The document discusses sustainability and engineering practice for the 21st century. It argues that engineering needs to shift from reactive approaches to active adaptive planning to address complex problems. It proposes that engineering practice needs to become more transdisciplinary, dissolve boundaries, and focus on creating desirable futures that are consistent with collective goals of sustainability. Key ideas are addressing "wicked problems" systemically and using foresight to create sustainable outcomes.

1. What is this “Sustainability Thing”? Jenni Goricanec @ Swinburne University 24 th August 2011

5. Start with a human system (artefacts e.g. dams)

6. Getting to the artefact

7. The project to build the artefact “sits” within an open system

8. This combination of relations is socio-ecological (Emery & Trist [2])

9. Highly interconnected… Our systems, networks, processes and organisations, developed with a causal logic have become over time deeply enmeshed in a ‘cats-cradle of interconnections’ with behaviour ‘driven by interactions between optimising, but confused, agents’ (Haldane [3]).

15. Directive Correlation (Sommerhof [9])

17. Latour [8]

18. Engineering practitioners making heterogeneous connections Engineering organising a sustaining technological world; becoming broader, more transdisciplinary, dissolving boundaries