Tag: CapacityToChange

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The song of the river

In this sequence of posts I’m collecting questions that can help me build a regenerative design palette. In regenerative design we use the living world as a design guide. This goes beyond mimicking living forms — beyond biomimicry — to understanding how  underlying systems work, the processes that give rise to form and that enable living systems to thrive in balance. 

Next on my list: how is information stored in this system?

We often think of information as facts or data — something that can be written down or recorded. The invention of computer memory, which stores information in sequences of ones and zeros, exerts a powerful influence of cultural understanding of what information is.

But the Oxford English Dictionary entry for information includes other definitions that can broaden our understanding and what we look for in living systems.  Information can also be what is expressed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.

DNA is perhaps the living world’s most impressive information code, with a base of four rather than our binary two. But this is only the starting point for thinking about natural memory. 

Tree rings store the story of rainfall and prevailing wind. Wider rings correlate with wetter years; asymmetric ones show the dominant direction of wind. And at a larger scale still, information sequences are also expressed in the shape of the hills, storing information through their form about the sequence of geological events over hundreds of thousands of years. 

At the Regenerative Design Lab, Bill Sharpe offered a beautiful way to think about this. In any system with flow, there are structures that shape the movement — like a river’s banks. But the flow is also shaping the structure — the water gradually re-sculpting the path of the river. 

I think of the river as a stylus. The banks are the groove of an LP. Together they play the song of the river.  A record of what has been played before — one that is updated with every performance. 

Our ecosystems are a rich record library of everything that has happened in a place. What happens, what used to happen, what no longer happens, what could happen again.

Information in genetic bases, in strata, in layers of growth, in physical form, in ways we are only beginning to notice, and I’m sure in many more that we haven’t.

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Six foot slugs

I get asked this question all the time. I present an example of a scheme or an initiative in which engineers have developed a glimpse of the future — a way to work with reclaimed construction materials, to work with place, to create a system of working that demonstrates how to build a thriving future. 

And then the question — how does it scale up?

This question of scaling makes sense in our parallel human-superimposed world of extraction, refining, manufacturing, distribution and assembly. In which the way to scale up is to build bigger, systems of supply.

But it doesn’t make sense in the living world.

In my garden, slugs are enormously successful. Somehow they have found a way to tough out the winter, and wait until the moment when the ground is wet enough, and then zoom up the stems of my runner beans and strip them.

Love them or loathe them, slugs are a great design. 

But in the living world, there isn’t a venture capitalist saying ‘lets 10x these slugs. I see the potential for 6 foot slugs’.

Instead, over time, living systems tend to grow in number and variety of systems. In other words, more slugs and more of lots of other things too.

It’s not so much a scale up but a diversify up. Each of these elements in relationship to each other. 

The question for the regenerative designer shifts from how do we scale up to: how can we allow the number and variety of local elements to grow and evolve?

In other words, from scaling up to creating a widening mosaic. 

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A wobbly table on the non-flat surface of the reality

The faster trees grow, the straighter they tend to be. Compare the straight spears of fast-growing bamboo with the twisting boughs of old oak in ancient woodland. The former grows quickly skyward in a single season, whereas the latter slowly develops, year on year. 

In the twists and turns of an old tree’s branches we see captured in its geometry the changing environmental conditions it has experienced — the availability of light, direction of wind and even how much water it had to drink. A partner dance fixed in its branches. 

This is construction of a sort that responds to the changing conditions. That adapts. That is the best structural response to what happened next.

The shapes we find in the living world are built up on site, layer by layer, ring by ring, branch by branch. Each a best-fit response to what happened that season.

Engineers don’t grow things. Not in this sense of contextual layering up and extending. 

Instead, we cast, extrude and slice. It’s easier to design and cut things in straight lines, cast flat shapes, pack things that are regular cuboids and transport things that all look the same. 

Whereas the living world evolves shapes to suit the site, we’ve evolved our designs to suit the factory, the quarry, the motorway and the drawing board. We make in one place and take it to another. Ready-baked forms with few of the specificities of place built in. 

More fundamentally, the living world designs in context and engineers tend to design in the abstract. 

Abstraction is helpful! It makes things simpler, easier to calculate, define, arrange, and scale up. But it also separates us from context and the consequences of our decisions. 

Given nothing in the landscape, nor in the living world is straight, everything we make straight is an imperfect fit, an inefficient response.

A wobbly table on the non-flat surface of the reality.

Straight lines are sign that things have been done to a place. That variations have been ignored or cut off. That something has been abstracted and rendered easier — but at what cost? What has been flattened? What has been undervalued? What has been overlooked?

Nature does so much so little. And we can learn to do the same. But this asks more of designers. 

Design that layers.

Design that experiments on site.

Design that is a long-term response to place. 

I believe we would recognise this kind of design straight away. And we would find it intrinsically beautiful.

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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.

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Lead indicators for heat stress resilience

Up until now, my discussion about lead and lag indicators has focused on classic building performance factors. But regenerative designers are concerned with creating wider system thriving. So we need lead indicators for things beyond buildings — indicators that can tell us how well a place is likely to adapt to future challenges.

At a workshop earlier this week, I was discussing predictors of how well my street might cope with extreme heat in the future. For example, a short-term lead indicator is the quality and age of the housing stock. Poorly maintained Victorian terraces are far less likely to keep residents cool during heatwaves than newer, well-insulated buildings. This gives us a near-term view — how is the street likely to perform this year, or in the next few years, in response to extremes of temperature?

But what about the long-term capacity of a place to adapt? Here, we need to look at other factors:

Absent landlords — High numbers of absentee landlords who neglect their properties are a lead indicator of declining housing quality. Poor maintenance means homes will become less resilient to heat stress over time.

Street trees — Whether or not there are mature trees in a street is a good short-term lead indicator for local heat resilience. Trees provide shade and urban cooling, helping reduce both air and building temperatures. But for longer-term resilience, we need to ask: Is there a plan for maintaining these trees? Are new trees being planted? Are existing trees diseased or in decline? Tree planting programmes and maintenance plans are long-term lead indicators of a community’s capacity to adapt to rising temperatures.

Residents’ associations — The existence of active local groups can be a lead indicator of a community’s ability to organise for resilience. These groups might campaign for street greening, lobby for insulation grants, or even collectively purchase retrofit services—actions that build systemic capacity to cope with environmental stress.

And that’s the heart of regenerative design: looking beyond immediate outputs to understand how places can build long-term capacity for thriving. With so many conditions changing — from technological to environmental — the question becomes, does the local system have the capacity to change. That’s a key lead indicator for future thriving.