Aesthetics and design [for regenerative cultures]
In 2003 I attended a talk by William McDonough and Michael Braungart at a construction industry trade fair in Barcelona. They opened with this question:
Can anything be truly beautiful if it causes ugliness, suffering or ill health anywhere else?
Most design academics and professionals suffer from a certain self-importance regarding their capacity to make aesthetic judgements while simultaneously holding a rather shallow and trend-serving notion of beauty.
In sharp contrast, the indigenous people of the Navajo tribe describe their traditional way of living as the ‘beauty way’. To them living in right relationship with the Earth is to ‘walk in beauty’ (Hózhóogo Naasháa Doo) and their advice is: ‘if you walk into the future walk in beauty’. The way to walk in beauty is to ‘witness the One-in-All and the All-in-One’. It is a path of appropriate relationship to self, to community and to the Earth. We have a lot to learn from this insight. It may guide us on our uncertain path towards a future where humanity has learned to be a regenerative rather than a destructive presence on Earth. It may also help us deepen into an ecological aesthetic of health and complexity.
The platitude ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’ turns out to be a profound insight into the way we perceive beauty based on our culturally dominant worldview. The way we see the world determines our aesthetic experience. What we choose to pay attention to, and how we interpret the ‘facts about reality’ we are selecting, depends on already established beliefs we hold about the world.
Likewise, our aesthetic perception is not a simple one-way process where we open our eyes and the world floods in and we see what is ‘out there’. Rather, we employ organizing ideas, or beliefs about the world, to make sense of our perception and thereby structure what-is- seen in such a way that it makes sense to us. Perception is a two-way process. The act of seeing involves visual stimuli coming in and organizing ideas going out, or better ‘making sense’ of what is coming in. Seeing is interpreting.
Beauty thus depends to a large extent on what we have learned to see as beautiful. Beauty is primarily about relationships and our perception of relationships. Nicolas Bourriaud (1998), the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, speaks of a “relational aesthetics” and Jale Erzen, a Turkish artist, architect, and member of the International Association of Aesthetics, equates the term relational aesthetics with ecological aesthetics, since ecology is fundamentally about interdependence and relationship.
“Aesthetics and ecology can be said to be complementary and interdependent.”
Jale Erzen, 2004: 22
Aesthetics is a participatory exploration of the relationship between the one and the all. This understanding of aesthetics is getting closer to the traditional Navajo view. The German artist Herman Prigann believes that the root of environmental problems lies in our “inability to understand the dialogue between nature and culture that defines their relationship through mutual dependence” (2004: 111). In Prigann’s opinion the environmental problems we face demand “a new capacity for aesthetic judgement” (p.75).
“It is not ecology that needs an aesthetic treatment, instead the aesthetic follows ecological insights. Nature does not need an aesthetic domestication.”
— Herman Prigann, p.220
Ecological aesthetics mediates an important shift in perception:
An ecological aesthetic would be a perspective on our environment and society as well as the ensuing theory and practice. This perspective would annul current, standard contradictions such as nature — art // nature — technology // nature — civilization // nature — culture and proceed towards an insight of the principle of dialogue in and towards everything.
Hermann Prigann (2004: 180)
Echoing Gregory Bateson’s suggestion that we ought to search for ‘the pattern that connects’, Prigann sees aesthetics as “the recognition of the pattern that connects everything”. He believes that “through attentiveness to pattern, that connection in everything — the universal togetherness — evolves an aesthetic perspective of perception”.
In a regenerative culture, our perception of beauty and our aesthetic judgement would come to depend upon the effect that art, design and architecture, or indeed any creative activity, has on life as a whole.
Once we begin to see things in their context — from a systemic perspective that is informed by ecological awareness of the impacts of production and consumption — what we perceive as beautiful changes.
Aesthetic judgement informed by ecological literacy is not only influenced by how something looks but by a deeper questioning of how it was made, out of what materials, by whom and under what conditions.
Edwin Datschefski explores this expanded understanding of beauty in The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products (2001) and William McDonough and Michael Braungart (2002) build on Datschefski’s concept of ‘total beauty’ in their ground-breaking book Cradle to Cradle — Remaking the Way We Make Things.
Aesthetics, as a participatory and systemic understanding of our relationship with the rest of nature, is about perceiving beauty as an expression of our belonging and being in relationship.
Beauty in a regenerative culture is about health, diversity, participation in complexity and about ethically appropriate relationships that create conditions conducive to life. A new aesthetic sensitivity of interbeing is emerging:
Health is a term for the aesthetic understanding of complexity. There is a thread connecting biodiversity, cultural diversity and economic diversity. This is the metaphorical understanding of the health of a complex dynamic system. […]
The perception of health is a relative term, it requires intimate knowledge over a period of time and a caring critical attention. In turn, a lack of health can be described in terms of emergent dominant systems that mitigate the constraint of diversity. […]
Within the aesthetic perception of diversity lies systemic relationship, dynamism, complexity, symbiosis, contradiction to measurement and indefinite and procreative vitality.
Timothy Collins (2004: 172)
In a regenerative culture any design, whether a product, a building, a community, or processes, services and systems, will be judged on its overall impact on health, resilience and sustainability. Any act of ‘making’ engenders the responsibility of material and energy use along with all other ways that the result affects the whole process in which it participates.
The aesthetics of regenerative cultures will value how we can ‘witness the One- in-All and the All-in-One’ in everything. Beauty draws us in and gives us a direct experience of our intimate communion with the world around us.
If it’s not beautiful, it’s not sustainable. Aesthetic attraction is not a superficial concern — it’s an environmental imperative. Beauty could save the world.
Lance Hosey (2012: 7)
[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
