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Living World

The Pattern Book uses the phrase ‘living world’ instead of nature. Nature tends to convey something outside — rural, picturesque and separate from us.

Living World describes something more encompassing. It’s everywhere. It’s in our towns and cities. It’s even inside us. And it doesn’t have to be pretty.

Nature will do, especially when speaking to the sceptical. But moving quickly to living world signals the deeper philosophy of the Pattern Book: life isn’t outside the window — it’s the container we live in.

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

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Short-Term Design from Anywhere

What might a design process might look like if its goal were the opposite of enabling humans and the living world to survive, thrive and co-evolve? The Pattern Book calls such an approach ‘Short-term Design from Anywhere’.

It might look like parachuting into a place we know nothing about and immediately starting to develop ideas. It might mean designing without ever visiting the site — relying instead on drawings, Google Earth and reports. It could mean defining success in ways that have nothing to do with the community or ecosystem of that place. It might not even consider the ecosystem at all.

Short-Term Design from Anywhere is about importing ideas from elsewhere — assuming that what worked well in one place will work just as well in another. It prefers one-size-fits-all solutions that seem economically efficient but fail to account for the cost of misalignment at a local level. This approach to design typically involves no local participation, no engagement, and no involvement — not in the design, not in construction, nor in long-term operation. It requires no commitment to place, no exposure to long term risks. It’s perfect for prioritising early return on investment for external stakeholders with no stake in the place itself.

Most of all, Short-Term Design from Anywhere assumes everything will work perfectly the first time. It does not anticipate learning, adaptation, or unintended consequences. And it rarely includes designers who stick around to find out what actually happens.

Overall, Short-Term Design from Anywhere doesn’t sound like a great approach. Fortunately, there’s another way—one that works with place rather than against it: Continuous Place-Based Design.

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

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Beavers

Whenever we ask the question, “What if every time we built something, the world got better?” — my mind jumps to beavers.

Beavers often catch the imagination of people interested in regenerative design because they show how one species, while meeting its own needs, can have a disproportionately positive impact on their environment.

In the UK, beavers were hunted to extinction, but where they are reintroduced they are creating stacked, multiple benefits in their ecosystems. To protect their homes — or lodges — beavers dam rivers to raise the water level, creating a defensive moat. To build these dams, beavers fell trees, remove their branches, drag them into the riverbed and hold them down with mud and stones. Incredibly, where the trees are too far away for them to be moved, beavers have been seen to dig a canal which they then use to float their materials to site.

Where beavers build their dams, aquatic and invertebrate life goes up. The flow of water is slowed and downstream flooding is reduced. The land around beaver dams stays wetter, which increases the amount of carbon dioxide it can sequester. In droughts you can see from the air where beavers are active — these are the places that stay greener for longer.

Beavers are examples of what ecologists call a keystone species — leading to a massively positive impact on their ecosystems.

It is ironic that where once we hunted them to extinction, we are now inviting them back to manage our flood defences and increase the resilience of our living systems. I wonder who they’ll invoice?

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

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Field notes: Book launch pattern sequence

This evening we held the London launch for the Pattern Book, hosted by our friends at Elliott Wood in the Society Building. 

I often describe the Pattern Book  as a build-your-own adventure practice guide for regenerative thinking. And as is befitting this format, the talk I gave was a build-my-own-adventure journey through my favourite short motifs in the book.

And that’s the point of the book. To stitch the motifs together to create a pattern for talking about, practising and bring people on a journey through regenerative design. 

My pattern sequence was as follows:

The Goal of Regenerative Design > Beavers > Short-term design from anywhere > Living World > Second Site > Carrier Wave > Harvesting Abundance > Fossil Fuel Friction Free > Practiiice > Systems Survey > Thriving.

In the Q&A there was a question around scaling, in response to which I talked about modularity and scaling out (see my recent post on six-foot slugs). There was also a great question about working with sceptical audiences, which gave me a chance to talk through  Pattern 07 Pinstripe — For Developers and Asset Managers. 

All of which gives me clues about how I can tweak my pattern sequence for future book talks. 

In case you missed the talk, this week on the blog I’ll be serialising some of my favourite short motifs from the talk pattern sequence. 

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Tips for regular blog writing

A friend asked me for suggestions to help them get started with a regular practice of blogging. Here’s six. 

Make it useful — if you are writing for yourself, then you can write what you like. But if it is for someone else, then make it valuable for them. With each post think, how might this, in a small way, help someone else.

Your view on the world — your readers love hearing how you see the world. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t read your work. What this means is that sharing your take on something, while not necessarily profound to you, is interesting to others and therefore a generous act (and useful — see previous point).

One point at a time — this gem I got from Seth Godin. You may have lots of points to make. But you can afford to take your time. You are probably way further ahead on your thought journey than your readers.

Metaphorically speaking — use metaphors to land your points more effectively than explaining. 

Write a manifesto — write down what you stand for, how you see the world, what change you want to make. Whether you publish it or keep it private, your manifesto is something to keep coming back to for inspiration or encouragement. 

Make a commitment — commit to writing regularly and tell your readers how often to hear from you. There is nothing like a copy deadline to help you find that you’ve got lots to write about. 

I’ve been blogging now for over 18 years but one book got me doing it regularly, Seth Godin’s ‘The Practice — Shipping Creative Work’.

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Field Notes — The Agora

This week I facilitated the final sessions in our Critical Thinking series for the Useful Simple Trust.

The programme takes participants through four rooms in the mind of a critical thinker. We began by gathering data in the Observatory, analysing these inputs in the Map Room, and then deciding between courses of action in the Decision Engine.

This final stage is called the Agora, from the Ancient Greek for marketplace. This workshop is about stepping into the public square to speak persuasively.

We held the sessions in a real theatre—a technique I first experienced 16 years ago on a training course with Linda Meyer, when I began working at the Useful Simple Trust.

But before we stepped on stage, we began in Catalytic mode— a conversational style I learned from Nick Zienau on another formative course. Catalytic Style builds trust and empathy — two essential elements of persuasive communication.

The final piece in this persuasion triptych is clarity. For this, we used the stage itself—moving across it to physically map out our key points and structure an argument in space.

To conclude, participants gave short presentations that drew on key insights from across the programme, using techniques from the workshop to build compelling, well-structured arguments grounded in critical thinking.

With the final curtain drawn, the ball is now in the court of the participants. The real work begins in applying this thinking to daily practice. That’s when the hard work starts — but as we like to say at Constructivist, you only learn when you do difficult things.

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Evergreys

This week I have been running a training course in an old venue wedged between two nesting grounds for tower cranes in central London. These leggy mechanical birds work all day to build their monumental, evergrey nests from concrete and steel. 

These towering evergrey structures are the opposite of evergreen trees. Their growth emits — rather than absorbs — carbon dioxide. And their year round operation adds further carbon to the atmosphere. 

But tower cranes don’t stay long in their evergrey nests. For once they are done building, the tower cranes take off and immediately start building new evergreys — sometimes demolishing perfectly good ones to build even taller ones. 

Given their destructive nesting habits, it is not entirely clear how Tower Cranes will continue to flourish.

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Horizon One Highway

In the Three Horizons model, Horizon One is the world that surrounds us — the one that grabs our attention, dominates our habits, and shapes our worldview.

Because it fills our field of vision, Horizon One obscures our view of possible alternative futures. 

Earlier this week I wrote about cognitive ease — the brain’s tendency to favour familiar options over ones that require more thinking effort. It’s the easy option of taking the familiar path, rather than the harder work of beating a new one. 

Horizons One is the beaten path. It’s the default route; the easy path.

But if we want to move towards a thriving future — one in which our work as designers and builders actually creates life and strengthens our communities and ecosystems — we need to beat a different path. And we need to do it every day. 

That takes effort and resourcing. 

We need time to reflect. We need time to rest. We need space to notice is what is missing and to dream about what is possible. 

And we need the nourishment of living things and the nourishment of community. 

Resourcing ourselves can help us resist the daily pull of the familiar. And we can keep searching for paths towards more thriving futures, even when walking down the Horizon One Highway looks like the much easier route. 

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Le paradoxe du design

I was in Paris last week to deliver a creative thinking workshop for engineers. I did the presentation in English and the Q&A in French — a happy balance that let me be precise in theory and looser in conversation. 

But I got a bit stuck translating ‘the Designer’s Paradox’ in French. 

The Designer’s Paradox says ‘you don’t know what you want until you know what you can have’ (McCann 2001)

Asking for help here’s some suggestions I got during the day.

On ne sais pas ce que l’on veut avoir, tant que l’on ne sais pas ce que l’on peut avoir. 

Translated back into English, this reads as ‘one doesn’t know what one wants for as long as one doesn’t know what one can have‘. It’s a fair translation, but long and literal. 

Then came:

‘Savoir ce que l’on veut, ou vouloir ce que l’on peut.’

Literally — know what you want or want what you can. It’s crisper and I like the rhythm. But the meaning drifts — it’s more about choosing between reality and desire. 

Mashing these together, I came up with: 

Savoir ce que l’on veut, savoir ce que l’on peut, vouloir le meilleur des deux

Know what you want, know what you can, want the best of both. But that isn’t really French!

In searching for the French version of the Designer’s Paradox, I’ve found another. 

Translate the meaning and lose the poetry

Translate the poetry and lose the meaning. 

That’s the translator’s paradox.

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Beating a new path

You’re out walking one morning and you reach a field of tall grass. Your destination is on the other side but you can’t see a way through. So you wade in, pushing through the tall stems until you emerge on the other side, leaving a path in your wake. 

On the next day’s morning perambulation you encounter the same field. Do you beat a new path — or take the one you made yesterday?

Of course, you follow the path. It’s easier. It’s the path of least resistance. 

And so it is when we develop ideas in response to a design brief. Beating a path through a sheaf of requirements takes effort. But once we have made that mental path, our brains prefer to follow it again. 

Why do the extra work of cutting a new route? 

This is cognitive ease at work: our brains tend to prefer the options they’ve already figured out over ones they haven’t figured out yet. 

There is no reason the first idea should be the best one. But cognitive ease makes it stick. So if we want better ideas, we need to resource ourselves to build beat a new path each morning.