Waves Archives - Constructivist

I spent most of yesterday afternoon up to my middle in waves learning to surf [this is a repost from the archive, so this didn’t actually happen yesterday!]. I’ve got a long way to go. So it is no coincidence that today’s post is about waves. Not necessarily physical waves but the waves we experience as humans.

As James Norman and I set out in our book, the goal of regenerative design is for humans and the living world to survive thrive and co-evolve. If we are thinking about human thriving then we should consider how we, and the people around us, experience a whole series of waves through our lives. The daily cycle of night and day, the menstrual cycle, the seasonal cycle and the cycle through the different phases of life. These cycles are waves with peaks and troughs. Trying to flatten them or ignore them by pretending that all things are constant stresses the system. Maintaining a high level of work when there is no energy in the system can be damaging. Equally having an abundance of energy and no means to dissipate it can also cause damage.

Much better is to try to work with energy of a system when it is available and use the downtime to recover.

Imagine a graph showing the power of two systems over time. One system has moments of high power and low power. The other system just operates at a constant power level that is the midline of the peaks and troughs.

The total area under these two graphs (which represents energy of each system) is the same.

If we have a system that is trying to run with oscillating levels of available energy and we try to flatten it, we risk damaging the system without gaining any more energy.

When we are thinking about how to organise our own work and how we collaborate with others, it is much better to ride the wave of available energy. Whether that’s through tuning in to our own daily, menstrual, seasonal or life cycles. Or through providing allyship to how others experience theirs.

Riding the wave is also much better for surfing. Sadly, I’m a long way off riding it for very long.

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in September 2024.

One of earliest childhood memories of travel is riding in the back of the car driving along a motorway in mountains in the north of Italy. To traverse a terrain of deep valleys and high ridges the engineers had taken a midline. The road leaps across the ravines on high viaducts, plunging straight into a tunnel only to fly out again across the next bridge. With the sea glistening deep below it was an exhilarating journey. (Did this sow the seed of going into civil engineering?)

Faced with a series of peaks and troughs the engineers flattened the journey. They saved journey time and energy on every single car journey on that route, every day for over half a century.

Smoothing things out is something that engineers seem to be generally good at. For example we’ve been straightening rivers to make them more navigable for centuries.

But building faster, straighter roads also increases traffic. Straightening rivers increases flood risk.

When we start to consider the unintended consequences smoothing things out we might find that working with the ups and downs and twists and turns is better. The friction slows down the flow. People or water, in these examples, spend longer in each place. There is greater interaction and opportunity exchange and creation of wealth in its many forms.

Next time I cross the Italian Alps hopefully I can do it on a bicycle, following the contours of the river valleys.

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in 2024.