Dr Michelle Miller
Michelle is a Research Scientist at CSIRO, working in Design for Sustainability Transitions with the Net Zero Mission. She has 20 years of experience supporting collaborative teams and groups to apply design-based approaches in the context of innovation, strategy, and change making. Her work focuses on creative agency for navigating societal decision. She seeks to help build the knowledge and practice base for sustainable, just and regenerative transitions.
This may include facilitating transdisciplinary and participatory processes, enabling farm and landscape management change, (re)imagining and planning for regional futures, re-designing systems and supply chains, building innovation ecosystems, developing innovations that can amplify pathways to sustainability, and creating the conditions for transition through policy.
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.