DesignShifts is an experimental lab, learning platform, and community exploring new ways to design, work, and relate to the world in times of systemic transition.
We are living through a convergence of crises. Climate collapse, deepening inequality, and democratic erosion are reshaping our world. Beneath them lie systems that determine how we live, work, relate, and distribute power.
Built around perpetual growth, these systems extract from our planet, our attention, and our relationships. Design, as it is practiced today, often reinforces them: producing things we don't need, creating systems that obscure harm, and developing products that consume resources beyond what our planet can sustain.
The costs are too high, and the harm too great. The growing rupture in our social, ecological, and economic systems makes clear that the ways we've organized our world are no longer serving us. What comes after growth at all costs? And what role can design play in making a different future possible?
These questions are at the heart of DesignShifts.
Our work is grounded in the belief that we need to shift the way we design our systems, products, spaces, and economies to meet this moment of climate breakdown, social fragmentation, and growing inequality.
Through theory, practice, making, and community, we challenge the assumptions that shape our world, imagine alternatives, and explore how design can move away from productivity, consumption, and capital gain towards care, structural equity, and collective well-being.
Our work is less about creating more things and more about developing the practices, relationships, and infrastructures needed to support human and planetary flourishing.
Our work happens across three connected spaces, each feeding the others:
Theory: Learning through research and reflections
DesignShifts started with small provocations, asking big questions. Now we're expanding by exploring the ideas, frameworks, and critical perspectives in more depth.
Practice: Collaborative
design spaces
We host courses, events, and intimate community practice sessions where we explore shifting together. We help individuals and teams pivot their creative capacity toward planetary health and social equity.
Making: Experiments & real-world projects
Through The Making Lab we partner with individuals, organizations, and communities to create regenerative solutions and test our frameworks in practice.
Our seven DesignShifts dimensions
The seven dimensions are the lenses through which DesignShifts explores the systems shaping our lives and collective wellbeing. They help us look at challenges from different perspectives, uncover connections, and identify where change might be possible.
They are interconnected, rather than separate workstreams. A challenge that appears to be about organisational culture, for example, might also involve power, purpose, relationships, and the wider system.
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Asks you to slow down and pay attention. Invites you to examine how we perceive, where we direct attention, and how we help others see and choose differently
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Asks you to loosen your grip. Invites you to work with uncertainty, adaptation, and what wants to become
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Asks you to see the web. Broadens how we understand interdependence, complexity, and root causes
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Asks you to question power and look below the default. Questions whose knowledge counts, who has been excluded, and how we design with many ways of knowing
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Asks you to remember that you are not separate from the living world. Looks at what we can move from extracting to belonging, and design within living systems
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Asks you to make space for others. Examines we tend the connections between people, communities, and the social fabric that holds us
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Asks the hardest question: what is all of this for? It invites you to imagine and build toward shared futures, reciprocity with the earth, and life beyond extraction
A conversation about DesignShifts
A behind-the-scenes look at DesignShifts. This conversation between Jayavanthi Gayathri, John V Willshire, and Ida Persson — the founder of DesignShifts.
The conversation was hosted by the STEPS collective in Spring of 2025.
The vision is to move design from a tool that contributes to division, destruction, and isolation to a practice that unites, rebuilds, and reconnects us to our inner selves, each other, and nature.
FAQs
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The project brings together people looking to Shift the way we design products, environments, governments, policies, messages, etc.
We're a global community of designers, researchers, teachers, scientists, and citizens who are tired of business as usual. We're committed to shifting our postures, our power, our perspectives, our practices, and the purpose of design to aid the transition towards a better future.
We're committed to harm reduction within the current system while dreaming and designing beyond its borders. This means working to minimize damage through immediate interventions like making existing services more accessible or policies more equitable, while simultaneously imagining and prototyping entirely new ways of organizing society, work, and care.
We recognize that real change happens when different kinds of people collaborate with each other. Beyond the borders of professional titles, we see that "design" happens on a day-to-day basis by many different kinds of people. From the policies that guide our social structures to the products and services we use daily, from healthcare environments to community organizing efforts, design is everywhere.
I hope we can shift WHO is doing the design as much as HOW design is being done. We're talking about parents designing more nurturing home environments, community organizers designing more effective campaigns, healthcare workers designing better patient experiences, and neighbors designing stronger local networks. Design isn't just happening in studios and boardrooms but wherever people are actively shaping their world.
In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar writes:"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."
I hope that these shifts will inspire a world where designers “walk hand in hand with those who are protecting and redefining well-being, life projects, territories, local economies, and communities worldwide”. (Design for the Pluriverse)
I hope this work can inspire and activate people from all fields, corners of the world, and paths of life. We will not shift the future for and through design by staying in our bubbles or echo chambers. This is the work of many, and it requires all of us.
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DesignShifts is a project that explores a better future for and through design. We explore intentional Shifts that can help us move design from a tool that contributes to division, destruction, and isolation, to a practice that unites, rebuilds, and reconnects us to our inner selves, each other, and nature.
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The vision is to move design from a tool that contributes to division, destruction, and isolation to a practice that unites, rebuilds, and reconnects us to our inner selves, each other, and nature.
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No! You don’t need a design title to participate. As a matter of fact, you don’t need a professional title at all. We recognize that real change happens when different kinds of people collaborate with each other and that expertise comes both from work and life experiences.
Beyond the borders of the professional world we can see that “design” is something everyone does on a day-to-day basis and by many different kinds of people. I hope that this piece of work can inspire and activate people beyond design titles. I hope it can create new connections between people from different fields and walks-of-life. I hope that it can Shift WHO is doing the design and how the design is being done.
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We believe that design plays a big role in shaping our physical and emotional environment. From the products we make, the messages we put out there, and the spaces we craft, design has the power to affect change. Through design we can understand and access situations, create narratives for a better future, and create actionable steps to move forward. Design has the potential to be part of creating a better tomorrow.In the article: The Power of Lo-TEK: A Design Movement to Rebuild Understanding of Indigenous Philosophy and Vernacular Architecture Julia Watson writes: “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.” Design, with its problem solving, imaginative and action oriented abilities can aid the transition towards something better.
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The project was started by me, Ida Persson, in a moment of personal transition. I was looking to Shift my personal career away from serving corporate growth towards serving communities and planetary florushing. I wanted to create a space where practitioners could develop mindsets and methods that could Shift the current state of design in order to aid the transition towards a better tomorrow. The project is in a constant state of evolution. I hope that the perspectives, processes, powers, postures, and purpose of design will be shaped together as a collective. Once the shifts have moved from abstract concept into lived practices, DesignShifts as a project will dissolve.
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As we find ourselves in the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy, poverty, and meaning it is important to recognize how the systems, products, and environments that are causing harm today are not broken. They are working as they were designed.. If we want to aid the transition towards a better tomorrow, we must be willing to rethink and redesign our perspectives, processes, and purpose. The time is now because tomorrow it will be too late.
Let’s shift together
We love support with people and organizations ready to move beyond extractive, growth-driven paradigms and shift towards new ways of creating value, meeting needs, and shaping a more just and regenerative world.
Is this you?