Dr Christian Bason brings new transitions to UTS

Christian is the co-founder of the Transition Collective and a former head of both the publicly funded Danish Design Center and the Danish Government’s MindLab innovation unit. 

You have a background in both political science and design leadership, and you’re also recognised for your expertise in transition design. How has your work evolved over the last 10 years?

If you’d asked me 10 years ago when I worked at MindLab, I would have described my focus as public sector innovation. Then, during my nine years as the CEO of the Danish Design Center, I became immersed in design approaches and design methods for business innovation and sustainability. What interests me now is how we guide, manage, govern and lead the long-term transitions that our societies and organisations need to go through. At the Transition Collective, I work on complex issues including global migration, the future of cities, the role of funding and philanthropy in social change, and how we innovate in global development. 

What drew you to transition design, and why are insights from the discipline so valuable at this particular moment in time?

Businesses, the public sector and even academia have become quite adept at understanding innovation as a way to craft, create and co-design great services and great products. Collectively, we also have some understanding of the systems needed to make those products or services work for people. 

This is the notion of human-centred design and human-centred innovation, which has been very key in my own work. When it comes to the wider context of what we’re creating, however, it’s abundantly clear that there’s a need to transition to a very different kind of economy and a different way of relating between humans, the natural world and the systems that surround us.

Can you give an example? 

In Denmark, we’re seeing a long-term trend of diminishing mental health, especially among young people. And we understand that this trend is systemic, which means the innovation challenge isn’t just about designing a great product or service or policy, but more a question of how we start a conversation about where we want to go. What does a thriving future look like for a city or a society or a region? What does it look like from a company or business perspective? And how do we engage and mobilise more actors, more partners and more parts of society in working together towards that long-term future where young people thrive again? That’s the sort of agenda that I see. 

This theme of driving societal change by working across and between people, professions and sectors is strongly aligned with the interests of UTS. As a newly appointed adjunct professor, what drew you to UTS, and what sort of synergies do you see between the school and your professional interests? 

What sets UTS and the TD School apart is that in addition to being transdisciplinary and clear-thinking around what that means, there’s also a strong design sensibility that, at a more conceptual level, matches with the way I see design and the role of design in innovation and change. Ultimately, these sorts of relationships are always about people. My UTS colleagues and I share similar values in how we address some of the challenges in the world. And then being the heart of such a vibrant city like Sydney feels right, too. There’s already a link between Sydney and Denmark in the Opera House, which is a very transformative design.

Your first visit to UTS is planned for later this year. What are you hoping to achieve during your adjunct professorship? 

In partnering with UTS, I dream about exploring some of those challenges that I know they are interested in. What are the leadership models needed to succeed with transition design? How do we work in a transdisciplinary way, which is something the UTS and the TD School are pioneering? What are the new ways of building governance and collaboration models in society to achieve long-term change? We will develop these ideas together, workshop them together and research them together. 

At a broader level, what sort of value do you think this appointment offers to you, to UTS and other stakeholders beyond the university? 

Any partnership is about potential, so this is an opportunity to create value for the school, for students, for research and for other partners in Australian society. What is interesting is how you take an opportunity like this and make it more systematic. How does it become something that generates more and more value over time? I look forward to crafting this “opportunity machine” together with colleagues at UTS.