Meta means ‘overarching’ and ‘change’. Metadesign means the design of design itself and design of change.
A key understanding guiding this project was that current challenges – climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequality, war, pandemics, mental ill-health – are too complex for individuals or organisation in isolation to grasp, let alone solve. Therefore the project focused on developing principles and upwards 100 tools for synergistic collaboration between many different disciplines, sectors, cultures and interests. An example of the tools we designed, now used internationally in many iterations is Five levels of story-telling which takes people from individual experiences and stakes to shared understanding and new visions in just half an hour. Another key understanding was that current challenges cannot be met with a narrow scope of knowledge. Therefore, we worked with four action styles, representing different ways of working: Languaging, New Knowing, Envisioning and Pushing and Doing. Core to our project was the connection between the individual ‘ME’, the collective ‘WE’, and the larger WORLD, and the essential loop back to ME, reflecting ideas of connected inner and outer change featuring in, for example, the Transition movement, the Permaculture movement, the Inner Development Goals and Engaged Buddhism.
Being part of the project was an amazing opportunity to engage with the deepest purpose and potential of design and to learn with a very exciting team and international network. The frameworks and processes we developed have travelled into many different contexts globally.
The metadesign project was a research collaboration between John Wood (project leader), John Backwell, Batel Dinur, Hannah Jones, Julia Lockheart, Anette Lundebye and Mathilda Tham. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. See the project website for a range of resources.
For an introduction to metadesign see Giaccardi, Eliza. 2005. “Metadesign as An Emergent Design Culture”, in Leonardo, Volume 38, Number 4, August 2005.
Insights from metadesign work in Metadesigning Designing in the Anthropocene, edited by John Wood and published by Routledge, 2022.
Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.