This week at the Regenerative Design Lab, we’ve been working with the Living Systems Blueprint — a model for connecting high-level regenerative thinking with more tangible design decisions.
The Blueprint identifies three qualities common to living systems. One of these is interconnection.
Thriving living systems tend to have high levels of local connectivity:
contact between species, relationships of co-dependency, flows of information and energy.
A good example is the mycelial networks that connect trees in a woodland. These networks allow feedback to travel through the ecosystem, helping the system adapt and stay in balance.
One feature of the industrialised human economy is just how separated we have become from the living systems that support life on Earth.
So interconnection becomes a useful design prompt.
- How might we design more feedback into systems?
- How might we reconnect supply chains to ecosystems?
- How might we strengthen relationships between people, place and the living world?
Interconnection as a topic comes up in so many ways:
- How do we connect with the systems that surround us?
- How does information travel through supply chains?
- How can we we pay attention to the signal when there is so much noise.
It’s a common thread running through much of this blog.
If you are interested, you can explore the archive of posts tagged with interconnection.