Tag: SystemsSurvey

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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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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.

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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.