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Transition Engineering is an engineering discipline that enables change from unsustainable existing systems to more sustainable ones. Just as safety considerations are incorporated into design parameters in all engineering fields, sustainability thinking is also built in. Transition engineering is emerging as a field to give engineers the tools necessary to address sustainability in design. Transition engineering is a cross-disciplinary field that addresses the issues of future resource availability and identifies, then realizes opportunities in resilience and adaptation.

Overview
Every time in history that a new problem has arisen, a new field of engineering has grown to tackle its problems. This was the case when safety engineering grew in the early 1900s to combat the high workplace injury and fatality rate. Then, in the middle third of the 20th century, Environmental engineering bloomed out of concern for environmental health and water quality. Quality engineering came about with the increase in mass production techniques during WWII and the need to confirm the quality of the products.

The current problem, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere and our unrealistic consumption and pollution of Earth’s natural resources, lead to the founding and creation of Transition Engineering. The concentration of carbon in the atmosphere recently broke 400ppm, a level that Earth has not known for 800,000 years. Whether peak oil is a current reality or not, oil projections show a decline in supply over the next few decades. Transition engineering aims to take advantage of the current energy surplus to prepare society for entering an age when energy and resources are not as plentiful.

Origins
The idea behind transition engineering has sprouted from many different roots, both technical and non-technical. The concept of sustainable development has been around since 1987 and the problem of sustainability was a driving force in the development of transition engineering. The Transition Town movement provided further inspiration as it showed that there were many groups of people around the world motivated to prepare for peak oil and climate change. Transition towns and ecovillages demonstrate the need for engineers to build systems that manage un-sustainable risks and provide people with sustainable options. Engineers are ethically required to "hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public" and answer society's need for sustainable development

The origins of safety engineering provided much of the inspiration for transition engineering. At the beginning of the 1900s, business owners viewed workplace safety as a wasted investment and politicians were slow to change. After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City killed 156 trapped workers, 62 engineers came together to investigate how to make the workplace a safer place to be. This eventually lead to the formation of the American Society of Safety Engineers.

As safety engineering manages the risks of unsafe conditions, transition engineering manages the risks of unsustainable conditions. To give engineers a better grasp of sustainability, transition engineering defines the problem as UN-sustainability. This is similar to the problem of un-safe conditions that is the purpose of safety engineering. We do not necessarily know what a perfectly safe system looks like, but we do know what unsafe systems look like and how to improve them; the same applies to unsustainability of systems. By reducing unsustainability issues we take steps in the right direction

The Seven Step Method
The transition engineering method involves 7 steps to help engineers understand and solve unsustainability problems. The key difference in transition engineering is not assuming that past trends will continue. For example, the increasing trend of energy consumption will not continue indefinitely since the availability and ability to produce highly dense energy is drawing to a close.


 * 1) History: First, all facts and historical data are gathered.  All historical aspects of the system are considered.  The transition engineering part investigates the effects that technology and social developments have on energy and resource demand.  How did we get to where we are now?  Why are we here?  What factors put us here?
 * 2) Present: This step assesses the current situation.  All current capabilities, investments, assets and condition/age of the assets, and liabilities are considered.  Energy use is audited and its end-use behavior is assessed
 * 3) Future: In this step, future outcomes are predicted by assessing various scenarios.  Determining the probability of each future outcome creates a future operating environment envelope.  This gives engineers and decision makers design constraints with varying levels of risk.
 * 4) Path Break Concepts: Innovation takes place in this step when all modifications and adaptations to the current system must be disregarded.  The engineer/inventor places him/herself in the future and uses the future design constraints to come up with realistic solutions.  What would a desirable future look like?
 * 5) Backcasting: The path break concepts are analysed to see how they differ from the current situation.  In this step, the barriers and strategies to change existing systems are also analysed
 * 6) Trigger Events: Although existing systems carry a large amount of inertia, if the right trigger is applied at the right time, a great amount of change is possible. Triggers can be either disastrous events such as economic collapse, or external changes such as a corporate merger, new law, or new staff.  They can also be engineered change projects.  The trigger event for safety engineering was the “Triangle shirtwaist factory fire.” (reference) The challenge is to communicate the advantages and benefits of adaptive change, and to initiate a disruptive event that enables an organization to get out of the rut. See Change Management
 * 7) Change Projects: Finally, by planning for future supply and demand, change projects are realized to make best use of the current available resources.  Through these projects, society will be more resilient to peak oil and climate change events.

International Society of Transition Engineers
The Society is an emerging network of engineers and non-engineers who are working to spread and teach the methods to engineers across all disciplines.