PhD Research: Designing Regenerative Transitions on background image of leaves. Social design sydney and sticky desisgn studio logos.

In this presentation and discussion of her PhD research, Michelle Miller will present her thesis in two halves. The first half will look at the Transition Design case study she undertook to understand how to increase transition to regenerative, ecological, and resilient approaches to agriculture—by design. The second half will then delve into the design-based methodology and practices that underpin the research, what she learned about the role of ecological thinking in both the case study and the methodology, and directions for future research.

About Michelle

Michelle Miller is a Research Scientist focused on accelerating Sustainability Transitions at CSIRO (Canberra, Australia). Her research aims to apply and further transitions research through action. She seeks to bring insight from transitions research together with the perspectives of industry, science, government and communities through design-experimentation, collaborative processes, generative tools, and transitions capacity-building to help people working on sustainability challenges collectively build agency to materialize pathways to desirable futures, catalyze systems change, and progress transitions.

For more than 20 years, Michelle has led, facilitated, and helped build capability for design-based, participatory approaches to innovation and change-making, whether via regional initiatives, strategy and organizational development, services, or product development. Over that time, she has had the opportunity to work in diverse areas including science, infrastructure, social services, media, telecommunications, all levels of government, regional Australia, and agriculture. That work has included supporting many different types of actors to co-develop and co-deliver innovation and change, for instance farmers, community members, executives and managers, industry stakeholders, and policy makers.

She holds a PhD from the University of Technology Sydney in Transition Design. Her PhD research explored the methodology and practice of design for transitions and featured a project to design for transition to regenerative approaches to agriculture.

About Transition Design

In December, 2017, Social Design Sydney hosted Terry Irwin to talk about Transition Design.
Check the video at this link. There is also other videos from the evening, including a response from Kees Dorst.
https://socialdesignsydney.com/transition-design/

Recording of the talk