Do you feel you have been aware of the issues of sustainability since you were a kid? Has this awareness affected your ideas, choices, work, creativity? Have you made a contribution to some area of science, engineering, modelling, business or policy that you think could be useful for “saving the planet”? How many other people do you think have also been working on saving the planet over the past 40 years? Why is the planet in such peril? Do we need just one more idea? Just one more brilliant person? Just one more scenario?

This workshop spends exactly 5 minutes on the problem of diaspora of sustainability champions and how to recast as a mission for convergence. The workshop will then have two intervention brainstorm sessions. The first will be on the psychology of metanoia – breaking down your framework of beliefs, and rebuilding in order to support a new construct. The second will be on the question of what the convergence would create – yes, it is the dreaded curriculum design exercise! We postulate that it is discipline that makes any kind of engineering effective and in demand. Therefore we will construct the curriculum for the new convergent discipline.

Professor Susan Krumdieck teaches and researches in the field of energy transition engineering and specialises in turning crises into opportunities. Susan’s work on transition engineering grew out of sustainability and energy engineering interests in University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She is co-founder and trustee of the Global Association for Transition Engineering. Susan is Chair in Energy Transition Engineering at Heriot-Watt University, where she is research director of the Islands Centre for Net Zero and the founder of the International Transition Labs Network.