Tag: Flow

Posted on

Use the water on its way downhill

Use the water on its way downhill

Gather the feedback before everyone leaves.

Capture the waste heat before it disappears up the exhaust.

Better to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Hold the nutrients back before they are washed away down the mountainside 

Learn the lesson straightaway 

Reuse before you recycle

Sort it on the doorstep rather than at the dump.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

When in doubt take the high road.

You can’t stop the waves but you can surf them.

When something concentrated disperses, it loses its potential. Dispersal is inevitable. The skill in regenerative design is to catch the potential on its way down, and cycle it into new life before it’s gone

Posted on

The Entropy Bus

When strangers get on a bus, they almost always spread out. Few people sit next to each other unless they really have to.

Partly that’s social norms. And partly it’s probability — and entropy is the name we give to it: the measure of how many possible configurations a system can take.

The social rules push people apart, but entropy makes the scattered state the most likely outcome.

You could put an extra conductor on the bus to tell people where to sit, filling rows neatly from the front. But that takes energy. Take the conductor away, and inevitably everyone spreads out again.

The lesson of the entropy bus is that order is costly, disorder is cheap — and dispersal from order to disorder creates a flow.

The art of regenerative design is to shape systems so that the most likely outcome, and the flow in that direction is also the most life-giving.

Posted on

Systems Survey

This motif combines the Living Systems Blueprint with a civil engineering perspective to create six questions for a site investigation that can reveal the underlying system characteristics.

  1. What is connected and what is separated?
  2. What is thriving and what is in decline?
  3. What is in flow and what is static?
  4. What is changing and what is fixed?
  5. What stories does this place tell?
  6. What is the place trying to do – and what helps or hinders it?

User guide

  • Site survey — use these questions to bring a more systemic lens to a traditional site survey.
  • System investigation — use these questions to think more about infrastructure and policies and how they relate to the patterns they create on the ground.

This post is an extract from the Motif Library in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design.