Headline: Designing Sustainable Futures: Interdisciplinary Science and Social Creativity

In every region and every nation in the world, people face the difficult challenges of learning to design and maintain healthy societies with limited natural resources—including water, land, and energy—under rapidly changing global to local conditions. These challenges are contained within the framework of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. Responding to the challenges of the SDGs at local to global scales must address the fundamental complexity of social–ecological systems. This requires understanding the technical, ecological, and geological conditions at multiple scales of time and space and equally importantly, understanding and designing for the future in the appropriate social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. In this talk, I want to discuss two critical questions that arise from these complex systems challenges: (1) How can we build the capacity to innovate for societal well-being by learning to think and act across traditional disciplinary lines? (2) How can we enhance the value of technology and engineering by engaging the knowledge, creativity, and cooperation of all parts of society in designing for their future?