Tag: ContinuousPlaceBasedDesign

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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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What if we got all the designers together who ever designed a place?

Imagine gathering every designer who has ever shaped a single street for a retrospective design crit?

Every building — from the latest new-build to the medieval cottage still standing.

The streets, the services, the flood defences.

All the engineers (and other humans) who made all the decisions.

What would they discover about their design choices?

What would they regret?

Which decisions would they make again?

What patterns of place might emerge — the things that repeatedly work (or fail), whether we choose to notice or not?

What changes might they observe?

How differently would the place sound to different generations of designer?

And how would they all arrive?

It feels like engineers (and other humans) are constantly redesigning places.

But how do we take the long view?

How do we learn from what has worked — and what hasn’t — over time?

So that from generation to generation, we build a progression of holistic wisdom, not just another round of reinvention.

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Too soon to decide?

Sometimes, when faced with a decision, it’s worth asking: is it too soon to decide?

In permaculture, it’s common practice to wait a whole season before planting anything. That way, you can observe the full cycle: how the sun moves, where water pools, which areas dry out, and what emerges from the seed bank.

Without seeing the full pattern of a cycle in motion, we risk deciding too early — acting on partial data.

And this principle isn’t just for seasonal systems. It applies to any emergent situation. If we make our decision before more factors reveal themselves, we may find we acted too early.

So how do we know when it’s the right time to decide?

We might try to assess the nature of the change: is it cyclical? Is it reaching a steady state?

But in many situations, we can’t know for sure. That’s why we need to engage for the long term — not just to decide, but to learn to work with system over time. This is when we shift from one-off decision-makers to long-term stewards of systems. Over time we can then tune our instincts for how — and when — to intervene.

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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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Crowd-sourced building-performance data

Here’s an idea that I would like to throw out into the solar systems and see if anyone can do something with it. 

I was writing yesterday about post-occupancy amnesia — how little attention we, as an industry, pay to how buildings actually perform once they’ve been built. And this got me thinking: what if we could crowdsource that data?

Think about how Google Maps works. It aggregates large amounts of data provided my millions of users to understand traffic flows and levels of occupancy of different location. All from data that individuals give Google permission to aggregate. 

What if we could do something similar for building performance?

Many of our devices already capture data on location, movement and temperature. I imagine they can also collect data on noise and light levels. If enough people opted in it might be possible to gather data on how buildings are actually performing, eg: 

  • How many people are in a building, in what areas and when
  • How they move through spaces
  • What temperatures they experience
  • Light, sound and air quality. 

Triangulated with health data (with the right safeguards) we might see new patterns emerge. Patterns of how the complex systems of people in buildings actually behave. What we learn from these lag indicators can become lead indicators for the buildings we propose for the future might perform. 

Of course, there a big questions. What’s in it for the user? Why would people opt in?

And there are precedents. The Zoe Health Study in the UK gathered huge amounts of data from volunteers who signed up because there was a clear, public health need. Energy use and building performance might not feel as immediate, but as the energy crisis deepens, and we become more concerned about whether our buildings make us healthier or not, this might change. 

And maybe it can start with a smaller group. Maybe a community of building nerds using such an app would give us much more insight than we have now. 

Every building is an experiment. It’s up to us whether we pay attention to the results.