Chris Ryan

Chris Ryan is Emeritus Professor of Design for Regenerative Futures. His current teaching commitments involve studio design projects in the Masters of Design, Innovation and Technology.

He was the founding Professor and director of the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) at the University of Melbourne (in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning) from 2008-18. Previously he was Foundation Professor of Design for Sustainability at RMIT  and Director of their National ARC Centre for Design (1983-97). He was professor and then Director of the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund university, Sweden 1997-2002; visiting professor at TUDelft in the Netherlands (1994) and Domus Academy, Milan and Politecnico di Milano 1997. 

In 2002 he was consultant to the UN Environment Program coordinating and writing the Global Status Report on Sustainable Consumption, for the Johannesburg UN world summit in 2002, 

He has been CI and director of the national Visions and Pathways 2040 project (of the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living), to understand potential futures for Australian Cities if they achieve 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and increased resilience by 2040 (visionsandpathways.com). That project utilised a systems transformation co-design process that he and colleagues developed, known as Eco-Acupuncture (EcoA) (ecoacupuncture.com). EcoA takes a distributed transformation approach to achieving sustainable cities, towns and suburbs. EcoA projects in Australia and Europe co-developed local government and community visions, plans and (small) interventions, to respond to climate change.  As a process they brought together university researchers, design teams of academics and post-graduate students, community members and local government staff, to envisage possible 25-year futures in urban systems (energy, water, food, transport, buildings, products and services). Those visions then become the design objective for the transformation of many local ‘places of intervention’ that act as niche demonstrations of new living systems possibilities.   

Professor Ryan currently working on a history of (global) eco-design, eco-innovation and product policy (1990-2010) and convening a new international network, hosted by RMIT and TUDelft (Netherlands), known as Field-Stations for the Future - a new dimension of civic infrastructure, providing places for Regenerative Action and Regenerative Connection., building on examples (established and emerging) in Australia.