Transition Engineering Lab

03/09/2026

https://oisf.org/fest-event/the-worst-kind-of-problem/

Why are the world’s problems so insoluble, dragging on from one year to the next, with no sign of any fresh ideas to resolve them? It’s because of their very nature, says Prof. Susan Krumdieck: our increasingly complex society is producing highly complex problems that have no straightforward sol...

01/09/2026

The Transition Engineering Lab is excited to host a HWU Honorary Industry Expert Fellow, Leanne Gluck from the USA.
Leanne has completed a MBA, BA in Communications, and a Certificate in Regenerative Organic Agriculture. She has 10 years experience in strategy around social enterprises, education, advanced manufacturing, innovation and product development.
She is particularly passionate about how data, modeling, and AI can be employed by people in their own communities to build resilience and transition to a sustainable future.

Leanne has been participating in the currently live Agriculture Transition Lab. She is also greatly helping with strategy in the cyberinfrastructure development strategy that has developed out of the first year of the Housing Transition Lab. The housing lab took on the housing crisis in 2025 and made some significant discoveries that are now the subject of research in the group. One main finding was that housing is a complex wicked problem, spanning equity, culture, finance, transport, health, economy, business, policy and construction. All stakeholders we interviewed expressed the need for reliable data and ways to build trust across the different and competing perspectives.

Leanne arrived in July and has already made major contributions to how we understand the potential and organize the development of the Data Exchanges, Modeling, and Observatory for the housing crisis. Her concept of the "Word of Mouth" has brought all the research together to a realizable ground-breaking innovation.

03/08/2026

Time to get tickets, and to get ready

Tickets for this year's Orkney Science Festival go on sale from 7 am tomorrow morning - Saturday 25 July.

The full programme can be seen on the Festival website
👇
www.oisf.org

30/06/2026

Can you help as a STEM ambassador in Orkney?

The Transition Engineering Lab team were asked to join Glaitness School community for a 'Transition Ting' event in the Pickaquoy Centre at The Phoenix Cinema.

The School Run to Net Zero Programme has been ongoing for 3 years and was co-developed by the Glaitness pupils, teachers and our team. It is all about acting as a school community to change the 'Glaitness Way' of getting to school.

The students organised the Ting. They presented the case and the student jury decided that the School Run to Net Zero should be permanently adopted into the school culture 🙌. The crowd went wild when the verdict came in!

The students also presented the case for the Transition Engineering Lab to develop the SR2NZ teacher training and curriculum and to facilitate delivery to all the other Orkney schools. The student jury verdict was unanimous, and Professor Krumideck agreed that the Transition Lab would take on the challenge.

This is where you can help! Dr. Florian Ahrens Doccumented the SR2NZ design, lessons, materials and experiences at Glaitness, and published a paper. The materials are ready to go, and Dounby School is willing to take up the programme which consists of three lessons with learning activities and a school community event. But Dr. Florian has got a job at TU Chemnitz in Germany to build a Transition Engineering Lab and won't be able to come into the school to deliver the lessons like he did in Glaitness. If you are a STEM Ambassador, we can train you, and work with the school to schedule the lessons and activity.

The Transition Engineering Lab purpose is to bring the power of world class engineering, science, modelling and ingenuity into local communities to help them find thierown way to deal with big questions of "how do we build strong towns, communities and economies, from the ground up, using what we have?" We are doing this research in the real world with you. The theory of system change is to work with people in the system (stakeholders) to correctly define the wicked problem (a coomplex, messy predicament with no known solution), find what could work (Transition Engineering) and then help each stakeholder find what they can contribute if all others do. The Transition Lab can start to create a positive atmosphere, but we then need to find the important people willing to do something to implement the solution and help everyone see how they are better off, and how teaching children how to tackle making things better for everyone is a matter of learning, helping each other, trying things, and sharing success. Helping equip children for the world we created is a gift that can't be demanded, it has to be given.

27/06/2026

Invitation to Participate in the Agriculture and Food Systems Transition Lab.

The Transition Lab on Agriculture and Food Systems invites you to participate as a stakeholder and help Orkney explore and take next steps in building a sustainable future.

Transition Engineering whole-systems approach is underway July-August 2026

The interdisciplinary standard of practice as set out by the Global Association for Transition Engineering, effectively deals with uncertainties and wicked problems. The approach moves beyond economic, regulatory and climate pressures to develop opportunities and deliver strategic system transformation through practical shift projects. We work with local holders of knowledge and assets to help them build strong local systems, including new types of information infrastructures. The processes also help to capture local knowledge and experience and build that into changes in the whole system, not just technology. This can include innovations in local regulation, market, policy, cooperative services, brand value, employment, ecology and participation.

Stakeholders:
Please register your interest and participate in as many of the lab activities as possible. We value all stakeholder knowledge and perspectives. The Transition Lab is a new way to bring the capabilities of engineering to real-world struggles with sustainability. We are not studying you or looking to demonstrate a new technology. We are using Transition Engineering to help a community and industries to explore and build steps to strong, resilient places from the ground up. Please contact Sandy Gunn to book in for a Clinic and to be invited to future lab activities as described below.
Sandy Gunn. [email protected]

Stakeholder Clinic: 30 minutes with individuals.
Clinic consultations are open to all stakeholders. A Clinic is a 30 minute appointment, with 5 questions designed to capture multiple perspectives on the current situation, and understand their pressures. The questions are designed for thematic analysis that can help us to frame up the wicked problems causing the pressures. We call it a clinic because it is like public health studies where the same information from a lot of people can provide a picture of what is going on and help with further research design to understand the cause of issues.

Wicked Problem Diagnosis: 90 minutes with small groups.
Wicked problems are a class of problems deemed “unsolvable” because of their high degrees of complexity and interplay of competing objectives of stakeholders. The diagnosis process uncovers the underlying issue at the heart of the problem by working with knowledgeable stakeholders. The underlying issue is often hard to see, even if it is hiding in plain sight.

Transition Engineering Design Sprint: Transition Lab Team:
There are two types of outcomes from the Design Sprint:
• Shift Project Concepts: real-world or research projects that could be done today by local people that would create steps toward building the sustainable future, while also adding multiple values, resolving conflicts and providing economic security and community resilience.
• Digital Infrastructure Concepts: data systems, modelling and ways to observe a range of relevant measures and factors that are needed for efficient transition and balancing of objectives.
Transition Sandbox: 90 minutes with diverse stakeholders
System transition is going to be messy. There will be conflicts. There will be competing objectives. The Transition Sandbox process is the result of research into strategic system transition. The research, analysis, results and engineering transition designs are brought into the sandbox for local experts to ‘play’ with. The process has successfully resolved conflicts and harmonised objectives, leading to concrete practical shift project proposals for development.

Meet the Transition Engineers:
Professor Susan Krumdieck is a Mechanical Engineer with long background in energy and community struggles with wicked problems. She literally wrote the book on Transition Engineering, and is a founding member of the Global Association for Transition Engineering (GATE). She was awarded Queens New Years Honours in 2020 for her contributions to engineering and sustainability. Susan founded the first Transition Lab in the UK after being recruited from New Zealand.
Professor Aseem Kinra is an expert in Supply Chain Management Transitions. He recently joined the Transition Lab from Bremen in Germany.
Dr. Florian Ahrens is a Chemical Engineer and the first PhD graduate of the HWU Transition Lab in Orkney. He worked on five successful labs and now has a position in TU-Chemnitz in Germany to build a Transition Lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Dr. Jack Boulton is a Mechatronic Engineer and the second PhD graduate of the HWU Transition Lab in Orkney. He worked on energy industry transition and is now a researcher developing sandboxing processes.
Dr. Mark Kelly is a Mechanical Engineer, teaching Transition Engineering Management, and he is a beef farmer.

27/06/2026

When solutions are not yet known... we must first define the system, the boundaries, and the relationships between ecosystems. We need a picture.

How do we get past the shock and horror that often paralyses us when we come to understand scientist's warnings about the irreversible damage Nature is sustaining ?

How do we deal with fear about the future in ways that don't retract into disbelief and denial?

How can we manage anger and blame, which are rather natural responses when things seem to be spiraling out of control?

How can we process our guilt that our needs, conveniences and entertainments have contributed greatly to the suffering of people in other places, degradation of wild and beautiful places, and risks to our own children and grandchildren and great grandchildren?

How can we accept the realities of the situation, and accelerate productive transformation?

How do we reframe the predicaments and paradoxes created by the Industrial Revolution - into new ways of understanding the problems of change for good of all - and thus generate the imense amount of ingenuity we will need to emerge, learn, create, design, build, regenerate, manage and thrive through the transition of whole systems to downshift the unsustainable energy and material flows which are currently 'normal'?

I can't tell you everything we have learned in this Facebook post, but I can start with the first step.

The Transition Engineeirng Lab is charged with answering the question "How do we proceed when solutions are not known?"
The first rule of engineering is "Define the problem you must solve." Here is the first massive challenge, because the problems of downshifting unsustainable energy and materials consumption are
- Complex, with interconnecting aspects that are hard to understand.
- Messy, with competing interests and champions of various technologies, policies, and plans that don't bring resolution.
- Involve people with perspectives, including not wanting to change.
- Do not have established processes or the needed information.

In order to define a problem in a way that makes it understandable and workable, we have to define the system and draw the system boundary.

Applying this logic, the Transition Engineering Lab contributed the first breakthrough - an applied systems thinking framework that lets us and stakeholders frame up the predicament as an exploration of interconnected ecosystems. The Ecosystems Framing Process uses the drawing here to identify the primary ecosystem, the interrelations with other ecosystems, and intersections and reliances on infrastructures, supplies, reguations, markets and the environments. It is one of the first process tools in our new Transition Engineering Lab Handbook.

Try it for yourself!

27/06/2026

Are you aware that modernity is on a crashcourse with Earth's systems? Would you like to know how we can change course and build a sustainable future?
Then you will enjoy this argument that answers the questions: "How do we...?"

27/06/2026

Another big milestone for the Lab. Congratulations to Dr. Jack Boulton as we attend the graduation ceremony at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. Jack's parents travelled from New Zealand to attend the graduation ceremony of the School of Energy Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society (EGIS). They were warmly greeted by Vice-Principal and Provost, Professor Steve McLaughlin, who officiated the ceremony.

Jack was awarded a Watt Scholarship to undertake the PhD research in Orkney. Jack and his fiance Ellie moved from New Zealand to take on what has to arguably be the most wicked problem of a just transition to sustainable energy - the transition of the oil production company.

Project Title
Transition Engineering for Fossil Fuel Decline: An Exploration of the Value Chain

Abstract
This PhD is focused on building the tools for understanding and engineering the energy transition in the oil industry. The goal is to build a biophysical system dynamics model of the oil production system and use this model to explore the energy transition of the oil supply. The challenge is to use gamification to create an alternative, but understandable and explorable, reality, and to generate real problem solving and adaptive responses from participants so that valid interpretations of different decision, investment and policy pathways can be explored. A novel aspect of this biophysical economics approach is to model the value chain and answer the question of how to value different uses of carbon differently in relation to the essentiality of the production or services provided.

Jack's key publications were about methods developed during the Transition Engineering Lab with oil industry experts. All of Jack's publications have already garnered multiple citations. Jack is currently a post-doctoral researcher with HWU Transition Engineering Lab with reasearch focused on another key process for system transition that came out of his research - How can we use reliable data and modelling to negotiate system transition shift projects while harmonising competing objectives and resolving conflicting perspectives?

The Three Doors: An attention shift process to break through the sustainability trilemma for oil production enterprises
10.1016/j.erss.2025.104217

Transition Engineering Sprint with Oil Industry Experts: Finding the Possibility for Climate-Safe Business Strategies
10.3233/atde240897

The First Rule of Transition Engineering Is Define the Wicked Problem
10.3233/atde240879

22/06/2026

UK Engineering Professors Council 2026 Meeting - Revolution or Evolution
Professor Krumdieck attended the meeting in Glasgow 17-19 June. She is a member of the committe developing Toolkits for Professors and she will be contributing a toolkit highlighting the processes developed for real world transition engineeirng labs developed in Orkney over the past 3 years.

Another highlight of the even was the poster session by the finalists of the 2026 Hammermen David K. Harrison Student Award for undergraduate engineering projects👏. The award was won by Grace McElroy of Orkney!!! 😀 Congratulations Grace, maybe you would like to come back to Orkney to work on sustainabilty transitions in the Transition Engineering Lab.

https://epc.ac.uk/uploads/2026/06/Grace-McElroy.pdf