Permaculture: a whole design philosophy for sustainable living
One of my ongoing intentions over a number of years has been to introduce people in Dudley to design mindsets and methods through CoLab Dudley, and help to increase their creative confidence. Over the last year I’ve discovered that permaculture design embraces the design mindsets we’ve been introducing and cultivating, and uses them in tandem with a set of ethics, some really useful strategies and principles and a range of methods which are drawn from observations and understandings of how nature works.
As Maddy Harland explains in Fertile Edges from an editorial for Permaculture Magazine written in 2002:
Permaculture’s central theme is to create human communities that can sustain themselves and the landscape’s flora and fauna within and around them. It is a whole design philosophy for sustainable living. At it’s core is the inspiration and example of natural ecosystems because the intelligence of Nature has so much to teach us. Permaculture has always been essentially innovative, trying and testing out new ideas, and pushing the edges of possibility.
Adam Brock, author of Change Here Now: Permaculture Solutions for Personal and Community Transformation (2017) writes:
The ethics, principles, and design process give permaculture a flexible and powerful set of problem-solving tools that can be applied to just about anything. Practically speaking, however, those tools have thus far been applied relatively narrowly. For most of permaculture’s history, it’s practitioners have tended to focus heavily on … food production and land stewardship.
… Today, more and more in the permaculture community are turning their attention to social systems — and we’re discovering that they might not be as slippery as we thought. In fact, our thirty years of lessons from the garden and the landscape are surprisingly easy to apply to these social structures, and in more than just superficial ways.
Heather Jo Flores, director of the Permaculture Women’s Guild and the organiser of an online permaculture design and advanced social systems design course explains that:
The same principles that make permaculture so successful on the landscape also work for designing invisible structures like social, emotional, economical, and political systems. That’s because permaculture is not just about the components of a system; it is also about the flows and connections between those components. It is about the relationships.
And that what’s great about it is that we can all use it in unique ways to enhance what we are doing already and take us in new directions… we don’t have to follow a prescribed route of how to use it.
Over the last few months our lab team have been using permaculture ethics, mindsets, design strategies and principles to guide a design process, along with inspiration, ideas and approaches from all sorts of other sources. However it’s not only since we consciously started applying permaculture design that we’ve been spreading permaculture mindsets and principles… as the links below to archive posts on some of our work around design illustrate.
Links to CoLab Dudley archive posts on design mindsets
Our CoLab Exchange series in 2014 included a hands-on experience of applying design thinking (I’ve since facilitated the d.school design thinking virtual crash course numerous times in and beyond Dudley) and signposting to the use of design in the public sector. We recently returned to the application of design in public services with a look at the principles in Hilary Cottam’s work on Radical Help.
A permaculture mindset of abundance thinking has consistently been central CoLab Dudley work. In 2015 I kicked off the year linking to Curtis Ogden’s post on Abundance Thinking for Change. Later that the year we ran a Knowledge Cafe which aimed to explore people’s experience of abundance thinking or an abundance mindset. This was inspired by permaculture teacher Looby Macnamara’s book, 7 Ways to Think Differently. During the Knowledge Cafe a wealth of ideas, reflections, experience and knowledge on the theme of abundance thinking were shared among a relatively small group of people, captured in a post called Share your chickpeas!
By 2016 we’d tested and developed our first design tool, the Activate Pack, and had started supporting local people to apply a range of design mindsets and methods to bring ideas to life in Dudley.
As we entered 2017 we had a lab team in place, and pretty much the whole year centred around the permaculture principle Observe and Interact… though we called it Detectorism. During 2017 embarked a couple of times on learning journeys to develop our systems thinking, the second time around with an open invitation to anyone wishing to work on this mindset.
