A better future for and through design text with images of leaves, butterflies and larva

DesignShifts is a movement, experimental lab, and learning platform where we research and practice non-extractive design methods for times of systemic transition.

We challenge traditional design (and capitalistic) paradigms that focus on efficiency, individual consumption, and product output. Instead, it invites designers, researchers, organizations, and communities to explore design as a force for healing, equity, and collective wellbeing.

DESIGNSHIFTERS

New Design Roles Responses
For a Shifting World

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Explore all DesignShifts

WHAT WE DO

Theory, practice, and making: co-creating the future we want

DesignShifts was started as a small content series asking big questions. We wanted to explore how we can shift design and the world at large, away from extraction towards care, justice, and connection.

Through theory, practice, community, and making we’re now expanding these ideas alongside designers, dreamers, strategists, scientists, authors, parents, etc. who recognize that the old model is breaking. The next one is not yet formed.

Together, we work in this transition — building the practices we need now.

Learn about our work
  • Close-up drawing of several leaves or palm fronds radiating outward with a circled design resembling a moon or planet with hands reaching toward it in the lower left corner in yellowish lines on a yellow background.

    “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”

    Ruha Benjamin

  • Light yellow background with faint leaf patterns

    "At the same time as we’re surviving in the mouth of the dragon, we also need to be feeding our vision."

    Audre Lord

  • Light yellow background with faint line sketches of leaves and plant stems.

    “With environmental and societal collapse imminent in the coming decades, design at the intersection of anthropology, ecology, and innovation is the most pressing discussion of our time.”

    Julia Watson

  • Yellow background with a subtle size of a bird, with some long legs, a long tail, and a small head, possibly a heron or similar bird.

    "Could it be that another design imagination, this time more radical and constructive, is emerging? Might a new breed of designers come to be thought of as transition activists? If this were to be the case, they would have to walk hand in hand with those who are protecting and redefining well-being, life projects, territories, local economies, and communities worldwide."

    Designs for the pluriverse

  • A yellow piece of paper with a sketch of a self-portrait, including an eye, nose, and mouth, drawn with a pen or pencil.

    “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

    Ursula K. Le Guin

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