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VEIL - Victorian Eco Innovation Lab

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Staffing and Management

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
Senior Research Fellow, David Turnbull ph 61 (0)3 9380 4645
(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).

Chris Ryan

Professor Chris Ryan VEIL DirectorChris Ryan has worked for over 30 years across various areas of science, technology, environmental policy and design and in projects that span the community sector, academia, government and international agencies, and business.

His community sector work includes the creation of a number of networks of ‘alternative’ and ‘radical’ technology in the UK in the 1970’s. He brought this work brought back to Australia for the creation of several community technology programs and, in 1978, a community plan for environmental and socially-useful work that became the Centre for Research into Environmental Strategies (CERES), still existing today in the Melbourne Suburb of Brunswick.

In academic work he help found the first multi-disciplinary undergraduate socio-environmental degree program at RMIT University that spanned two faculties (Social Science and Architecture and Design). That program ran from 1984 to 1997. He was foundation professor of Design and Sustainability at RMIT from 1990, and Director of the National (Key) Centre for Environmental Design from 1989-98. In this position he directed the National EcoReDesign program, working with 20 Australian companies to develop a new eco-design methodology and bring new greener products into the market.

Professor Ryan left Australia in 1998 to take up a position of Professor, and subsequently Director, of the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) in Lund, Sweden. That Institute, which focuses on new sustainable systems of production and consumption, is attached to Lund University. Its research program is closely linked to the formation of government policy, innovation and industry strategy. Professor Ryan returned to Australia from Sweden in 2002-3 to work with RMIT’s Lab 3000 researching the potential for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to contribute to eco-innovation. The outcomes of that research appeared in Lab Report 03 - "Digital Eco-Sense: Sustainability and ICT, a new terrain for innovation". In parallel with that research, he initiated the international "Eco-Sense" program linking University design schools around the world to explore new possibilities for transformative eco-innovation.

He joined the University of Melbourne in 2006 as Professor and Co-Director of the Australian Centre for Science Innovation and society and as Director of the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (based on the Eco-Sense program). He is now Professor and Director of VEIL as a research unit within the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. He was theme leader Sustainable Cities for the Melbourne Sustainable Societies Institute until April 2010.

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Professor Ryan has collaborated with many eco-design related research groups in Europe, including Domus Academy and the Politecnico di Milano, Italy and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. He has been a member of the international assessment panel of MISTRA in Stockholm for their four-year ‘innovative ideas for the environment’ research grants program (2004-8). He holds the position of Adjunct Professor in Design Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney and in Industrial Design at RMIT and is Visiting Professor at the IIIEE at Lund University. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the 'Journal of Industrial Ecology' (Yale University and Wiley-Blackwell Press). His most recent books are Imaging Sustainability, RMIT University press 2007 and Design for Sustainability – a step by step approach published by UN Environment program 2009. In 2008 he was awarded an ERASMUS fellowship for work in Europe on distributed systems and resilience.

His work with government and international agencies includes a range of policy reviews and research for state and federal governments in Australia, a four-year tenure on the Community Environment, Art and Design committee of the Australia Council and a membership of the Council’s Community Cultural Development Board. He has worked with the UK Design Council in London and with the UN Environment Program (Division of Technology, Industry and Economics) in Paris on various programs related to eco-design and sustainable consumption. He was the author of the UNEP Global Status Report on Sustainable Consumption for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. In 2008-9 he was Chair of the Premiers Design Award in Victoria and Director-Curator of the DEAKINS 09, the Victorian government’s Alfred Deakin Lectures, on ‘Climate and Innovation’.
His industry work includes projects for Electrolux (Europe); Electrolux (Asia Pacific); Volvo Penta, (Sweden); Brio (Sweden); Body Shop (Australasia); Blackmores (Australia); Isle Property Development Group (Australia); Fletcher constructions (Australia). He has worked in long terms consulting roles with Schiavello Systems Furniture (Australia) and the Transurban group. He is a Board member of the Banksia Foundation, Australia’s peak environmental awards agency.


Di Moy


Kirsten Larsen
Kirsten manages policy research at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab at the University of Melbourne. Prior to this Kirsten worked in sustainability policy for the Victorian Government for 5 years. Kirsten uses futures thinking and research in her current work on opportunities for secure and sustainable food systems. This work has included the release of Sustainable and Secure Food Systems for Victoria: What do we know? What do we need to know? in early 2008, which led to involvement in a wide range of sustainable food projects across Victoria including the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Future Food and Farming project Steering Committee and the VicHealth Healthy Eating Advisory Panel. Kirsten’s current work includes: developing the concept of Food Sensitive Urban Design; research into greenhouse emissions and vulnerabilities in food freight systems; and a Food Supply Scenarios project exploring the implications of multiple scenarios on food supply in Victoria.

 

Kate Archdeacon


Che Biggs

Che Biggs is investigating the value of distributed systems in a collaborative project between VEIL and the McCaughey Centre. This project involves identifying, exploring and communicating what the distributed systems approach means and how it can help build a more ‘resilient’ low-carbon future. Research in this area is intended to inform other aspects of VEIL and McCaughey Centre work and contribute to wider understanding of alternative (more sustainable) systems of production and consumption. Briefing papers produced as part of this research can downloaded from the Publications or Distributed Systems research pages of this website.

Che has worked with sustainability issues from a range of angles in Australia and overseas within private, government, community and NGO driven projects. His experience includes involvement with regional strategy development and impact assessment in planning contexts, working with technical and regulatory aspects of ‘Green’ buildings and with the mapping and assessment of infrastructure and ecosystems. Before joining VEIL, Che worked for WSP Sweden International.

Che has an Honours degree in Environmental Science from Adelaide University and a Masters in Environmental Management and Policy from the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) in Lund, Sweden.

Michael Trudgeon


David Turnbull

Senior Research Fellow, Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL), Faculty of Architecture, University of Melbourne; School of Sociology, Lancaster University.

tel: 61 (0)3 9380 4645
email: gt( at )unimelb.edu.au

Qualifications
B.A. Honours in Philosophy, Trinity College, Dublin, 1965. M.A. 1988.
Ph.D. Melbourne University, 1997.

Publications

Books

Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge, Routledge,  London, 2003 2nd ed.

Maps Are Territories: Science is an Atlas, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1993. First edition, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1989.

Technoscience Worlds, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1991.

Mapping The World in the Mind: An Investigation of the Unwritten Knowledge of the Micronesian Navigators, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1990.

Max Charlesworth, Lyndsay Farrall, Terry Stokes, and David Turnbull, Life Among The Scientists: An Anthropological Study of an Australian Scientific Community, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989. Reprinted Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1992.

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Refereed Journal Articles

‘Introduction’ in David Turnbull ed. Special Issue on The Futures of Indigenous Knowledges, Futures, vol. 41, n.1, Feb, 2009, 1-5.

‘Maps, Narratives and Trails: Performativity, Hodology, Distributed Knowledge in Complex Adaptive Systems– an Approach to Emergent Mapping’, Geographical Research, vol. 45, n. 2, 2007, 140-9.

'Locating, Negotiating,  and Crossing Boundaries: A Western Desert Land Claim, The Tordesillas Line and The West Australian Border’ in Annemarie Mol and John Law eds Special Issue on Boundary Variations, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,  vol. 23,  n.5 2005, 757-70.

‘Multiplicity, Criticism and Knowing What to Do Next: Way-finding in a Transmodern World’. Response to Meera Nanda’s Prophets Facing Backwards’ in James Maffie ed. Social Epistemology Special Issue Science, Modernity, Critique, vol. 19, no.1, 19-32, 2005.

Book Chapters, Anthologies, Online and Encyclopedia Articles

‘Boundary-Crossings, Cultural Encounters and Knowledge Spaces in Early Australia’ in Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj  & James Delbourgo, eds., 'The Brokered World: Go-betweens and Global Intelligence 1770-1820, Science History Publications USA, Sagamore Beach, 2009, 387-428.

‘Science and Scientism: Cartography’ in Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, eds., International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, vol. 10, Elsevier, Oxford, 2009, 37-42.

with Phillip Rehbock, 'Australia and the Pacific' in Robert DeKosky and Douglas Allchin eds, An Introduction to the History of Science in Non-Western Traditions, History of Science Society, Seattle, 2008, 65-71.

'Bamboo'; 'Knowledge Systems: Local Knowledge', 'Maps and Mapmaking of the Australian Aboriginal People', 'Rationality, Objectivity, and Method', ‘String and Stories’; in Helaine Selin ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-western Cultures, Springer, Berlin, 2008 2nd ed.

'The 'Unity' of Science and its Demarcation from Other Knowledge Traditions', in P. Bilimoria and M.K. Sridhar eds. Traditions of Science, Cross-Cultural Perspectives:  Essays in Honour of B. V. Subbarayappa, Munshiram Manoharial Pbl., Delhi, 2007, 207-224.

‘Maps and Plans in ‘Learning to See’: the London Underground and Chartres Cathedral as Examples of Performing Design’, in Cristina Grasseni ed, Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards, Berghan Books, Oxford, 2007, 125-41.

'Knowledge Systems: Local Knowledge' in Helaine Selin and Roddam Narasimha eds., Encyclopedia of Classical Indian Sciences, Universities Press, Hyderabad, 2007, 191-9.

‘Away with Bell Jars and Databases: Imaging Sustainability Design Practice as a Theatre of Diversity’ in Helen Lewis and Chris Ryan eds., Imaging Sustainability, RMIT Press, Melbourne, 2006, pp 69-82.

‘Movement, Boundaries,  Rationality and the State: The Ngaanyatyarra Land Claim, the Tordesillas Line and the West Australian Border’ in Moving Anthropology: Critical Indigenous Studies, Tess Lea, Emma Kowal and Gillian Cowlishaw, eds., Charles Darwin University Press, 2006, 185-200.

with Helen Verran ‘Biocultural Diversity: Elaborating Theoretical Issues for Communities and Policy Makers’ and ‘Indigenous Knowledge & Resource Management in Northern Australia’ in Ellen Woodley ed. Global Source Book on Biocultural Diversity, On line 2005. URL www.terralingua.org/GSBBCD.htm

‘The Function of Maps’ in Paula Rothenberg ed., Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically About Global Issue, Worth Pbls., New York, 2006, 7-15.

'Genetic Mapping: Approaches to the Spatial Topography of Genetics', in Classical Genetic Research and its Legacy; The Mapping Cultures of Twentieth-century Genetics, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger and Jean-Paul Gaudilliére, eds, Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 207-219

'Narrative Traditions of Space, Time and Trust in Court: Terra Nullius, ‘wandering’, The Yorta Yorta Native Title Claim,  and The Hindmarsh Island Bridge Controversy' in Gary Edmond ed, Expertise in Regulation and Law,  Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004, pp. 166-83.

‘Travel, Narrative, and Space in the Production of Unified Knowledge in Helmut Heinze and Christiane Weller, eds,  Worlds of Reading: Festschrift for Walter Viet, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2004, 203-222.