Tag: adaptability

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Three tests for regenerative infrastructure

Pulling together the threads from this week’s posts so far on infrastructure, discussions about regenerative infrastructure often confuse three distinct factors: 

  • Metabolim
  • Ecological participation
  • Resilience 

Untangling these questions can help us gain clarity in what we are trying to design, so that we can then look for solutions that are win-win-win on all three counts. 

Metabolism.

The first question is about ecological metabolism, which we looked at yesterday.

In other words, what kind of economy does this infrastructure enable?  

Is it an economy of high energy and high material throughput? Or is it one that enables the economy to operate within its ecosystem limits? Or does it enable a metabolism that demands every increasing energy and materials? 

This question is the most contentious as it challenges fundamental assumptions about our economy. 

When we are discussing regenerative design in the context of buildings, this challenge is easier to side step because the scale is smaller. But when we get to talking about infrastructure, we are talking about the plumbing of the economy itself. 

Ecological participation

The second question is about how does the infrastructure engage with the living world itself. 

Some infrastructure depletes ecosystems as it passes through, for example by fragmenting habitats, disrupting water cycles or creating pollution.

Other infrastructure systems seek to minimise damage or contribute to ecosystem enhancement, for example, by creating wildlife bridges, protected nature reserves,or blue-green corridors alongside transport routes. 

Some infrastructure is actually created to support ecological processes for the wider benefit of humans and the rest of the living world — for example wetland restoration integrated into flood management systems.

The question here is: does the infrastructure damage the ecosystem, try to minimise harm or play an active part in enhancing life systems.

Resilience

The third question comes down to system design. Is the proposed system resilient? Is it decentralised, modular and capable of adapting and evolving? 

When conditions are stable, highly centralised systems can work very efficiently. But when conditions are unstable then modular, distributed networks are more effective.

This is where the writing of Donella Meadows and David Fleming is so helpful in understanding how complex systems can be made resilient.

Getting in a knot

When these three factors get tangled together, debates about infrastructure can get into a knot. 

For example, we can be building a wildlife corridor along a piece of infrastructure. That may be good from an ecosystem participation point of view. But if that infrastructure intensifies the metabolic rate of the economy beyond what the ecosystem can support, then the overall effect is still damage. 

Without separating these questions, it becomes difficult to see what we are designing for.

Three tests for regenerative infrastructure

Any proposal for infrastructure should pass three regenerative tests. Does it:

  • Support an economy operating within ecological limits?
  • Enhance the living systems it participates in?
  • Remain structurally resilient?

If we can design infrastructure that performs well across all three, then we are building the backbone of a system that can create thriving rather than exhausting the ecosystems our lives depend on.

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Good system design is not enough

Good system design is not enough

In regenerative design we spend a lot of time thinking about systems.

What is the system of construction? How does it work? What are the feedback loops that keep the show on the road? Which loops reinforce the outcomes we already have, and which might enable the more life-giving outcomes we want?

The living world is our template. Life is our best example of how to create thriving within ecosystem limits. Whether that’s through the systems of forests, wetlands, under-ocean reefs – in all of these contexts, the living system of life manages resources and energy while creating thriving. 

So we can ask, what are the characteristics of living systems that enable them to thrive? Could our economy work in a similar way – we live on the same planet and are subject to the same laws of physics, after all. How would our economy be organised? What would our supply chains look like? How would our infrastructure function?

But watch out! There is a banana skin here. 

It is possible to create systems that function really well — systems that are resilient, adaptable, efficient and well structured — and yet fail to create life-enabling conditions.

The potential slip is that good system design is not enough. Regenerative systems must be engaged with the system of life itself. They must participate in the living systems they are part of.

This is the key shift. 

  • Systems design asks, is the system well designed?
  • Regenerative design adds on the next layer: how is the system working with the living world. 

The transport corridor

Imagine we are designing a transport corridor to link connecting cities. From a systems perspective, we might aim for a system that is:

  • Resilient – able to adapt to shocks
  • Efficient – uses minimum resources to deliver its goal
  • Modular – made of semi-independent parts so failures or changes in one part do not collapse the whole system.
  • Adaptable – able to be configured in different ways. 

From a systems perspective, that could be a great design. 

But then we ask the additional regenerative question: what is this system doing to the living world?

Is the corridor slicing up habitats? Is the corridor severing communities? Is the corridor causing pollution? Is the corridor contributing to a wider system of ecological decline? Because on these counts, human and living world thriving is reduced. 

Interestingly, landscapes themselves are a patchwork of different ecosystem types linked by their own corridors: waterways, hedgerows, continuous tree-cover, that allow exchange of species, nutrients and water.

So the question is, does the addition of an extra corridor, built by humans for transport, enhance these connections or cut them off?

It is not enough for systems to function well. They have to participate in and positively contribute to the living world. 

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Field notes from chaos

(This is another archive post from September 2024 — re-reading it, I realise there’s potential to create a new pattern book motif on chaos, how we work with it, and how we might reduce it for others).

The wind was getting up. The waves were starting to blow in from different directions. The sea scape seemed to be changing at random. The day before, the waves had been rolling in with a nice rhythm.

This is another blog post that comes from the sea. And this one is about chaos. One characteristic of chaotic systems is the rules of the system keep changing. And this seemed to be what was happening around me. The wind was gusting from different directions, the tide was turning, the sun was coming in and out from behind clouds. And all of this was making a chaotic mess of the surface of the water.

Standing there trying to figure out what was going on I started to think about ways of coping with chaos. Think of these as working notes rather than a developed theory. 

Get into the field – the sea looked messy from the shore but only in the water could I really feel how changeable it was. 

The signal in the noise – there can be a lot of randomness but are there underlying patterns. There did seem to be a beat of waves heading in to the shore, confused by another set rolling in from the side. When you find a pattern in the system it is easier to work with. 

Notice when the pattern ends – the rules of chaotic systems change. A pattern in the system is only useful as long as it persists. Look out for the pattern changing. 

Think on your feet – you can’t rely on the normal patterns of working (see yesterday’s post on creating cycles in work). Instead you have to make the most of the situation you are in. 

Learning is difficult – if learning relies on loops of action and reflection, then learning is much harder when the conditions keep changing.

Chaos is tiring – if you are constantly on alert trying to figure out what is going on then you are not getting time to rest and recuperate. 

Writing these notes up I am left wondering:

  • How can we support ourselves, other people and organisations when they enter into periods of chaos?
  • How might our own actions, behaviours and design decisions cause chaos for others?
  • How might we design for increasing chaos as climate breakdown rolls on?

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Tools for telling the future

What began as a conversation this week on the blog about how designers predict the future has unlocked some deeper reflections on how we approach regenerative design.

Let’s rewind.

As designers, we are always concerned with the future. Our job is to imagine how things could be and shape the conditions to get there. To do this, we rely on two types of indicators:

  • Lag indicators — evidence of what has already happened. The results of past design decisions. 
  • Lead indicators — signals in the present that suggest how the future will unfold.

When conditions are stable, precedent (ie lag indicators) can be a reliable guide to the future. But in changing, complex systems, the past is no-longer such a reliable guide to the future.

In these situations, rather than predict the future directly, we can try to assess the capacity of the system we are working with to successfully respond to change.

Capacity to change — a key regenerative lens

In regenerative design we use the living world as a template for understanding how to create systems that thrive. Thriving ecosystems adapt continuously to shifting conditions. This capacity to change is a key characteristic of living systems — and is a guiding principle for engineers (and other humans) thinking about how to create thriving systems. 

In the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, we go on to define four factors that indicate a system’s capacity to adapt:

  • Building blocks that can easily be recombined.
  • Coexistence of diverse variations to allow for different responses. 
  • Feedback loops that reinforce adaptations suited to current conditions.
  • Mechanisms for retaining and repeating what works.

From analysis to a design brief

These four factors are both analytical prompts and design levers.

When we encounter a new situation, we try to establish the extent to which each of these is present and use this as a measure of the system’s capacity to survive and potentially thrive through change.

And they can be used as design requirements, giving us factors that we can build into a design brief to create a brief for thriving. 

In a complex situation it is hard to predict the future — instead, regenerative designers seek to make things better by building in the capacity for people and ecosystems to respond together to changing situations in a way that creates thriving for the whole system.