Transition Engineering

IET Prestige Lecture 2010 Podcast:

http://podcasts.otago.ac.nz/nzc4sc/files/2010/05/Susan-Krumdieck-enginee...

If you designed and built a useful machine, and then the operating conditions changed - you would do design modifications and adjustments.  This is my thinking with establishing the field of Transition Engineering.  The whole "machine" of our national power grid, transport networks, production systems, city urban forms, homes and buildings represent the built environment where we now live.  We can plant gardens in our suburban back yards.  We can abandon the whole machine and head for the hills.  But the fact still remains that unprecedented resources have been spent on building the "machine" and that 99% of the people who make up our civilisation depend on it.  There is no way to "substitute" clean energy for the fossil energy that feeds this machine and to keep it working in the same way it is now.  The reality is that the machine needs design modifications and change.  This can't be done by politicians and economists any more than building of it in the first place could be done by them.

I have taken it as a mission to move the members of my profession to the understanding that they are ALL responsible for working on the change projects required to wind down the fossil inputs to the machine.

My main thesis is that this kind of transformation in the engineering profession has happened before with safety.  100 years ago, the engineering profession was participating in design and operation of inherently unsafe factories, mines, products, workplaces, materials... We have come a long way in 100 years because it was the right thing to do.  The history of the development of Safety Engineering is amazing and inspirational. It can serve as a fast-track model of what we must now all do to re-design and re-develop every aspect of the built environment of the fossil fuel era.

I was invited to present the IET prestige lecture for 2010.  I got the chance to speak for 50 minutes on what ever I thought was important.  The audience was both engineers and the general public. If you know an engineer, ask them to watch this.