Suzanne Benn talks about the Anthropocene at Designing our Future event

Designing our future: A conversation about the Anthropocene, Transition Design & Sustainability

Suzanne Benn
Professor of Sustainable Enterprise in School of Management, UTS Business School

For the first time in the evolution of life on planet Earth a single species has become so numerous, so widely distributed, so rapacious, and so unresponsive to ecosystem feedback as to seriously disrupt the biosphere's critical life support systems. We humans are now the dominant force for Earth system change. We have become a force of Nature. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

Fundamental change at every level of our society is needed to address the issues confronting us in the Anthropocene. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, depletion of natural resources and the widening gap between rich and poor are just a few of the ‘wicked problems’ that require new approaches to problem solving. The transition to sustainable futures calls for new ways of designing that are based upon a deep understanding of how to design for change and transition within complex systems.

Transition Design is an area of design research, practice and study which looks toward design-led societal transition toward more sustainable futures. Transition Design acknowledges that we are living in ‘transitional times’. It takes as its central premise the need for societal transitions to more sustainable futures and argues that design has a key role to play in these transitions. It applies an understanding of the interconnectedness of social, economic, political and natural systems to address problems at all levels of spatiotemporal scale in ways that improve quality of life.