious, but interesting, that emerged for me was how the structure of "land" and "sea" leads to worlds being created that are aware of each other, but distinct, with a third society emerging in the going-between, centred on travelling.
My experience so far is that frequent travel between the Netherlands and the UK—usually on the Stena ferry route, Hoek van Holland to Harwich, with trains at both ends—leads to an odd feeling of being something like a character in both places, maybe a wanderer or traveller, perhaps Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap*. Sometimes there is a strange kind of superposition of mental landscapes, like some passage from W.G. Sebald where the events and emotions of one context are taking place in the mind of someone in another, or the psychological juxtaposition of inner and outer landscapes of a Ballard character. (Sometimes it feels like there are perhaps too many worlds, somehow, if the journey involves an excess of doomscrolling about the collapse of American democracy, or the genocide happening right now in Gaza.) I do want to highlight here the importance of the liminal zone: the ritual of transitions, the time spent in the ferry cabin where I am nowhere, before facing Harwich International’s bleak coffee machine at 6.30am, seems an important part of the experience, reducing the abruptness of the change. The worlds are not as different culturally as those in, for example, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but they are subtly different models for a society.
And it’s that slight shift which is especially interesting, somehow. Continually encountering and switching back and forth between versions of everyday life where the basics are in common, but there are little changes in assumptions, worldviews, and emphases encoded and designed into the systems around me (traffic and crossings are the most evident) offers a way of thinking about experiential**** near-futures which while it is by no means radical, is very plausible indeed. In Utrecht as I cycle into the city centre, I see regularly the section of the Catharijnesingel canal that was until 2020 a dual carriageway road. Is this a "future"? It's certainly an alternative, inhabitable, experienceable version of an existing world, in which different priorities are evident, but enough existing reference points are present for it to be relatable. I suspect that, from Humphrey Repton's Red Books to Dutchifying your street to (yes, probably even) AI looksmaxxing apps for people's own 'future selves', the appeal of "new worlds" that are really slightly alternative versions of our world, is effective in a somewhat different way to much more radical future visions that seem further away and more detached.
Catharijnebaan, Utrecht, Netherlands, 6 October 1973. Photo by W. Meijnen. Copyright Utrechts Archief; used under CC-BY 4.0 licence.
The same location, now Catharijnesingel , Utrecht, Netherlands, 25 August 2025. My own photo (from the cyclepath alongside)
More advanced, yet accessible
This idea that in some ways, visiting somewhere similar enough to your own world, but which does things slightly differently, can be a form of visiting "a possible future", is not especially earth-shattering but I think it can be quite powerful. For example, Rob Hopkins' idea of travelling to 2030 by visiting places that seem like they could be the future (not even weak signals really in the Near Future Laboratory sense, but quite strong signals—parts of futures that are definitely here, or at least there, but not evenly distributed), is perhaps obvious, but as a framing it (to me at least) seems an intriguing perspective on futures. Practically: these are models of how our world could be, in an adjacent world, an adjacent possible that is just there. More advanced yet accessible, to modify Raymond Loewy’s MAYA concept.
What could we do with this in design / research terms? I can see some possibilities for how the Institute for Sustainable Worlds might approach a form of situated futuring with communities—much more about anchoring the visions of possible futures in highly plausible variations of real places, ideally those which are recognisably similar to people, even more ideally actually places they can visit and experience.
Harwich International at dawn
[1] who funded the SusLab project on which I worked, many years ago
[2] The designer I still am, despite everything, has a whole slew of user experience and service design improvements I could suggest for both this journey and the Eurostar experience, but that’ll have to be another post one day
[3] or perhaps Goodnight Sweetheart, although less duplicitously!
[4] in Stuart Candy’s term of course