How socio-technical transitions work

A little while ago, we published in this space what we called a founding manifesto for Creative Regeneration. A declaration about why designing transitions — ecosocial, technological, economic… even personal? — requires designing the conditions that make those transformations possible, rather than simply managing their symptoms.

Today we go deeper into how the social and technological transitions that shape institutions, policies, markets… and ultimately our lives, actually happen. How is AI going to affect my work? What’s going to happen with housing? What will become of my organisation under that new regulation? In each of these questions about the future, two opposing perspectives coexist.

The first: the “system” (whatever that is) changes, and there is nothing I — or my organisation — can do about it, because the conditions of the environment determine everything. So there’s no point reducing my meat consumption, because the big industries have already decided everything and they’re the ones to blame. And only the norm determines what is possible.

The second is a kind of individualist optimism that tells me I can adapt to anything, that I can do whatever I want — “if you want it, you can have it.” That if I go vegetarian, I’m saving the planet. That if AI puts me out of a job, tomorrow I’ll launch a startup and that’ll be that.
So today, let’s try not to fall uncritically into either of those two opposed positions — and instead, increase our capacity to shape our own world in a slightly more realistic way.

A framework for understanding transitions

In 2002, Frank Geels published what would become one of the most influential frameworks in the study of systemic change: the Multi-Level Perspective. This can help us understand what agency we have, what interventions we can make, what actions to take… to contribute to the kind of change we want to see.

A note: people like Geels or Ezio Manzini call these “socio-technical” transitions, precisely because they understand that any transformation emerges from a continuum between aspects related to technology, and aspects related to norms, culture, and forms of social organisation. (Sorry, techbros — I know that last part is a bit harder to take, but it’s essential).

Let’s look at the three levels Geels proposes.

(1) The landscape is the macro level — demographic trends, geopolitical shifts, ecological forces, the cultural paradigms that run through everything. It is the context that no single actor controls… but that all of us must navigate. It sets the inexorable pace that reconfigures everything below it, everything we experience.

(2) The socio-technical regime is the intermediate level — the dominant and relatively stable configuration of technologies, institutions, norms, markets, cultures, and user practices that organises how things are done within a system (whether an organisation, a company, or a whole sector). It is what gives coherence to the current system. And it is also what makes change so difficult: the regime is not just an external structure — that “superstructure” Marx talked about — but a way of seeing and doing that the actors themselves (you, me, specific entities and organisations…) reproduce daily, often without being aware of it.

(3) Innovation niches are the spaces where radical alternatives emerge — experimental and fragile… which is precisely why they only emerge under very specific conditions. This is where the practices, technologies, and models are developed and tested that could, if they gain sufficient traction and if the regime creates the conditions for it, eventually become part of the regime and redefine it. That housing cooperative based on the right to use. That new technology promising a new way to generate renewable energy, but which hasn’t yet broken into the mainstream. That product, that service, that startup… born to solve an urgent social problem, but which the market hasn’t yet learned to read.

Many of these niches can be actively created because landscape pressures open windows of opportunity. Others… we create the spaces — marginal, even a little nerdy, I’d say — for them to emerge, but they won’t be able to enter the socio-technical regime until a window of opportunity appears. Sometimes, these niches end up dying as laboratory experiments that couldn’t sustain themselves long enough to find that window.

So the central point of Geels and his model of socio-technical transitions is this: the understanding that a real transition requires a certain alignment across all three levels. Acting only in the niches — that is, designing new products, technologies, business models — without understanding the higher levels, and without seeking alignment with levers of change within them, produces innovations that don’t scale. And so we’re left with what Ezio Manzini called an “archipelago” of disconnected islands: inspiring experiments that never produce real change.

Acting only at the socio-technical regime level (norms, governance models, business models…), without giving form to concrete niches — those seeds of change — means staying with theoretical reforms and no tangible alternatives. And the landscape? Ignoring it produces strategies that become obsolete, that aren’t future-proof, and that find no fertile ground to take root.

The truth is, as individuals and organisations, we don’t have the power to manufacture those windows of opportunity. But we can organise our work of creation — of products, technologies, businesses, norms, protocols, strategies… — in such a way that, when the right windows open, we have something ready to step through them.

The Creative Regeneration framework focuses precisely on this, working with that multi-level perspective. But I’ll come to that in a moment — first, let’s look at the gaps this transitions theory still leaves open.

From transitions theory to practical action

Geels’ Multi-Level Perspective is a very powerful framework for understanding how transitions happen. However… Geels describes systemic change with great sophistication, but provides little guidance on how to design for it from our own positions.

That is the gap Creative Regeneration tries to fill. Beyond the transitions analysis framework, we are building a strategic design methodology for actors who want to develop the capacity to navigate transitions. To have a voice and a vote in that landscape of change, and in the direction it takes.

Designing in three movements: transitions through Creative Regeneration

Each complete cycle of Explore-Activate-Impulse, which we described in our last paper, operates across all three levels at once. And what is constituted in Impulse modifies the conditions that Explore will encounter in the next iteration. The system we will study next time is not the same — because we have constituted something, a new niche, that is already transforming it.

There is a pursuit of “recursiveness”: with each design cycle, increasing the capacity of the system to produce its own wellbeing, its own conditions. We could also call this Regenerative Economy. As you prefer. In any case, what is vital to understand in this process is that the actors within the system are (we are) also co-producers of the system’s conditions. We drive or block certain paths with every design decision.

EXPLORE from the landscape down to the niches. A panoramic view.

Having a strategic vision of the system we operate within — as an organisation or as a community — means identifying macro trends and forces (ecological pressures, cultural and regulatory shifts that are reconfiguring the environment…). But it also means understanding, at the level of the socio-technical regime (our organisation, our territory, our sector), the written and unwritten norms, the power relations, the material infrastructures and worldviews that determine what can be thought and done within the current system. And it means mapping the niches: detecting weak signals, emerging practices, experiments already happening at the margins that might point toward where the system is heading.

For this, the methods we propose in the “Explore” phase range from stakeholder maps and value network diagrams — which make visible who participates and how across the different levels —, foresight tools for detecting signals of change in the environment — political, economic, social, technological, ecological, legal —; and futures design exercises to open possible and desirable scenarios toward which to orient action. So that when those windows of opportunity open… we have prepared ourselves for their possibilities.

ACTIVATE the co-creation of strategies across both regime and niches.

Understanding ourselves, as individuals and organisations, from the position we occupy (or want to occupy) within the system in transition. And from there, designing the strategic interventions that increase the likelihood that the niches — the products, services, business models, and emerging practices we want to develop — gain traction and at some point enter the mainstream.

This is what it means to design conditions, not just solutions. Working on our positioning and strategy, understanding them as interventions in the transition system: what narratives and purposes can legitimise change at the socio-technical regime level; what collaborations and alliances can create the institutional conditions for niches to accumulate and grow; what business models can make the alternatives economically viable and not just desirable.

The methods we propose in “Activate” help us think about the value we offer, not only through a market lens but with that systemic logic that encompasses the economic, the social and the environmental. Definitions of vision, mission and purpose as narrative anchors that orient action under conditions of uncertainty. Value proposition maps built not only from the needs of human users — nor, of course, only from the needs of the client. And tools for backcasting from the desirable future we’ve set for ourselves, back toward the present, to understand what to do right now, in this precise moment, that can position us where we want to be in the future.

IMPULSE the materialisation of niches that follow our strategy.

This is the movement that gives tangible form to those niches: the businesses, products and services, the everyday experiences that make the alternatives we built into our strategies real, liveable, and sustainable over time.

It is about giving form to experiences and artefacts that will make certain behaviours, relations, and beliefs possible — and thus contribute to transforming the conditions we explored in the first movement.
Those niches are configurations of practices, technologies, narratives, and infrastructures that need to be designed as systems. In “Impulse”, we propose methods that help give shape to the portfolio of initiatives, products, and services. Methods for visualising, all at once, the tangible experience that the system’s actors live through, and the invisible infrastructures that make it possible — in the manner of a service blueprint. Experiences and infrastructures that embed strategy into everyday life.

Designing for Regeneration; Regenerating Design

Creative Regeneration, as a community and as a methodological framework, is a work in progress. Working under Creative Commons, in open knowledge, the idea is that any practitioner can use, adapt, and improve the frameworks we work with.

We are not simply generating an analytical framework for academics, nor an expert consultancy service — though it can serve those purposes too. Rather, we are building a framework for collective practice, proposed to give us the capacity to participate in the transformation of our world.

⚪ And you… how do you approach the three levels — landscape, socio-technical regime, niches — of transitions?