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Two new short courses on regenerative design — launching next week

Over the last couple of months we’ve been preparing two new online courses introducing regenerative design, and we’re almost ready to launch them.

They’re practice-based introductions for engineers (and other humans) who want to understand the language around regenerative design and how to begin to start thinking regeneratively on projects.

Next Tuesday these two new courses will go live on the Constructivist website:

Feeling the Future — for people who prefer to begin with observation, story, and intuition, and build toward frameworks.

Seeing the System — for those who like to start with systems thinking, then explore how those models show up in lived experience.

Both courses will cover almost exactly the same content, but just organised differently depending on your learning preferences.

Both are four-week online courses. Both are rooted in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. And both are designed to enter more confidently into regenerative thinking.

More details (and booking links) coming next Tuesday.

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Zero negative externalities

Bill Sharpe’s definition for a regenerative system is one that creates zero negative externalities. In other words, no harm done. The system makes things better. 

It is a sobering benchmark and a valuable tool to distinguish interventions which dance at the edges from those which tackle the heart of the issue.

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Pattern Book Notes: Kalideascope + System Survey

My intention with the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is that users can share with each other how they have used the tools and techniques within. So, kicking off this process, this is how I used two motifs two weeks ago to run a lunch for team at Elliott Wood to support an internal regenerative design competition they are running. 

Building a Kalideascope

If a group of people are working with a written design brief, then my starting point for creative thinking is to get them to build a Kalideascope. The groups write three headings on a large piece of paper: information, questions and ideas. I then get them to read the brief out very slowly and everytime something that comes to mind under any of these headings, they must shout stop, and write it down, before the reader can start again. 

The exercise is a quick method to generate lots of thinking. 

To add a regenerative lens to it, I prefaced the exercise by reading out the motif on Beavers. This motif primes listeners to think about the potential stacked multiple benefits of our interventions. 

Systems Survey

To tune the group deeper into regenerative thinking, I then read out the questions in the Systems Survey. These are questions that combine the theory of the Living Systems Blueprint with a civil engineering site survey perspective. 


The questions are:

  1. What is connected and what is separated?
  2. What is thriving and what is in decline?
  3. What is in flow and what is static?
  4. What is changing and is fixed?
  5. What stories does this place tell?
  6. What is the placing trying to do — and what helps or hinders it?

I read each question out and gave groups 3-4mins to populate their Kalideascopes with any new information, questions and ideas. 

Overall, it felt like a high-energy session and I think people went away with new ideas on how to bring regenerative thinking into their design process.

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Punching through the canopy

Yesterday I wrote about creating a forest garden from scratch — turning a pasture into thriving food growing space. But what if there is already forest? How do you approach the problem from the other angle? This is one of the questions that came up at the Forest Garden talk I’ve been writing about this week. 

When a forest has grown a thick canopy, little light can get in. So while it may seem counterintutive, the key is to create holes in the canopy to let the light in. Either by cutting back branches or taking down whole trees. It is at the margins between the light and the dark areas that the most interesting growth happens. And so forest gardens need lots of these edges in order to be effective. 

Punching through the canopy to let the light in. It’s a powerful metaphor for breaking through an existing system to let a new one take off. The canopy is a metaphor for anything that stifles. The asphalt of an industrial estate covering acres of soil. Streets clogged with cars that stop chance encounters. Places through which no fresh air ciruclates. The doom of scarcity and control that stifle play and innovation. Organisational hierarchies that lock out change. 

But punch through that layer and a pocket of life can establish itself. A niche of new. And then we can join those niches up to create a network of change.

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Creating thriving from scratch

Yesterday I wrote about the seven levels of a forest garden. I learnt about these at a talk given in the forest garden at Coed Hills Rural Arts Centre. The forest garden there is a flourishing, food producing space, but it hadn’t always been so. We heard how in 2009 the garden had been a field. And so how did the field become the thriving place we see today?

I’m interested in this question because it tells of taking active measures to create flourishing places. Left to its own devices the space would have brambled over, trees would have taken root and eventually the field would have become wood. But through active intervention, the team have created a space that is more flourishing than dense woodland would be — productive and in balance with its ecosystem. 

Key early moves include designing the space for the way the light falls. Forest gardens have lots of openings to let in the light, and so this structure needs to be thought about from the start. 

Another key factor was slowing down water that would run across the site in a storm and directing it through a series of swales. This was another dramatic intervention but one that has protected the soil from erosion and created ponds and multiple habitats. 

And finally, the team spoke about the work of holding things in balance until a natural balance could be achieved. For example, until the high trees grow tall, there can be too much light and the ground level plants grow out of control. Again this speaks to an active intervention needed in the transtion from a monoculture to a thriving polyculture. 

Most of the time, when humans build stuff, we have a negative overall impact on the world. Some say the best thing we can do is to stand back and let nature do its thing. But models such as forest gardening show how we can actively work with ecosystems to meet our needs while creating greater flourishing. We need to find the analogous models in construction, for example, for sourcing our construction materials. And we need to recognise that creating these supply chains will take many years of work before they can exist in harmony. 

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The Seven Levels of a Forest Garden

The following I learnt from Steve Watts, permaculture expert, during a talk he gave about Forest Gardens at the wonderful Coedfest, which he co-leads.


In a forest garden, plants and trees are layered over one another to create a growing system that is far more productive and diverse than farming a single crop on an area of land.

By stacking layers of complementary plants and trees over one another, you increase the amount of carbon that is being locked in, you increase the leaf litter that falls and so you increase the richness of the soil.

As Steve describes we can think of a forest garden has having seven layers:

  • High trees,
  • Lower trees,
  • Tall shrubs,
  • Small shrubs,
  • Ground cover,
  • Plants in which we harvest the roots, and

  • Climbers.

Each of these layers can produce food at different times of the year, and each of these layers provides a complementary role to the others. It is a beautiful model for a stacked system that is creating life. And it is a reminder that when we bring different systems together in complementary ways we can create much greater richness and diversity than we keep things separate.

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Thriving

The Pattern Book uses ‘thriving’ as a shorthand for the goal of regenerative design. The full goal is more precise: for humans and the living world to survive, thrive and co-evolve. Each word has earned its place in this definition: humans, living world, survive, thrive, co-evolve. And when we are doing systems analysis, it is helpful to be precise. The Living Systems Blueprint helps us unpack this definition further into more measurable characteristics in a system.

But in everyday conversation, thriving is enough. It’s a feeling. It stirs a reaction. It’s a familiar word.

Sustainability seeks to meet our needs without compromising the needs of the future. It is a zero-sum game — you end up with no more or less at the end. But aiming for thriving says we want more life. Not just life as a noun but a phenomenon.

As Janine Benyus says, ‘life contains the conditions
for more life’
.
Life that gets more sophisticated over time.
Life that grows in richness.
Life that exists in balance.
Thriving conveys the feeling of life doing this.

So, when we need to get technical, we can talk about the goal of regenerative design and the Living Systems Blueprint.

But when we want a compelling destination,
we’ll just say: thriving.

This post is an extract from the Motif Library in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design.

References

Tippett, K. (n.d.). Janine Benyus Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings [Audio recording]. https://onbeing.org/programs/janine-benyus-biomimicry-an-operating-manual-for-earthlings/

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Systems Survey

This motif combines the Living Systems Blueprint with a civil engineering perspective to create six questions for a site investigation that can reveal the underlying system characteristics.

  1. What is connected and what is separated?
  2. What is thriving and what is in decline?
  3. What is in flow and what is static?
  4. What is changing and what is fixed?
  5. What stories does this place tell?
  6. What is the place trying to do – and what helps or hinders it?

User guide

  • Site survey — use these questions to bring a more systemic lens to a traditional site survey.
  • System investigation — use these questions to think more about infrastructure and policies and how they relate to the patterns they create on the ground.

This post is an extract from the Motif Library in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. 

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Carrier Wave

In radio communications, a carrier wave is a signal that carries another signal. The carrier wave is the disturbance in the electromagnetic spectrum that travels out across the medium. Information to be transmitted is encoded by modifying the base wave’s amplitude (as in AM, amplitude modulation) or its frequency (as in FM, frequency modulation).

The carrier wave metaphor is a useful motif for thinking about what it is that transmits feedback around a system.

Through my phone I am connected to hundreds of contacts — but that doesn’t mean I am in communication with them. In contrast, with the much smaller group of people I work on projects with, there is regular transmission of information. In this smaller group, regular dialogue creates a carrier wave for feedback — how is everyone feeling? Are things going well? Where are the potential problems? Some of these signals are not explicit, but more subtle shifts in conversation — changes in tone, mood or bigger gaps in the signal.

Our reliance on others tunes us into the feedback available through our relationships. I can easily search online for live data feeds concerning the quality of water in rivers around the country, but I’m far more likely to pay attention to the river I swim in.

When thinking about levels of interconnectivity in systems, consider the reciprocity that exists in those relationships. It is not enough to build connections. Through the internet, engineers have never been more connected to communities and ecosystems — but what matters is having something that flows through the connection. A carrier wave for the feedback.

This post is an extract from the Motif Library in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design.