Tag: ContinuousPlaceBasedDesign

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On pattern spotting

Pattern is a word I use a lot. Recently, a reader wrote to say how much they appreciated this use of pattern language in my writing. And that made me pause today and think about why patterns matter so much to me. 

A book I regularly return to, usually towards the start of the summer holidays, is How to Read Water, by Tristan Gooley. In this fascinating guide, Gooley shows us how to understand all the complex things that are going on in a body of water by reading the patterns. 

In fluid mechanics, we can study the bulk properties of water flowing down an idealised channel – its velocity, discharge and whether it will be smooth-flowing or turbulent. Equations give us the means to predict overall behaviour.

But stand on a real river bank and we will find it much harder to predict the detail of what is going on. Sure, the big numbers stay the same, but the detail becomes impossible predict – where an eddy might suddenly appear and then dissolve; or where a submerged stone might set up a standing wave. Multiple factors interact to create a system that is too complex to predict. 

When faced with this sort of complexity, we stop seeking to predict the detail and instead learn to read the patterns, and what these can tell us about the underlying system. That’s what Gooley’s book does so well – gives us patterns to look for that help us understand the underlying structure and behaviour of the water we are looking at. 

Patterns show us what the system is trying to do. Its tendencies, what is reinforced and what is absent or removed. They show us the most likely, energy-efficient response to a set of conditions. 

Complexity emerges in systems with lots of connections and lots of interlocking factors. And so, straight away, we tend to see complexity whenever we are working with ecosystems, communities and organisations – in other words, in the work of regenerative design.

Patterns are a key to working with complexity. And pattern spotting is a key skill.

Spotting patterns doesn’t necessarily mean we need to copy them. Rather, patterns are clues to what is going on so that we can choose the best response to this complex system. 

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Incline? Uncline? Recline?

I caught myself wondering in a workshop this week, what is the opposite to decline?

Incline? Uncline? Recline?

A bit of context. I often look at places in need of repair and think why has nobody fixed that yet? Perhaps, in the past, my automatic response would have been to say because there isn’t a budget for that. And with this reflex programmed in, I stop noticing.

But for some reason I have started noticing. 

A wall needing a new coat of paint.

A planter without any plants in.

A flickering light making a place feel unsafe.

When places are uncared for, unmaintained, they go into decline. Things break, breakages create new weaknesses, which then break further. Places feel unloved, and in turn they get less love. It’s a downward spiral. 

But the opposite is also true. 

When places are cared for, are maintained, they do the opposite. Improving one thing is an invitation to improve the next. We can see love for a place and are more inclined to play our part, even if that’s just by spending more time there. It’s an upward spiral. 

One way to reverse this trend is to put more external investment in. But this money will come at the cost of another place in the system. 

The regenerative designer asks a different question: 

How can the energy and resources needed to build up a place come from that place? 

How can a virtuous spiral of local inputs and outputs reinforce itself to keep making things better, and to keep going within the limits of what that local ecosystem and community can carry?

That is the essence of regenerative design. 

To move from systems that deplete themselves to ones that improve over time. 

The opposite of decline?

Thrive. 

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340-degree vision

I read on a fact sheet that guinea pigs have 340-degree vision. On a horizontal plane they can see almost all around. Imagine! Their only blind spots are directly behind and a small patch directly in front of them. 

That’s because they are prey animals. They spend their whole waking time observing their environment for threats (they can even sleep with their eyes open). And while they can’t see far, they build up a detailed mental map of their surroundings by scuttling around, which means they can navigate even in the dark.

The animals that hunt them, on the other hand, have forward-facing eyes. Their breadth of vision is limited but their acuity is much higher. This focus allows them to spot and lock on to their prey from much further away.

I note that my eyes are on the front of my head. Does that make me a hunter? 

And when we design, which way are our eyes pointing? Are we focused on a pre-defined target or are we continually scanning the landscape to build up a picture?

For the regenerative designer, seeing is much more akin to the latter: building up a picture of the system we are in by continually exploring it. Building our interconnection with place. Searching for symbiosis we can unlock. Looking for emergent patterns we can enable. Then we can know how to act, even without being able to see straight forward.

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Visions that abstract us/ visions that ground us

Many vision statements float in the abstract. To be a global leader… To minimise store-to-door time… They sound clear, but they ignore the ecology and community that make the work possible. At best, such visions are inert to these realities. At worst, they succeed only at the cost of them.

A regenerative vision is rooted in place — in ecosystem and community. It sees the thriving of that place as central to success. So that our activity enhances this and the other places it touches. Perhaps, even, that this place would miss us if we were gone.

So rather than a mission statement that puts you anywhere and serves nowhere, see what happens when you serve somewhere.

Related tools > Continuous Place-Based Design

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Get on the ground and start moving around

In the early days of the internet, you had to know a website’s URL in order to visit it. 

Companies like Yahoo! set themselves up as way-finders. Visit their site and you could find links to popular places on the web. All organised under headings like a giant directory. 

And then a little company called Google came along and started building its own map of the web, based on exploration. Its bots would crawl the web, visit each website one at a time, figure out what it was about, and then follow the links from there. Which connections are strong? Which are weak?  Which way does the traffic flow?

This is a very different approach to knowledge gathering. Not based on a top-down hierarchy but on-the-ground mapping based on simple questions. 

What is here, what is happening, which ways are things going? 

With Google’s tool, all you had to do was search — they had the map, and it was a much better representation than Yahoo’s top-down approach.

Of course, who owns the map, and what they use it to do, are important questions too. 

But the underlying premise remains, if we want to really understand a situation, then get on the ground and start moving around. 

Related tools
>Continuous Place-Based Design
>Systems Survey

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Teaching theory versus the inconveniences of reality

Theory is abstraction. It is an understanding that is distilled of the inconveniences of reality to allow us to make predictions about that reality. 

Most engineering degrees start with the theory. Vast columns of theories stacked one on top of each other in piles called things like

Mechanics 1

Mechanics 2

Mechanics 3

And then at some point in that journey we ask students to apply that theory in a real world context. 

What if we flipped that model?

Start with observation — the opposite of abstraction. Discover the inconveniences of reality to allow us to find out how the world actually works. 

Observation 1

Observation 2

Observation 3

Of course that leads to an equally lopsided model, uninformed by the telesecoped sum of thinking available to theoretician.

Of course, the answer lies some where in the middle, sprinkled with a fair dose of application. 

Observe

Theorise

Apply

Observe 

Theorise

Apply

Etc 

It is surprising how radical this suggestion is.

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Pattern book field notes – action learning and continuous place-based design

The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is propped against a sign saying keep off the grass. In the backdrop is the quad of a Cambridge college

This week I took my copy of the Pattern Book to Cambridge. (Its second visit: in July I dropped it — and my laptop — in a puddle. Both recovered, and this time was less eventful.)

I was there to deliver my annual September workshop for the new cohort of students on the Sustainability Leadership for the Built Environment (SLBE) masters at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Two Pattern Book entries featured strongly.

Continuous place-based design

The workshop was called Design your learning process. We began by asking: what is design? I asked students to sketch a diagram of design as they see it.

This is central to the Constructivist method: start where the learner is, then connect new concepts to what they already know.

After sharing diagrams, I introduced a series of design models, each adding a new dimension, until we reached the Continuous Place-Based Design motif. At each stage, I pointed to overlaps with the students’ diagrams.

The point isn’t to treat any model as a strict procedure, but to use it as something to compare with reality — and then think how we might shift that reality for the better.

Action learning

From there, we turned to the idea that continuous place-based design is really a learning process. Which led naturally to the Action Learning motif.

It’s easy to be passive in learning. The real value comes when we apply theory to practice and then reflect on the results. The Pattern Book entry for action learning even includes a script for running these conversations with colleagues.

This month, I’ve been in workshops on live infrastructure projects where the same theme has surfaced again: organisations struggling to learn from mistakes. Not lessons learned, but lessons lost. For me this underlines that action learning isn’t just a training method — it’s a principle for working in complex systems.

—

It is such a pleasure to teach on this course — this is the start of my eighth cohort! Many graduates are readers here, so if that’s you: thank you for sticking with me all these years.

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Learning as a design process

Diagram showing the cycle of Continuous Place-Based Design: Observe, Brief, Ideas, Make & Test — all centred around Place.

In a flip of yesterday’s post — if design can be a learning process, then learning can be a design process too.

What would it look like to approach learning the way we approach design?

Design begins with intention. It asks: how do I take an existing situation and make it better? That invites us to name where we are now — and to define what better might mean for us.

Design also embraces divergence. In a learning context, that could mean exploring unexpected sources, challenging the materials in front of us, or inventing new ways to engage.

Design gives a different meaning to testing. Not testing to see if I made a grade, but testing to see if I fulfilled the brief. 

And design invites us to keep coming back to the brief and ask how could the brief be improved.

By designing our learning we have the potential to not just passively follow a learning process but to create one that more intentionally meets our needs. 

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Design as a learning process

Many projects treat design as a problem with a fixed answer. But what if we treated design as learning journey?

In a complex world, design needs to be a responsive process. This means observing, setting intentions, developing ideas, testing them and seeing what happens. With each iteration of this process we get a better understanding of how the system responds to our thinking — and how our thinking needs to respond to the system.



  • This mindset encourages us to:
  • Respect complexity
  • Work iteratively
  • See value not in a single deliverable, but in insight that accrues over time

It’s hard to argue with that. And yet many design processes are linear and short-term.

But just think about what long-term value could be unlocked by shifting from merely delivering an answer toward building understanding.

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Consult your hopes and dreams — part of what a place is trying to do

The first stage in continuous place-based design is observation. It is a beginning that says before we do anything different here we need to try and understand this place. 

The aim of this phase is to gather as much data and wisdom as we can before proposing changes. That data can be physical, cultural or even intangible — anything that helps us to notice what makes a place distinct, what gives it its feel. 

One of the data sets I think is often overlooked — but vital — is hopes and dreams.

These are easy to dismiss as not ‘real’ but I see them as very real. Our hopes are distant but visible from where we are now — rooted both in the present and in the future. In the language of the Three Horizons Model, they belong in Horizon Three: an outline of what we see from here in the future. 

Since the design process spans the present and the future, hopes and dreams are a vital link.

The hopes and dreams of the people that live or regularly used in a space are founded in their complex interaction with that place. So asking simple questions like: 

What is your hope for this place?
What do you dream I could become?

…can a great deal about the current lie of the land and its future potential. 

One the questions we ask in the Systems Survey motif (see the Pattern Book) is ‘what is this place trying to do?’

Hopes and dreams are part of that answer. They are usually motivating — either towards one place or away from another. They inject energy into certain courses of action over others. And so that are an important clue as to what patterns are already unfolding here or are likely to in the future.

So pay attention to hopes and dreams as well as the things you can physically observe. These dreams may already be shaping the path that this place is taking.