Transition and Social Practices

Against the background of environmental problems arising from the growing extraction of natural resources and resource depletion, achieving a sustainable development is an indispensable challenge in the twenty-first century. In the paper "Transition and Social Practices", the authors aim to show how socio-technical and product-service innovations can change social practices, meaning the routine doings in everyday life, and, thus, support transition of socio-technical systems. They introduce theoretical considerations on how social practice theories and the framework of the multi-level perspective in transition research can be linked to better understand transition processes from a micro-macro-link perspective. To illustrate this, cases based on desk research in the field of practices in bathing, heating and nutrition are presented to show how these have changed over the past decades. Based on this, examples of concepts for sustainable product-service-design in these areas are given as leverage points to change social practices in everyday life. These have been developed in research projects or design student seminar works, respectively. The authors argue that this implies that sustainable product-service-systems should be developed in a user- and actor-integrated framework, such as Sustainable Living Labs. The integration of users and other stakeholders into participatory co-creation processes enables tailored solutions that take actual routines and dependencies seriously into account.

The paper "Transition and Social Practices" by Wuppertal Institute's Prof. Dr. Christa Liedtke, Marco Hasselkuß, Dr. Melanie Speck, and Dr. Carolin Baedeker (all Research Group Sustainable Production and Consumption) was published in the Journal of Sustainable Development, volume 10, issue 5. It is available for free download online.