About VEIL

VEIL was established by the Victorian government in Australia through the Victorian Sustainability Fund, as part of the government's Sustainability Action Statement, 2006. VEIL was first a project of the Australian Centre for Science Innovation and Society at the University of Melbourne. University partners include: Monash University, School of Design; RMIT University, School of Architecture and Design; Melbourne University, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning and the School of Land and Environment. Collaborating research groups include: Swinburne University Faculty of Design; LaTrobe University (Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities, Bendigo).

Program Director: Professor Chris Ryan ph 03 83449175
Project Coordinator: Dianne Moy ph 03 83449174
Policy Challenges Research Manager: Kirsten Larsen ph 03 83449189
Distributed Systems Research Fellow: Che Biggs ph 03 83440626
Design Research Assistant & Communications: Kate Archdeacon ph 03 8344 9268
(Former) Sustainable Cities Research Officer: Ferne Edwards

 

Advisory Management Board: Members include: Jon Ward (Toyota Australia), Rebecca Falkingham (Department of Premier and Cabinet), David Hanna (Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development), Rob Adams (Director City Design, Melbourne City Council), Mick Pearce (Design Inc.) Sharon Macdonnell (Department of Sustainability and Environment).

We are in the early stages of a sustainability revolution. Climate change is forging a new global dialogue that may prove to be unlike anything before it in human history. That dialogue has already shifted from a focus on the scientific evidence of global warming to the need for urgent action.

What will be tested in the years to come is our ability to change direction.

Mitigating climate change (and adapting to a rise in global temperatures) points to an historic shift in the past trajectory of development. The transition to a sustainable economy, to a low carbon (and for Australia, a low water) economy, represents an unparalleled challenge to our systems of social and technical innovation. Incremental improvement – doing more efficiently what we currently do – will not be enough. We have only decades to transform the 'carbon' basis of our economy; the best current modelling suggests we will need a global reduction in annual CO2 production of between 60-80% (compared to current levels) by 2050. With such targets, we are not talking just about the re-construction of our world, but about its re-invention.

If ever we needed the spirit of entrepreneurial action, of creative destruction, it is now.

VEIL involves an evolving 'think-tank' referred to as 'the Hub'. At its core the Hub has design academics seconded from the design schools of Victorian Universities. Researchers from various academic and other institutions, representatives from industry, from government and environment and community groups, contribute to the deliberations of the Hub through a variety of structured processes.

 

 

The work of the Hub combines research, analysis, design speculation and evaluation, resulting in visions, concepts, reports and papers, identifying fruitful long-term (typically 25 year) scenarios for sustainable solutions (products, services, systems, life-styles, built environments and infrastructure). These long-term visions and eco-innovation ideas are also formulated as 'design studio' topics for the university design schools (and as student and design competitions). Through these design studios, ideas and visions are further researched and tested by hundreds of (final year) design students as part of their academic programs. (Diagram 2 below)

Future visions (developed through the Hub, Studio and PPW process) need to be meaningful and achievable. The VEIL project attempts to set those visions in the context of particular 'trajectories of development', plausible scenarios for the process of change that could have brought them into existence. VEIL projects place considerable emphasis on such trajectories and on the agents of change that support them.

A 'trajectory of development' is a way of 'backcasting' from the future vision to the present. This leads to two interrelated sets of investigations:

1. "Revealing the Present": Are there emerging 'sites' of change in the present which could be considered as the precursors of the new trajectories?
2. "Vision Driven Innovations": If the future 'looks' like that, then what new innovations today could help to bring that about?

For (1) the VEIL SustainableMelbourne.com web-site and various elements of research that are collectively referred to as observatory projects, contribute to revealing the present; the future visions provide a 'window' through which to observe and make sense of current social and technical innovations.

For (2) there are projects that can also be elaborated through a PPW process, that are referred to as 'VEIL - Seeding Ideas'.

Examples of both investigations can be found within this web site.