Abstract
This paper explores how organizational design can support sustainability transitions in complex industrial contexts, through the development of situated, visual tools. The study is based on a one- year design intervention within a railway maintenance facility in France, aiming to improve industrial waste sorting practices following the departure of the site's waste manager. Drawing from system design, service design, and Actor-Network Theory, the project approaches waste management not as a technical issue, but as a socio-material system of routines, infrastructures, and tacit knowledge. To navigate this complexity, the design team produced a series of hybrid documents— field enquiry maps, analog and digital car to graph ies, and a systemic waste itinerary—that supported both observation and transformation. These documents are analyzed as translation devices that make visible the often-invisible flows, frictions, and organizational logics structuring the field. Beyond their descriptive value, they acted as mediating and per formative artefacts—supporting stakeholder alignment, operational decision- making, and strategic reframing. By examining how these representations shaped understanding and action, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions on the role of design in enabling sustainability transitions. It highlights how representational tools can serve as scaffolds for systemic intervention, especially in infrastructure- heavy and operationally constrained environments. The article also reflects on the evolving role of designers as facilitators of alignment between long-term visions and everyday practices.
Keywords
Systemic design; Situated design practice; Enacting documents; Sustainability
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.723
Citation
Leger, D.W.,and Gentès, A.(2025) Maps That Matter: Design as a Translation tool in Industrial Sustainability Transitions, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.723
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 10 - Design Practices & Impacts
Maps That Matter: Design as a Translation tool in Industrial Sustainability Transitions
This paper explores how organizational design can support sustainability transitions in complex industrial contexts, through the development of situated, visual tools. The study is based on a one- year design intervention within a railway maintenance facility in France, aiming to improve industrial waste sorting practices following the departure of the site's waste manager. Drawing from system design, service design, and Actor-Network Theory, the project approaches waste management not as a technical issue, but as a socio-material system of routines, infrastructures, and tacit knowledge. To navigate this complexity, the design team produced a series of hybrid documents— field enquiry maps, analog and digital car to graph ies, and a systemic waste itinerary—that supported both observation and transformation. These documents are analyzed as translation devices that make visible the often-invisible flows, frictions, and organizational logics structuring the field. Beyond their descriptive value, they acted as mediating and per formative artefacts—supporting stakeholder alignment, operational decision- making, and strategic reframing. By examining how these representations shaped understanding and action, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions on the role of design in enabling sustainability transitions. It highlights how representational tools can serve as scaffolds for systemic intervention, especially in infrastructure- heavy and operationally constrained environments. The article also reflects on the evolving role of designers as facilitators of alignment between long-term visions and everyday practices.