Dr Michelle Miller
Michelle is a Research Scientist with a specialty in Design for Sustainability Transitions. She has 20 years of experience supporting transdisciplinary collaboration to apply design-based and participatory approaches in the context of research, innovation, strategy, and change making. Her work focuses on enabling creative agency, dialogue, and evidence-informed decisions for navigating sustainability transitions. Her research helps build the knowledge and practice base for catalysing systems change through:
- regional-industrial futures and transition pathways
- whole-of-farm and landscape transitions
- agri-food systems and low-carbon value chains
- innovation ecosystems and pathways
- policy and governance that creates conditions for change
In her work she has been involved in a range of industries, for instance agriculture, infrastructure, commercial insurance, media, telecommunications, product development and manufacturing, child protection, education, international development, and unemployment. This has taken her into diverse contexts including all levels of government, philanthropy, commercial business (small, medium, and large), non-profit/NGOs, startups, regions, and communities. In these contexts she facilitates design-based approaches for transitions, regional capacity building, strategy, services, products, entrepreneurship, community development, and social innovation. Prior to CSIRO, she worked for The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, Second Road, her own consulting business (MMBD), Suncorp, and Pacific Market International (Seattle).
She holds a PhD in Transition Design from UTS. Her PhD research, partly documented in this website, focused on the methodology and practice of design for transitions and features a project to design for transition to regenerative approaches to agriculture. TransitionAg began as a business experiment as part of the PhD research, 'Designing Regenerative Transitions'.
Michelle lives in Canberra with her partner Scott Middlebrook. While living in the Hunter Valley they experimented with agroecological and natural sequence farming approaches to a small market garden that could best be described as a Chaos Garden. Having moved to Canberra, they are developing a Chaos Garden fit for the backyard. Watch this space! ;)
The ideas and perspectives expressed here are my own.