The concept of transformation in relation to climate and other global change is increasingly receiving attention. The concept provides important opportunities to help examine how rapid and fundamental change to address contemporary global challenges can be facilitated. This paper contributes to discussions about transformation by providing a social science, arts and humanities perspective to open up discussion and set out a research agenda about what it means to transform and the dimensions, limitations and possibilities for transformation. Key focal areas include: (1) change theories, (2) knowing whether transformation has occurred or is occurring; (3) knowledge production and use; (4), governance; (5) how dimensions of social justice inform transformation; (6) the limits of human nature; (7) the role of the utopian impulse; (8) working with the present to create new futures; and (9) human consciousness. In addition to presenting a set of research questions around these themes the paper highlights that much deeper engagement with complex social processes is required; that there are vast opportunities for social science, humanities and the arts to engage more directly with the climate challenge; that there is a need for a massive upscaling of efforts to understand and shape desired forms of change; and that, in addition to helping answer important questions about how to facilitate change, a key role of the social sciences, humanities and the arts in addressing climate change is to critique current societal patterns and to open up new thinking. Through such critique and by being more explicit about what is meant by transformation, greater opportunities will be provided for opening up a dialogue about change, possible futures and about what it means to reshape the way in which people live.

The purpose of our article is to propose that compromising is a constitutive characteristic of those marketing systems that entail matters of public interest or concern. In such markets, actors design compromises as they encounter criticisms of and contending justifications for the market's products, as these refer to price, efficiency in production and use, regulatory compliance or ecological sustainability. Tests and justifications are vital in order to determine what is valuable and by which measure. As a theory framework, the economic sociology of conventions provides a basis for assessing these contests, compromises, and justifications over the issue of worth in a marketing context. Through an ethnographic study of the regulated activities of chemicals service companies supporting the upstream petroleum industry, we assess how actors evaluate and justify the market's products and services in this environmentally sensitive setting by means of tests drawing from different orders of worth: the green, the industrial and the market order. Our contributions show that by artful and pragmatic compromising around exchanges, actors in marketing systems can balance several conflicting orders of worth over the question of worth without needing to converge on an overriding institutional logic.

Positionings and possibilities This chapter seeks to challenge aspects of anthropology and design that curtail their potential to be significant agents of social, material and ecological change for the better. In doing so we also seek to open up the possibility for the anthropological imagination to play a greater role in the shaping of the world; we are critical of anthropology where the discipline tends not to build upon observations of the world and keeps itself at an arm's length from the practical formation of future environments and things. Addressing design, we critique practices that produce and proliferate material things largely ignorant of the extended dynamics of time, materials and ecology. Whilst we acknowledge that these versions of the disciplines are to some extent stereotypes and (therefore) do not reflect their full scope, we still make the case that there is need for a radical reformulation of how materials, time and ecology are considered in anthropologically-informed processes of design and making. We develop our argument through the discussion of periods of participant observation that we carried out within two distinct situations of making. The first case is concerned with everyday working life in a product design studio, where activities of making are situated within a commercial consulting context. Here we examine how day-today experiences of time become contracted and relations with materials and ecology become narrowed. The second case focuses upon the practice of self-building, whereby people construct their own ecofriendly homes. Here, the makers work with a more extended idea of time, one that correlates with a pronounced sensitivity to materials and ecology. Considering these two cases together, we draw out an important analytical point: that the different situations or processes of making reveal different senses of the present, and, furthermore, that different processes of making may invoke or at least encourage different perceptions of time. We refer to this phenomenon as 'different presents in the making', whereby socialities of making, perceptions of time, involvements with materials and sensitivities to ecology become bound-up together and co-productive of one another. Underlying our point here is the idea that the grander notions of 'future', 'society' and 'ecology', and the possibilities that they entail, are always grounded in the experiential qualities of the present. Whilst we are critical of the example of mainstream design we see in our first case, and largely supportive of the alternative presented in the latter, our point is not to set them in opposition to one another. Instead, the alternative approach of the latter opens up possibilities for practices of design and anthropology which are attuned to more extended dynamics of time, materials and ecology. Furthermore, we position ourselves within a stream of recent design anthropology thinking that considers 'ethnographies of the possible' (Halse 2013), adding our voices to attempts to 'counter the simplified image of ...

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