Design Theory and a Changing Scientific Worldview

Look abroad through nature’s range. Nature’s mighty law is change. — Robert Burns (in Gould, 2000, p.96)

The role of scientific information, or scientific knowledge in decision-making processes requires more detailed discussion and I will return to this topic throughout this thesis. [This is an excerpt from my 2006 PhD Thesis in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic/Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’. This research and 10 years of experience as an educator, consultant, activist, and expert in whole systems design and transformative innovation have led me to publish Designing Regenerative Cultures in May 2016.]

On the one hand, we desperately need reliable information upon which to base our design decisions, on the other hand by restricting our thinking through an exclusive focus on particular types of information (e.g. scientific data or theories) and particular epistemologies (e.g. dualistic subject-object separation and either-or rationalism) we are limiting our information base and are therefore less likely to create solutions that are appropriate in the long run.

All that the different sciences or other academic disciplines can ever do is provide useful maps of certain aspects of reality and highlight certain dynamic relationships. We need to be frequently reminded that these maps are never the territory and are always limited abstractions of a process too complex to describe by any means, whether the written word, mathematical formulae or artistic expressions. Furthermore we need to acknowledge the participatory role of the map-maker (ourselves) in choosing how to reduce this complexity in the very act of conception (meta-design) and the resulting perception of reality.

I have already suggested that all design is worldview dependent and I will discuss this in more detail later. Any worldview is based on a particular ontological and epistemological strategy to reduce the complexity of existence into an experience to which we can relate. At this stage, I simply want to emphasize that while neither the traditional reductionistic approach to science nor the modern holistic sciences can or should be regarded as the only reliable basis for decision making, they nevertheless both provide important tools and insights that may help humanity to re-design its participation in natural process and shift society towards sustainable patterns of production and consumption.

Since the predominant cultural bias is still to be captivated by the reductionist, dualist and mechanist paradigm, I will tend to redress the balance by arguing for a more holistic perspective. This is not denying the significant but limited usefulness of reductionistic, dualistic and mechanistic methodologies! A truly holistic and integral perspective will transcend and include the reductionist perspective.

Acknowledging that science, technology and economics are among the most influential contributors to the currently dominant worldview and its associated value systems is the first step of tackling unsustainable practices at their root cause. Design can only change if we recognize that all expressions of our creative potential are pre-selected and shaped by the values and attitudes that are inherent in our worldview. As our worldview changes, so do the intentions behind design. What we know and how we know affects the way we see the world, and therefore how we design and act.

Thus, it may be necessary at this stage to recapitulate some crucial developments in scientific theory that have taken place during the course of the last century. I will suggest a number of ways in which these developments may increasingly come to influence design theory and practice. Science itself, or at least its most avant-garde disciplines, have moved on from an exclusive focus on reductionism, dualist rationalism and linear cause and effect thinking.

While Newtonian physics and mechanistic metaphors are useful tools for engineering and technological development, holistic and process orientated scientific approaches can suggest certain relationships, dynamics and limits that can guide appropriate participation in natural process and therefore lead toward increased sustainability. The modern holistic sciences can inform ecologically and socially literate design decisions.

A competitive, individualistic and materialist worldview cannot inform sustainable design. Society has created its institutions and reward systems around the outdated dogma of competition due to resource scarcity — a central but anachronistic focus of both “free” market economics and neo-Darwinian biology. To facilitate the emergence of a sustainable human civilization we will have to transcend and include such conceptually limited meta-design.

Modern ecology recognizes that the evolution of complex ecosystems is fundamentally based on symbiosis, co-evolution and emergent self-regulation throughout the system as a whole. In this view, at the scale of ecosystems or the biosphere, all life is an expression of its co-operative attempt to share existing resources in the most effective way to allow for both individual survival and the maintenance of the processes of life as a whole. Thus, ecology — as a holistic approach to science — supports a shift in cultural metaphor from the overemphasis of the competitive aspects of nature to the recognition that life is a fundamentally cooperative and symbiotic process. This and various other insights from diverse scientific disciplines, particularly complexity theory, can inform designers in their attempt to design with, rather than against, natural process.

The year 2005 marked the centenary of Albert Einstein’s publication of two papers that changed physics and initiated a transformation of the way that modern humanity understands the universe. Relativity theory forced us to reconsider some fundamental assumptions about the natureofreality. It fused the previously mutually exclusive categories of space and time into an interrelated space-time continuum. Experience was recognized as dependent on the location and speed of the experiencing subject. Furthermore, the concepts of matter and energy also were brought into dynamic relationship, rather than existing as separate dualistic categories. The famous E= mc2 expresses a relationship between energy, mass (matter) and the speed of light, that describes the transformation of mass into energy and vice versa. The inherent lesson: The rigid categories that describe the Cartesian and Newtonian universe and its linear cause and effect laws and dualist either-or logic may be very useful within limits, but are insufficient abstractions of the true complexity of natural process.

The work of Descartes, Newton and Darwin took many decades, even centuries, to fully establish itself as cultural metaphor to the point that modern design professionals and the majority of society can be trapped in those modes of thinking without even recognizing their origins.

Equally, the insights of the mathematician Jules-Henri Poincaré during the last decade of the 19th century, which drove the development of non-linear mathematics, chaos theory, fractal geometry and complexity theory, and the work of the great physicists of the early 20th century in relativity and quantum theory, has not quite percolated up from the collective subconscious enough to completely transform older habits of thought and out-dated descriptions of reality. Cultural metaphors change and transform very slowly in comparison with the speed of accumulation of new knowledge and insights in specialized fractions of society.

One of the crucial insights that the science of quantum theory brought to our conscious awareness is that the Cartesian separation between the observer and the observed is no more than an epistemological tool and not founded in physical reality. While most scientific theories claim to be based on the detached and impartial standpoint of the ‘objective’ observer, quantum physics has demonstrated that observation is always based on the subjective involvement of the observer in the processes observed.

In reality, observers are always participators. The separation of object and subject takes place in the noosphere and is thus a result of our way of thinking. At the quantum level everything is entangled with everything else. The theory describes a fundamentally interconnected universe in which humanity participates. In the words of John Wheeler:

Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there’, with the observer safely separated from it by a 20-centimetre slab of plate glass. Even to observe so miniscule an object as an electron, he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. He must install his chosen measuring equipment. It is up to him to decide whether he shall measure position or momentum. To install the equipment to measure the one prevents and excludes his installing the equipment to measure the other. Moreover, the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never afterwards be the same. To describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator’. In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe. John Wheeler (in Capra, 1991, p.141)

What holds for the scientific observer also holds for the creative designer. The inherent lesson:

Our way of observing and the resulting actions or designs affect the complex dynamics of the entire system since it is fundamentally interconnected. Fritjof Capra has described the work of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louise De Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac as a paradigm shift in the foundations of science and our worldview. “The new physics necessitated profound changes in concepts of space, time, matter, object, and cause and effect; and because these concepts are so fundamental to our way of experiencing the world, their transformation came as a great shock” (Capra, 1982, p.65).

The insights that shook science a hundred years ago are still finding their way into our worldview that is still so strongly affected by the Cartesian epistemology that isolates the individual observing subject from the objects it observes. Our dominant worldview leads us to perceive our selves as individuals and the human species, as separate from the natural processes in which we participate. This is an epistemological illusion that has critically affected the way we have approached design and humanity’s existence in natural process.

Niels Bohr pointed out: “Isolated particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems” (in Capra, 1982, p.69). Capra emphasizes that, at the sub-atomic level, particles are not things but relationships between things. He writes: “modern physics reveals the basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independent existing smallest units.” Capra explains: “As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated basic building blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relationships between the various parts of a unified whole” (Capra, 1982, p.70). He quotes Werner Heisenberg’s conclusion: “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole” (in Capra, 1982, p.70).

This insight turns isolated objects into interconnected processes. Properly internalised and understood it could revolutionize the way we approach design! As it may help to shift us from an end product focussed approach to design to a process or service focussed approach. It also provides a scientific basis to an understanding of form as an expression of process, relationships and interaction, rather than purely a static spatial material expression.

Dorian Sagan and Eric Scheider (2000) provide a brief synopsis of the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger’s discussion of what a thermodynamic perspective can contribute to our understanding of life. Schrödinger was the first to point out that, since the laws of thermodynamics suggest a universe tending toward energetic decay and the ultimate stasis of heat death, the evolution of life should really be considered the result of a highly improbable event. Schrödinger argued that the increase in organization and complexity that is accomplished by life must have a continuous source of energy from outside the biosphere, since the laws of thermodynamics would have to apply to all biological organisms. “He argued that it was sunlight that provided the crucial input” and suggested that “by feeding on the energy of the sun, living beings are able to become more ordered and can resist the thermodynamic imperative to fall into disrepair,” and thus “order can then emerge from disorder” (Sagan &

Schneider, 2000, p.122). Based on this crucial insight, that life constitutes a synthropic or negentrophic force at the scale of the biosphere, Sagan and Schneider provide this insightful statement of who we are and what we are part of:

The improbability of being you is high — you could never come into being or exist as an isolated system — something so complex or improbable could never happen without an abundant flow of matter and energy. But you are as organized as you are because you are part of a planetary thermodynamic system — the biosphere — which has been continuously trapping and rerouting the high-quality energy of sunlight and producing the low quality energy of heat, for more than three billion years (Sagan & Schneider, 2000, p.122).

Let me emphasize again, my intention is not to claim that these scientific descriptions of the nature of our existence tell the whole or the only valid story, nevertheless they can help us to relate to nature in a different way. For example, the above clearly indicates that almost all life follows the fundamental design strategy to be powered by sunlight, either directly or indirectly. Understanding our involvement in natural processes and how they function and interrelate can change our relationship to nature.

A change in our relationship to nature is a necessary shift in meta-design in order to move from talking about sustainability to taking appropriate action. Eco-literacy is a catalyst of meaningful and motivated action by informed citizens to turn the attainable utopia of sustainability into reality. A more holistic scientific understanding is part of eco-literacy and can inform the necessary shift in perception of the relationship between humanity and nature.

The Austrian, Ludwig von Bertalanffy is usually accredited with being the founding father of an entirely new scientific discipline called General Systems Theory. As an early attempt to develop a more holistic approach to the study of natural systems, General Systems Theory aimed to establish the laws of interaction that govern the behaviour of systems. Bertalanffy defined systems as complexes of elements in interaction to which systems laws can be applied.

With regard to natural systems, Paul Weiss later offered a more informative definition. A system is “a complex unit in space and time, whose sub-units co-operate to preserve its integrity and its structure and its behaviour and tend to restore them after a non- destructive disturbance” (Weiss, 1971, p.99). This definition addresses the self-regulation and self-making (autopoietic) properties of living systems, to which I will return in more depth later.

Edward Goldsmith has pointed out that “by defining a natural system in Weiss’s way, one also distinguishes it from the components of the technosphere or surrogate world, which satisfies none of these conditions.” Goldsmith argues that “the failure of many of those involved in General Systems Theory to grasp the significance of this distinction largely explains why this discipline has made remarkably little progress since the death of its founder” (Goldsmith, 1996, p.238).

There is a fundamental difference between living systems — organisms and their communities — and engineered mechanistic systems! Failure to understand these differences has limited many systems theorists. Nevertheless, I disagree with Goldsmith’s statement, and suggest that general systems theory was an important stepping stone into a new way of thinking in a more joined-up way that acknowledges complex, multi-causal relationships and the unpredictability of non-linear and time-delayed causality.

Many of its proponents had difficulties overcoming their own mechanistic schooling and adherence to a scientific enterprise that seeks to increase predictability and controlability in order to manipulate, but nevertheless systems theory was a significant move towards a more holistic and dynamic perspective of our own involvement in natural process.

The eminent ecologist Eugene Odum was among the first to emphasize the self- regulatory, or homeostatic nature of ecosystem dynamics, but he also highlighted the fact that in nature systems are controlled by a diffuse network of interaction and relationships. A good many system theorists have tried in vain to apply mechanistic and engineering based thinking to increase the level of control and prediction in complex living systems like human organizations. They failed to learn Nature’s important design lesson of diffuse control and causality through dynamic information and feedback flows. Odum wrote:

Besides energy flows and material cycles, ecosystems are rich in information networks comprising physical and chemical communication flows that connect all parts and steer or regulate the system as a whole. Accordingly, ecosystems can be considered cybernetic in nature, but control functions are internal and diffuse rather than external and specified as in human-engineered cybernetic devices (Odum, 1983, p.46).

The cybernetic way of thinking — that tries to understand complex relationships through representing them in a web of dynamic positive and negative feedback cycles — was developed by engineers thinking about mechanistic human inventions. Its application to biological and ecological systems has proved extremely insightful, but also caused much confusion due to the carrying over of inappropriate mechanistic metaphors.

Cybernetics combined with the use of more organismic metaphors in the creation of dynamic representations of complex living system is also called bio-cybernetics. The bio-cybernetic way of thinking about complex design problems will prove increasingly useful as we shift towards the aim of creating design that participates appropriately in natural process. Bio-cybernetics is an important component of the systems view of life. In his book The Web of Life Fritjof Capra defined this view as follows:

According to the systems view, the essential properties of organisms, or living systems, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships between the parts. Thesepropertiesaredestroyedwhenthesystemisdissected,eitherphysicallyortheoretically,into isolated elements. Although we can discern individual parts in any system, these parts are not isolated, and the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts (Capra, 1996, p.29).

A characteristic emergent property that makes living systems more than the sum of their parts is that they are self-organizing and self-repairing systems. One of the main shortcomings of understanding living systems through mechanistic metaphors is linked to these properties. As much as it might be helpful to gain a simplified understanding of, for example, the human eye by comparing it to a pin-hole camera, or of the human heart by drawing analogies to a mechanical pump, their self-organizing and self-healing ability distinguishes them critically from machines.

Fritjof Capra emphasizes three key aspects of self-organizing systems. The first is its “pattern of organization: the totality of relationships that define the system as an integral whole,” the second is its “structure: the physical realization of pattern or organization in space and time;” and the third aspect of self-organization is the organizing activity itself: “the activity involved in realizing the pattern of organization” (Capra, 1994). These aspects of self- organizing systems could fruitfully inform the creation of more integrated designs that participate appropriately in natural process (see chapter 7). They could be used to methodically consider a design’s effect on the interconnected processes that organize the wider context into which the design needs to be integrated (i.e. the local environment).

General Systems Theory facilitated the development of a whole host of holistic scientific theories. Applied to living systems it has influenced Earth Systems Science or Gaia Theory, as well as ecology and bio-cybernetics. Combined with insights from non-linear mathematics and chaos theory it provides the basis of the development of the theory of complex dynamic systems.

The systems approach inspired the complex computer modelling that has lead to the simulations discussed by Donella Meadows and her colleagues in Limits to Growth, Beyond the Limits, and Limits to Growth — The 30 Year Update (see Meadows et al., 1972, 1992, and 2005). These models have both warned of the effects of over-population, over-consumption and resource depletion, and at the same time demonstrated that complex processes cannot be precisely predicted.

Globally interconnected systems are too complex to be controlled or predicted. As a result some of the predictions made in the first edition of Limits to Growth have since been revised. Nevertheless, the overall lessons and warnings behind the predictions of these models should be taken very seriously in all our designs. Early predictions underestimated the overall resilience of the planetary system and therefore suggested a more rapid collapse of vital planetary life support systems, but that does not mean that rapid resource depletion or exponentially growing rates of consumption or populations can be sustained.

Sadly Donella Meadows died on February 20th, 2001 of bacterial meningitis at the age of only 59. Her writing has reached millions and she has personally inspired many thousands of people through her scientific work, her academic teaching, public lecturing, and her local activism. She managed to combine all these activities with running an organic farm for 29 years and publishing a highly acclaimed regular newspaper column entitled ‘The Global Citizen’ since 1985.

Before falling ill, Donella Meadows had been working on the manuscript for a new book, which was to summarize what she had learned from applying the concepts and tools of systems theory to understanding complex systems. Excerpts from her unfinished last book were published in 2001 by the Whole Earth Review under the title ‘Dancing with Systems’

(Meadows, 2001). In this article Donella Meadows advises in a series of general guidelines,how to facilitate positive change in a system. This list is deeply insightful. In my opinion, it could be regarded as a set of guidelines for appropriate decision-making, participation and design. The list describes a holistic problem solving approach that should inform design in responding to wicked and complex problems. Every global citizen and every professional designer would do well to contemplate these suggestions. I have summarised them below.

Donella Meadows’ Guidelines for Appropriate Participation in Complex System

(Summarized and adapted from Meadows, 2001, pp.1–4)

1. Get the beat.
Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. Starting with the behaviour of the system forces you to focusonfactsnottheories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others. The systems behaviour directs one’s thoughts to dynamic, not static analysis — not only what is wrong? But also how did we get here? And where are we going to end up?
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
Aid and encourage the structures that help the system run itself. Don’t be an un-thinking intervener and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge into the make things better, pay attention to the valueofwhat’salready there.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be shot at. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Mental flexibility — thewillingnesstoredraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure — is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
Trust your intuition more and your figuring-out rationality less. Lean on both as much as you can, but still be prepared for surprises. In a world of complex systems it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it’s leading. Honour, facilitate and protect timely and accurate information!
5. Locate responsibility in the system.
Look for the ways the system creates its own behaviour. Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behaviour from the system rather than another. Sometimes outside influences can be controlled, and sometimes they can’t. Intrinsic responsibility means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision-making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision-makers.
6. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
You can imagine why a dynamic, self-adjusting system cannot be governed by static, unbending policy. It’s easier, more effective, and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system. Especially where there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta-feedback loops — loops that alter, correct, and expand loops. These are policies that design learning into the management process.
7. Pay attention to what is important, not to what is quantifiable.
Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live.

8. If something is ugly, say so.
If something is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsuitable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don’t let it pass. Don’t be stopped by the “if you can’t measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it” ploy. No one can [precisely] define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can [precisely] define or measure any value. But if we don’t speak up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak of them and point towards their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

9. Go for the good of the whole.
Don’t maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as [creativity], stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability — whether they are easily measured or not. As you think about the system, spend part of your time from a vantage point that lets you see the whole system. Especially in the short term, changes for the good of the whole may sometimes seem to be counter to the interests of a part of the syst em. It helps to remember that the parts of a system cannot survive without the whole.

10. Expand time horizons.
The official time horizon of industrial society doesn’t extend beyond what will happen after the next election or beyond the payback period of current investments. In the strict systems sense there is no long-term/short-term distinction. Phenomena at different timescales are nested within each other. Actions taken now have some immediate effects and some that radiate out for decades to come. We are experiencing now consequences of actions set in motion yesterday, decades, even centuries ago. You need to be watching both the short and long terms — the whole system.

11. Expand thought horizons Defy the disciplines. Inspiteofwhatyoumajoredin,orwhatthetextbookssay,orwhatyouthinkyou’reanexpertat,follow a system wherever it leads. It will be sure to lead across traditional disciplinary lines. To understand that system, you will have to be able to learn from — while not being limited by — economists and chemists and psychologists and theologians. You will have to penetrate their jargon, integrate what they tell you, recognize what they can honestly see through their particular lenses, and discard the distortions that come from the narrowness and incompleteness of their lenses. Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than being academically correct.

12. Expand the boundary of caring.
Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, and systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The realsystemisinterconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. As with everything else about systems, most people already know the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn outtobethesame rules. They just have to bring themselves to believe what they know.

13. Celebrate Complexity.
Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is non-linear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behaviour on its way somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizesandevolves. Itcreatesdiversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work. Only part of us, a part that has emerged recently, designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces. Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic.

14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.
Examples of bad behaviour are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. Just what you would expect. After all, we’re only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodnessarebarelynoticed. TheyareNot News. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instil ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly, amoral or immoral and are not held to account. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love. Don’t weight the bad news more heavily than the good.

These guidelines for appropriate participation in complex systems and natural process offered by Donella Meadows should be discussed in every school of design and considered by all decision makers. Donella Meadows’ work shows clearly how much an integrative and holistic approach to design could potentially learn from the kind of joined-up and dynamic thinking that found an early expression in General Systems Theory and has been developed further by many of the other new sciences.

Through the influential work of Herbert Simon (1969, 1996) in his treatise on design as The Science of the Artificial, systems theory has long had an influence on design theory, but mostly in its conceptually limited form that is focused on the prediction, manipulation and control of systems. These approaches have ignored the lessons of fundamental interconnectedness and unpredictability, by isolating particular systems and thinking about them in the mechanistic mindset of engineering, aiming for increased control and more effective manipulation.

The engineer and design-scientist R. Buckminster Fuller invented Synergetics, on the one hand a geometrical theory that allows for modelling in four dimensions, and simultaneously a system of thought that allowed its user to consider the properties of wholes that cannot be predicted by the analysis of its constituent parts. Fuller combined elements of topology and vectorial geometry for his mathematical formulations.

A central concept of the theory is the concept of synergy. Fuller described synergy as “the only word in our language that means behaviour of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviours of any of the system’s separate parts or any subassembly of the system’s parts” (Fuller, 1969, p.64) (see also chapter 3). This definition of synergy would also define the term emergent property, a crucial concept in the current understanding of complex dynamic systems.

The term synergy is now more commonly understood to refer to “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of the separate effects” (Pearsall, 1998, p.1881). It is usually used in the context of positive emergent properties, referring to win-win situations for all participants. The word derives from the Greek word sunergos, meaning ‘working together’.

Understanding designed artefacts or processes within their wider social and ecological context should always lead to an attempt to increase the number of win-win situations throughout the whole system that unites a particular design with its context. In order to do this we need to gain a better understanding of how designs work together on different scales and how they interact with the context set by natural systems. This could guide the creation of designs that are beneficial to, rather than destructive of, the overall system in which they participate. Rather than performing an isolated function or servicing a need out of context, such synergistic design mimics the symbiotic win-win strategies so abundantly observed in nature.

Where good design becomes part of the social fabric at all levels, unanticipated positive side effects (synergies) multiply. When people fail to design carefully, lovingly, and competently, unwanted side effects and disaster multiply (Orr, 1994, p.105).

The work of the biologists John Todd and Bill McLarney together with their colleagues at the New Alchemy Institute and later at Ocean Arks International pioneered the integration of insights gained from studying nature through various scientific approaches and then using these insights in the creation of more adaptive and systemic health supporting design solutions for a wide variety of problems. After an investigation of the scientific and design work of the New Alchemy Institute on the Ark on Cape Cod by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the scientific advisor Dr. Barry Valentine of Ohio State University concluded:

The Ark is a man-made ecosystem and they are just beginning to learn how to maintain it. The experimental procedures may involve intuition, data are often observational not meritistic, predictability is often low, and uncontrolled variability may be high. There is a body of scientists who down grade this kind of research. These individuals do not understand that the reduction of experimental variables (for example, isolation in a climate-controlled chamber to stabilize temperature and humidity) introduces many new biotic variables resulting from the absence of interacting organisms. I’m saying that the holistic approach of the Institute is realistic, practical, and approximates nature, but it is very disturbing to the scientist who thinks that if you break up very complex and interrelated problems into its smaller isolated components, solve each, and then reconstitute the many solutions into one, the result will solve the original problem. Biotic systems just do not work that way. I think that the Institute has a real scientific base and is investigating an incredibly difficult project. Barry Valentine (in Jack-Todd, 2005, p.124).

If we aim to create designs that are adapted to their complex social, cultural, ecological, and economic contexts and at the same time participate appropriately in natural process, we need to learn more about natural process. We need to pay more attention to what nature can teach us about adapting to the health and life-supporting processes of the biosphere. Every designer should know about and understand basic ecological and biological principles. In order to design appropriate designs we have to understand biological material and energy flows, so we can integrate the material and energy flows that we redirect to serve human needs into these wider processes.

Basic ecological literacy will have to be taught to every global citizen, not just professional designers. An understanding of self-organization and symbiosis in nature is a critical prerequisite for responsible decision making in the 21st century. Yet designers will have to be discerning about the differences in approaches that exist within science and let decision- making processes be informed by both reductionist and holistic theories. Both provide valid and useful points of view, but linear, dualist reductionism often demands to be regarded as the only reliable and useful epistemology.

A truly holistic perspective is based in considering various, sometimes contradictory, but often complementary epistemological and explanatory approaches. One example of alternative and contradictory explanations existing within science comes from biology. Its effect on cultural metaphor and human self-perception has particular significance in the context of sustainability.

Many scientists are still not sufficiently aware of just how much their Cartesian epistemology and reductionist methodology is biasing their perception towards a focus on competition between separate individuals, rather than dynamic co-evolution of diverse and complex systems based on co-operation. The biologist Professor Brian Goodwin explains:

Darwinism sees the living process in terms that emphasize competition, inheritance, selfishness, and survival as the driving forces of evolution. These are certainly aspects of the remarkable drama that includes our own history as a species. But it is a very incomplete and limited story, both scientifically and metaphorically, based upon an inadequate view of organisms; and it invites us to act in a limited way as an evolved species in relation to our environment, which includes other cultures and species. These limitations have contributed to some of the difficulties we now face, such as the crisis of environmental deterioration, pollution, decreasing standards of health and quality of life, and loss of communal values. But Darwinism short-changes us as regards our biological natures. We are every bit as co-operative as we are competitive; as altruistic as we are selfish; as creative and playful as we are destructive and repetitive. And we are biologically grounded in relationships which operate at all the levels of our beings as the basis of our natures as agents of creative evolutionary emergence, a property we share with all other species (Goodwin, 1994, p.xiv).

The change of perception of ourselves and the human species in relationship to the rest of the natural world that is described by Professor Goodwin has the potential of provoking a fundamental change in worldview and therefore design practice — a shift from design for humans but against nature to a design approach that recognizes that humanity is a co- dependent part of nature. In recognizing that life is fundamentally cooperative and symbiotic, designers can shift towards a symbiotic, synergistic or win-win approach to design that integrates humanity into natural process.

The biologist and Goethean scientist Craig Holdrege, who founded the Nature Institute in New York State, has proposed a complementary way of understanding organisms. He suggests a shift “from a traditional notion of separate biological organisms to the conception of ecological organisms, of which the biological organisms are part.” Holdrege explains this radically different understanding of the relationship between individual organisms, or particular species, and the natural processes or environment in which they participate as follows:

The organism is interaction with other organisms within the context of a habitat. The single organism (or species) that is supposed to compete with others does not exist. It is far more appropriate to view organisms as members of a differentiable whole that has never been dissolved into discrete entities (Holdrege, 2000, p.16)

Holdrege’s proposal clearly challenges a fundamental assumption of modern biology at its roots. Without denying the validity of the conventional understanding of organisms and species, it could be extremely instructive to at least entertain Holdrege’s holistic notion of an organism as interaction and relationship as a complementary point of view. I have previously suggested how “the potential implications of this kind of understanding of nature and our role as organisms within the larger process of interaction and changing relationships could work as powerful catalysts in the gradual shift towards a more holistic and participatory worldview.” Such a shift would result in: “Understanding ourselves as integral participants in natural process rather than as detached controllers, manipulators and predictors of nature, we would re-evaluate the importance of cooperation, symbiosis, community, as well as humanity’s appropriate participation in natural process” (Wahl, 2005e, p.67).

The microbiologist Lynn Margulis contributed greatly to our understanding of symbiotic processes and their fundamental role in the evolution of life. She proposed that the first eukaryotic cells — cells with a nucleus — evolved by one prokaryote — a cell without a nucleus — engulfing another and the development of long-term symbiotic relationships between the two. There is conclusive evidence that Margulis is right and that the same might be true for other organelles that constitute a eukaryotic cell like the mitochondria (see Margulis, 1982).

This reciprocally beneficial relationship, referred to scientifically as endosymbiosis, led to the emergence of new wholes that were greater than the sum of their parts. This example demonstrates the profoundly cooperative basis of all higher life forms, which are all composites of eukaryotic cells that have co-evolved and specialized in function during the evolution of more and more complex organisms.

At the level of communities and the evolution of the diverse and unique ecosystems that make up the planet’s wealth of biodiversity, life is what Alfred North Whitehead called “a creative advance into novelty” (in Goodwin. 1994). The complexity of relationships and interactions within the web of life as a whole has increased continuously throughout the course of evolution.

As more and more diverse and numerous species co-adapted to create their little niche within the different trophic levels of planetary material and energy flows, the level of cooperation had to increase in order to accommodate them in a way that the overall system stayed viable. Fritjof Capra has pointed out: “Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity” (Capra, 1996, p.238).

In much the same way that a biological species only survives through continuous process of co-adaptation that connects it to both its living and non-living environment, a design should co-evolve in response to its environment. Appropriate designs should be synergetic, salutogenic (health-generating), and symbiotic.

For any design to participate appropriately in natural process in the long-term, it will have to be flexible, mutable and able to metamorphose in continuous response and co-adaptation to the natural processes of change and transformation. The discipline of community ecology or ecosystem science provides countless examples of nature’s dynamics of change.

As we enter the new millennium, the headlines present us with stories of impending climate change, ecological crisis, and wrenching social change, making it more important than ever that we come to terms with the idea that change is the rule, not the exception, for life on Earth. In seeking to conserve and manage our living resources, we must learn how to work within these forces of change. We must learn to replace our idea of static beauty and perfection in biological nature with a new appreciation of the dynamics and processes in ecological systems (Botkin et al., 2000, p.15).

A shift in focus from static objects that are separate from each other to dynamic processes that are constantly mutually adapting, when applied to aesthetic perception would result in a shift in aesthetic judgement, to being less focussed on the form of isolated designs and more on the aesthetics of interaction and relationship.

In his book Within the Gates of Science and Beyond, the engineer and systems biologist Paul Weiss expressed an understanding of living form that can also be found in the work of Heraclitus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, D’Arcy Thompson (see Thompson, 1917), and Brian Goodwin (Goodwin, 1994). Weiss suggests: “Living form should be regarded as essentially an overt indicator of, or clue to, dynamics of the underlying formative processes” (Weiss, 1971).

This dynamic understanding of form acknowledges a long-term temporal dimension and nature’s transformative processes. If one applies this understanding of form to design, it places objects into the dynamic context of how they came into being, what they are made of, how they relate to natural process and whether they are symbiotic or detrimental to the process as a whole.

The polymath scholar and biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson described this dynamic double focus on living form, in which form is understood both in terms of the interactions and function of the parts, and dynamically in terms of the processes through which it emerged out of the whole. The understanding of living form expressed by Thompson could also widen our perspective on form in design. In his magnum opus On Growth and Form Thompson writes:

According to the trend or aspect of our thought, we may look upon the co-ordinated parts, now as related and fitted to the end of function of the whole, and now as related to or resulting from the physical causes inherent in the entire system of forces to which the whole has been exposed, and under whose influence it has come into being (Thompson, 1917, p.264).

To consider any design simply in terms of the function it is intended to perform ignores all the other processes it interacts with and affects, only because they might not have been consciously included in the design process. In thinking of form in this dual way as an expression of function to some extent, but also as a temporal snap-shot in its overall process of transformation that has contributed to its coming into being and will eventually involve its dissolution, we can better appreciate how a designed product or process interacts with a host of contexts at diverse spatial and temporal scales. D’Arcy Thompson warned:

As we analyse a thing into its parts or into its properties, we tend to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole. …The biologist, as well as the philosopher, learns to recognize that the whole is not merely the sum of its parts. It is this, and much more than this (Thompson, 1917, p.262 & p.264).

Clearly, Thompson was one of the early proponents of a more holistic and dynamic view of living form. This dynamic and process oriented understanding of form provides the basis for a more holistic understanding of the relationship between form and function. Even today, biologists, designers and architects still tend towards absolute statements pronouncing that form follows function. Ian McHarg, in Design with Nature, expressed a more dynamic understanding of form: “Certainly we can dispose of the old canard ‘form follows function’. Form follows nothing — it is integral with all processes” (McHarg, 1969).

McHarg, as an ecologically literate designer and planner, suggested that in order to design with nature we had to establish a creative fit between our designs and their environment. Throughout human history, communities had to adapt to their local environmental conditions — its limitations and opportunities — simultaneously, communities transformed that environment in a more or less responsible way to meet human needs without destroying life supporting natural cycles. McHarg judged design according to its ‘fitness’ — the way it fitted into and affected natural process. He defined fitness not purely in Darwinian terms but saw Darwin’s understanding of fitness complemented by the suggestion of the biologist Lawrence Henderson, who proposed that the process of adaptation was mutual. The organism and the environment mutually adapt to each other, in a process that changes the relationships and interactions between the organism as a part and the environment as the whole that contains it. In this process neither the organism nor the environment remain unchanged (see McHarg, 1969).

In the terminology of complexity theory, one could say that as the diverse and dynamic relationships between the participating agents within the complex dynamic system change, novel properties emerge at the level of the whole, and the system transforms. McHarg explained his understanding of the co-evolution between organism and environment as follows:

Fitness has two definitions, each complementary. Charles Darwin (1859) stated that the surviving organism is fit for the environment. Much later, Lawrence Henderson (1913) augmented this proposition by showing that the actual world consists of an infinitude of environments, all exhibiting fitness for appropriate organisms. Every organism, system, or institution, is required to find the fittest environment, adapt that environment and itself in order to survive (McHarg, 1981, p.145)

McHarg based his understanding of fitness on this dual perspective of understanding fitness as emerging from the co-adaptation of a fit environment and a fit organism. “The environment is fit for life and all the manifestations which it has taken, and does take. Conversely, the surviving organism is fitted to the environment.” McHarg concluded: “Thus, we can use fitness as a criterion of the environment, organisms, and their adaptations, as revealed in form. Form can reveal past processes and help to explain present realities” (McHarg, 1968, p.68). In the same paper, entitled ‘Values, Process and Form’, McHarg explored the notion of co- operation and symbiosis at a planetary scale, which lead him to call on humanity to design with rather than against nature. He wrote:

The human organism exists as a result of the symbiotic relationship in which cells assume different roles as blood, tissue, and organs, integrated as a single organism. So, too, can the biosphere be considered as a single super-organism in which the oceans and atmosphere, all creatures, and communities play roles analogous to cells, tissues and organs. Ian L. McHarg (in Wahl, 2005c, p.15).

McHarg was among the first design professionals to recognize the crucial importance of a better understanding of ecosystem and planetary dynamics if we aim to create designs that participate appropriately in natural process (see also chapter 3).

Designers need to fully comprehend the fundamental interconnectedness between human and planetary health, and between nature and culture. A certain understanding of the geological, hydrological, climatological and ecological processes that interact within the biosphere as a whole will be a prerequisite for sustainable and appropriately adapted design in the future. Let me therefore briefly explore some important scientific insights with regard to planetary dynamics.

William Melson, a geoscientist at the Smithonian Institute’s National Museum of natural History in the USA, explains: “The rocky crust [of the planet] and underlying mantle are not merely the solid foundations for the dynamic systems of our planet, but active participants.” He adds: “powered by the heat welling up from the Earth’s interior, volcanic eruptions and geological upheavals have been major forces behind the evolution of the atmosphere, oceans, and diversity of life”(Melson, 2000, p.79).

Microscopic creatures can have profound effects on both biological and geological processes. All scales are interlinked and interrelated, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that a rigid, mutually exclusive distinction between the biotic (the living) and the abiotic (non- living) components of this complex dynamic system are much more the result of our human models of explanation and scientific abstractions, than they are a reflection of the true complexity of natural processes.

Melson (2000) provides a very telling example of this interconnection in describing the importance of diatoms — a genus of photosynthetic algae. Over 70,000 species of living and fossil algae have been described scientifically and there is good reason to believe that these may constitute only about half of the total algal diversity. To give an indication of the scale of these organisms it may help to consider that “some 25 million would fit in a teaspoon.” As Melson points out, the diatoms constitute a quarter of all plant life by weight and they “produce at least a quarter of the oxygen we breathe.” Furthermore, living diatoms “provide high quality nutrition to animals as small as protozoans and as large as baleen whales” and dead diatoms “ram down ocean floors, where their oil-rich plasma is eventually buried and transformed into petroleum” (Melson, 2000, p.81).

To fully comprehend the sheer infinite complexity of interactions and relationships that unite the biosphere into one dynamic, continuously transforming and evolving whole will always remain beyond human capability, but an understanding of the basic patterns and dynamics may prove vital for ours and future generations.

I include this kind of scientific detail in a thesis on design because without understanding some of the basic connections that link the minute to the planetary it will be difficult to realize the importance of trans-disciplinary problem-solving in the creation of sustainable and appropriate design solutions. An enormous breadth of information will have to be integrated sensibly in order to create design solutions that contribute to long-term sustainability. In chapters five and six, I will argue for the importance of scale-linking in design, therefore it may be useful to recapitulate some of the contemporary understanding of nature’s own scale -linking processes.

In the late 1960s, while working on NASA’s first exploration of Mars, the atmospheric chemist and engineer of scientific measuring devices James Lovelock, proposed a groundbreaking new hypothesis. He argued that when we look at planet Earth as a whole system, the living and the non-living components seem to be tightly interrelated and interacting through complex feedback loops. Lovelock proposed that life itself — over an evolutionary time- scale — has participated in the creation of the atmospheric composition of gases we observe in the Earth’s atmosphere today. Life actively contributed to the creation and maintenance of conditions on Earth that are favourable for higher organisms. Over the course of the last thirty years Lovelock’s hypothesis has matured into a new field of scientific investigation that is referred to as Gaia theory or Earth Systems Science. Professor James Lovelock explains:

[The] evolution of organisms [is] so closely coupled with the evolution of their physical and chemical environment that together they constitute a single evolutionary process, which is self-regulating. Thus the climate, the composition of the rocks, the air, and the oceans are not just given by geology; they are also the consequences of the presence of life. Through the ceaseless activity of living organisms, conditions on the planet have been kept favourable for life’s occupancy for the past 3.6 billion years (Lovelock, 2000, p.25).

Dorian Sagan and Lynn Margulis write: “Clearly life on the planet is some kind of interacting unity.” They argue: “If symbiosis is defined as the living together in protracted physical continuity of different kinds of organisms then … Gaia is simply symbiosis seen from space” (Sagan & Margulis, 1993, p.353). The research of Lynn Margulis revealed that micro- organisms in the soil and the oceans play a crucial role in the maintenance of natural processes that maintain the atmospheric composition, global average temperatures and the planet’s climate patterns in a range that favours the continued evolution and existence of life on Earth.

Lovelock has described Gaia theory as planetary physiology or as “a practical science of planetary medicine” (Lovelock, 2000). In Gaia — The human journey from chaos to cosmos, Elisabeth Sahtouris describes the process of how life and matter have co-evolved and formed the biosphere as a complex dynamic of co-evolution that unites life and matter:

Living and non-living matter are continuous, such that life is no more, no less than a geological process that becomes a biogeochemical process through its own transformation over time. The non-living state of original geological matter, with its slow linear chemistry, undergoes transformations to a cyclic chemistry as it complicates into the high-energy state of self-reproducing living matter. In other words, life and non- life can be seen as two states or aspects over time of the same material. The whole biogeochemical process is cyclical, though it involves ever more of the original geological matter over time and is evolutionary in character. In short, this view suggests that organisms are transient parts of a relatively permanent cyclic process in which they both result from and produce a planetary metabolic system (Sahtouris, 1989, p.57).

This holistic understanding of the Earth as a dynamically transforming system not only creates a fuzzier less dualistic distinction between life and matter, but it also integrates humanity as part of this living process into nature. Human health depends on planetary health, therefore sustainable human decision making processes and designs should always include the underlying intention to contribute to and maintain planetary health. Earth Systems Science and Gaia theory are important contributors to such a salutogenic approach to design as these sciences can help us to gain a better understanding of how to improve planetary and therefore human health.

I will return to discussing salutogenesis and health-generating design in much greater detail in chapter two, along with a detailed discussion of the relationships between diversity, resilience and health on various scales. At this point, I would simply like to emphasize that if we want to create designs that avoid climate change and maintain the health of the biosphere as a fundamental prerequisite for healthy ecosystems, communities and individuals, designers will have to become ecologically literate to the extent that they understand the intricacies of the planet’s life support system.

It is important to be aware of the fact that due to Earth’s self-regulating properties, climate patterns have remained relatively stable despite millennia of deforestation and two centuries of rapid release of the carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. Metaphorically speaking, a healthy body can take a certain amount of abuse before the immune system becomes so weak that ill-health manifests itself as disease.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution human action has drastically decreased planetary health, but it took almost two hundred years for climate change, environmental degradation, and increasing cancer rates to reach the perceptual threshold and turn into an unmistakable warning to humanity that the effects of bad design and inappropriate participation in natural process can accumulate through run-away feedback and jeopardize our future. Professor Lovelock warns:

It is true that a system in homeostasis is forgiving about disturbances, but only when it is healthy and well within the bounds of its capacity to regulate. When such a system is stressed near the limits of its capacity to regulate, even a small jolt may cause it to jump to a new stable state or even to fail entirely (in Goldsmith, 1996, p.272).

The planetary life-support system that joins all life into a survival community in the face of drastic global climate change is in severe danger. The ecologically destructive effects of designs and technologies that have enabled industrial civilization have already done enough damage to permanently change atmospheric composition and disrupt climate patterns.

This may potentially lead to a change in ocean currents, and may through a series of positive feedback loops result in a change in conditions on planet Earth that will make the continued existence of higher life forms including humans difficult, if not impossible. I propose that humanity’s chances to avoid such a scenario will increase as recognition for the role of ecologically literate, salutogenic design in the creation of a sustainable human civilization increases.

An important aspect of the co-evolutionary case is its treatment of entropy and entropy change. Ultimately, by virtue of the laws of thermodynamics, resources are limited. However, from the particular perspective of the human species, and over what are rather long periods of time in human terms, negative entropy change is perfectly possible providing appropriate and appropriately focused inputs of energy are available (Scott & Gough, 2003, p.47).

Understanding the dynamics of the biosphere holistically, we can begin to comprehend planet Earth as a self-regulating, open system in which the photosynthetic conversion of sun-light into complex organic molecules has provided the process of life with the energy to transform matter into higher states of energy. Over roughly the course of the last three billion years life has acted as a syntropic or neg-entropic force on a planetary scale, reversing the tide of entropy and accruing sunlight in the form of an increasingly complex system of increasingly diverse organisms interacting and co-evolving with each other and their environment.

As a unified process, life locally reverses the universal law of increasing entropy — the second law of thermodynamics. While entropy continues to increase at a universal scale, at the scale of planet Earth it has decreased as a result of life’s doing. This insight helps us to understand our dependence on plants as primary producers. One could argue from this perspective that all life is ultimately made from sunlight and the matter of the earth — enlightened matter!

What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to amoeba in one direction and the back ward schizophrenic in another? What is the pattern which connects all living creatures? Gregory Bateson (in Jack-Todd, 2005, p.77)

The process of life itself is the pattern that connects. Gregory Bateson saw the human mind as a conscious reflection of the processes of Nature. I will return to the deeper implications of this insight in chapter eight. For now, I would simply like to highlight that Bateson’s writings contributed to a further blurring of the rigid dualist distinction between life and matter and humanity and nature.

Bateson inspired the Chilean biologists and cognitive scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to propose the Santiago Theory of Cognition. Fritjof Capra describes the central insight of this theory as “the identification of cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life.” For Maturana and Varela cognition can be understood as “the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks.” In this context, cognition is recognized as “the very process of life,” and “mind — or, more accurately, mental activity — is immanent in matter at all levels of life” (Capra, 2002, p30). The implications of this insight radically alter our understanding of mind and matter, as well as humanity and nature. A civilization informed by such an understanding will express fundamentally different intentions through fundamentally different design.

Maturana and Varela (1987) suggest that as we are beginning to understand how we know, we have to realize that “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world which we bring forth with others.” The world as we know it emerges out of the way we relate to each other and to natural process. This leads Maturana and Varela to the important conclusion “that the world will be different only if we live differently” (Maturana & Varela, 1987, p.245).

Capra explains: “In the Santiago theory, cognition is closely linked to autopoiesis, the self-generation of living networks” (Capra, 2002, p.30). This understanding of life as a constantly transforming network of networks regards all organisms as autopoietic systems, which continuously undergo structural changes but always maintain the web-like, network pattern of organisation. Networks within networks are now recognized as a fundamental organizing principle of life and the underlying pattern of natural design. This network pattern of organization is reflected across scales. It has a fractal dimension.

In other words, from networks of molecules emerge the properties of cells, from networks of cells emerge the properties of organs, from networks of organs emerge complex higher organisms, from networks of organism emerge communities and ecosystems, all the way up to the scale of the biosphere, a dynamic autopoietic network of ecosystems. Interaction and relationships in this holarchy of networks is both material and mental. Again, such scientific insights can critically inform design practice aimed at appropriate participation in natural process and therefore sustainability.

Ecoliteracy — the understanding of the principles of organization that ecosystems have evolved to sustain the web of life — is the first step on the road to sustainability. The second step is to move towards ecodesign. We need to apply our ecological knowledge to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions, so as to bridge the gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature (Capra, 2002, p.203).

In The Hidden Connections — A Science for Sustainable Living, Fritjof Capra (2002) concludes that ecological literacy and ecological design are fundamental to creating a sustainable civilization. Ecological literacy promotes the mental mapping and understanding of the holarchical dynamics described above and ecological design aims for an appropriate expression of these insights on a material level in a way that reintegrates humanity into nature.

Capra offers a series of ecological principles that provide designers with some of the central concepts of an ecologically literate understanding of natural process (see below).

These principles summarize the main points discussed in this chapter and will be revisited numerous times throughout this thesis. They are ways of understanding nature’s organizing principles and therefore they will be of critical importance in creating designs that participate appropriately in natural process and are therefore sustainable.

Principles of Ecology and Fundamental Ecoliteracy

(Reproduced and adapted from Capra, 2002, p.202)

Networks: At all scales of nature, we find living systems nesting within other living systems — networks within networks. Their boundaries are not boundaries of separation but boundaries of identity. All living systems communicate with one another and share resources across their boundaries.

Cycles: All living organisms must feed on continual flows of matter and energy from their environment to stay alive, and all living organisms continually produce waste. However, an ecosystem generates no net waste, one species’ waste being another species’ food. Thus, matter cycles continually through the web of life.

SolarEnergy: Solar energy, transformed into chemical energy by photosynthesis of greenplants, drives the ecological cycles.

Partnership: The exchanges of energy and resources in an ecosystem are sustained by pervasive co-operation. Life did not take over the planet by combat but by co-operation, partnerships and networking.

Diversity: Ecosystems achieve stability and resilience through the richness and complexity of their ecological webs. The greater their biodiversity, the more resilient they will be.

Dynamic Balance: An ecosystem is a flexible, ever-fluctuating network. Its flexibilityisaconsequenceofmultiplefeedbackloops that keep the system in a state of dynamic balance. No single variable is maximized; all variables fluctuate around optimal values.

All the principles of ecology listed by Capra are based on a wealth of scientific evidence. A systemic and holistic perspective that is still not shared by all members of the scientific community informs their wording and focus. Exclusively materialistic, reductionistic, mechanistic and dualistic modes of explanation and understanding are still trapping many scientists and designers in a perceptual iron cage that keeps them from fully comprehending the complex interconnections among the various problems they study and thus leads them to propose valid but limited solutions.

The creation of sustainable design solutions requires both scientists and designers to be able to shift between and employ multiple epistemologies in order to understand the significance of scientific investigation and design in a wider context.

The Gaian understanding of the world — that which speaks of the encompassing earth not as a machine but as an autopoietic, living physiology — entails an embodied, participatory epistemology. As the earth is no longer viewed as a machine, so the human body is no longer a mechanical object housing an immaterial mind, but rather a sensitive, expressive, thinking physiology, a microcosm of the autopoietic Earth (Abram, 1991, p.71).

In 2000, the University of Siena and the Italian Research Council sponsored an International School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, devoted to an exploration of Earth Systems Science and Gaia theory. At this meeting the ecologist and Gaian scientist Stephan Harding who directs the Masters programme in Holistic Science at Schumacher College described the difference in perspective between Earth Systems Science and Gaian science as an example of what he called the “detached” and the “participatory mode of holistic science” (Harding, 2001, p.227).

Harding explains: “Holistic science is an attempt to move beyond some of the conceptual limitations of conventional science without losing the many benefits it has to offer.” He describes the ‘detached mode of holistic science’ as the study of emergence within whole systems, “which agrees with conventional science that value questions are of no concern to science,” and contrasts this with the ‘participatory mode’ that “also seeks to understand emergence and the behaviours of whole systems but does not accept the separation of fact from value, realizing instead that knowledge and appropriate action must be intimately linked in the practice of science” (Harding, 2001, p.227).

Harding emphasizes that a distinction between these two modes should serve as a “heuristic device for stimulating discussion on the place of values in scientific discourse and practice,” and that such a distinction should not be misinterpreted to set up yet another dualistic dichotomy. He acknowledges that in the real world “holistically inclined scientists move back and forth between the two modes” (Harding, 2001, p.227). Stephan Harding describes holistic science as follows:

A key characteristic of holistic science is a focus on the phenomenon of emergence. … Holistic science involves the study of emergent properties across a large range of temporal and spatial scales in a wide variety of situations. … For holistic science, relationships are primary. Objects can only be understood through their relationships, and indeed are themselves made up of complex networks of internal relations. The world thus consists of nested sets of networks within networks.

… Holistic scientists believe that objective knowledge is impossible to attain since all knowledge depends on how the scientist has interacted with the natural world. Because of this, the process of acquiring knowledge should be included in scientific description. … Detached holistic science is a more ‘holistic’ version of conventional science.

…[It] recognizes that traditional academic barriers are an impediment to understanding emergent phenomena, and seeks to build complex, trans-disciplinary ‘systems’ models which can then be scrutinised … participatory holistic science is also concerned with trans-disciplinary understanding of emergent phenomena, but has a different philosophical motivation at its core … this mode sees humans not as objective observers but as participatory experiencers radically embedded in the world. Intrinsic value is explicitly recognized, and knowledge is seen as a means of increasing a sense of belonging to nature, rather than solely as a means of control. This mode of science accepts lack of complete predictability as a key feature of a creative universe … .

Furthermore, intuition is explicitly developed as a method for enhancing scientific enquiry through paying close attention to the consistency of feelings and intuitions which come up amongst a group of scientist during their investigations (Goodwin, 1999). Participatory holistic science is more than just an intellectual stance — it involves a radical shift in our fundamental perception of nature. (Harding, 2000, pp.228–230).

Both conventional and holistic science can offer important contributions to sustainable design decisions. An understanding of emergence in complex dynamic systems is crucial if we want to create designs that integrate benignly into natural process. The participatory relationship between humanity and nature is a biological fact. The detached stance of conventional science that is based on a subject-object separation epistemology is without a doubt a useful tool for the generation of scientific theories and technological innovation, but it needs to be balanced by integrating it into a more participatory understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature.

Over the course of the last two decades, advances in the science of complexity have provided important contributions to such a participatory understanding. These insights have begun to percolate through management theory, social science and design theory as well as most other fields of human endeavour. I will therefore take the time to discuss complexity theory and its implications in some more detail.

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[This is an excerpt from my 2006 PhD Thesis in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic/Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’. This research and 10 years of experience as an educator, consultant, activist, and expert egneralist in whole systems design and transformative innovation have led me to publish Designing Regenerative Cultures in May 2016.]

More:

Facing Complexity: Wicked Design Problems

Understanding Complexity: A Prerequisite for Sustainable Design

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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