Spatial and Temporal Scales in Design Thinking
from ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health’ D.C. Wahl 2006
We need to recognize that every ecosystem is a part –or subsystem — of a larger system and that it in turn includes a number of yet smaller subsystems. It also has necessary linkages to both the larger and the smaller units. …Our range of design scales forms a hierarchy that corresponds to the concept of levels of integration in nature or in any organized system. Certain principles of organization link the levels of this hierarchy and provide guidance for design at any given level.
— J. T. Lyle, 1985, p.17
John Tillman Lyle was a strong proponent of the scale integrating way of design thinking. His seminal book Design for Human Ecosystems provided a clear formulation of the concept of scale-linking design. Lyle rightly emphasized the fact that it is difficult and maybe not altogether necessary to define the exact boundaries between different units of scale, since often “boundaries are determined not by topographic features, but by political and economic ones.” He pointed out that such boundaries are “abstractions, ordinarily invisible and unrelated to the physical reality of the landscape”(Lyle, 1985, p.24).
Many social, ecological and economic relationships cross these abstract boundaries; therefore each individual unit of scale is only significant within the context that encompasses it. An analogy can be draw to all biological boundaries. While they can help us to identify subcomponents within larger cycles of energy and matter, biological boundaries, thought of holistically, are more fundamentally about interconnection than they are about separation. They are zones of interactions where the subcomponents exchange matter and energy with the wider system that contains them.
Mitchell Thomashow emphasizes: “The ability to juxtapose scale requires discipline, the necessity of clarifying boundaries, and, somewhat paradoxically, crossing the boundaries of space and time.” He refers to work by Timothy Allen and Thomas Hoekstra in Towards a Unified Ecology, who stress “the importance of space-time as a means of interpreting complex natural systems and ecological patterns;” and argue that since “ecological processes are multiscaled,” their “ecological interpretation requires the use of multiple criteria” including landscape, ecosystems, communities, organisms, populations, biomes and the biosphere (Thomashow, 1999, p.127).
Temporal and spatial scales have to be considered together, since slow and fast processes manifest differently at different scales of magnitude. In focussing on a certain spatial scale, a scale linking approach to design would at least consider the next scale down of boundaries that define component parts, and the next scale up of the wider whole that encompasses the scale in focus.
For any level of aggregation, it is necessary to look both to larger scales to understand the context and to smaller scales to understand the mechanism; anything else would be incomplete. For an adequate understanding … it is necessary to consider three levels at once:
(1) the level in question;
(2) the level below that gives mechanisms;
and (3) the level above that gives context, role, or significance.
— Timothy Allen and Thomas Hoekstra (in Thomashow, 1999, p.127)
At what scale we draw boundaries and whether we see them as zones of interconnection or separation is a crucial influence on how we will design at that scale and how our designs will affect all other scales. Lyle explains “the scale, or relative size, determines the types of relationships that occur within the boundaries and the types that cross over them.” It is therefore the scale we focus on that “determines the kind of concerns we can address in a design effort, the approach, the level of detail and the number of people involved” (Lyle, 1985, p.24).
No matter at what scale the main focus lies in a particular design project, if the aim is to create designs that participate appropriately in natural process, it is necessary to consider the interactions and effects of the design at all other scales. Design solutions need to be integrated across scales so that the finished product meets the needs that motivated the design in the first place, without causing ecological, social or economical disruption elsewhere, i.e. at different scales, a later date, or a removed location.
Sustaining ecological processes, landscape function and biological diversity is an issue of importance globally, nationally and locally. Pressure to accommodate a rapidly increasing human population together with increased provision of goods and services has been growing for decades. Consequently the need for a multiple scale, trans-disciplinary approach and strategic framework for planning and managing resource use is becoming paramount.
— David Brunckhorst, 2002, p.14
Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan have argued in Ecological Design that scale -linking will have to be a central strategy in designing sustainable solutions. The habit of approaching a problem from within the confines of a single discipline predisposes to paying attention to one scale at a time without noticing the important interconnections between the scales. “Nature’s processes are inherently scale-linking, for they inherently depend on the flow of energy and materials across scales.” Van der Ryn and Cowan describe how “global cycles link organisms together in a highly effective recycling system crossing about seventeen tenfold jumps in scale, from the ten-billionth of a meter (the scale of photosynthesis) to ten thousand kilometres (the scale of Earth itself)” (Van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, p.33).
To be aware that any design, at any scale, also participates — to some degree — in designing at all the other scales, makes us face the complexity of the dynamic natural processes in which humanity participates head on. It immediately reminds us that we had better take a humble attitude to what we can do and know. Whatever we do as integral participants in the wider complexity of the biosphere, we are affecting changes and we are unable to fully predict the consequences of those changes.
Design solutions can never offer a guarantee of their long term appropriateness, they have to be continuously reconsidered in the context of the changes that occur on the various divisions of scale we use to help us to conceptualise the interactions and relationships within the overall system — the process of transformation within a fundamentally interconnected universe. In considering the effect of a particular design across scales is facing the complexity of participation.
Shifting attention towards process, interaction and relationship, redefines appropriate design as primarily a collective fine-tuning of processes in context (physical, biological, social, cultural, spiritual) rather than an individualistic production of artefacts out of context. I fully acknowledge the magnitude of the challenge this presents. Conceiving design in this way catalyses the realization that only through the co-operation between specialists from many disciplines and generalists who can facilitate the integration of many diverse viewpoints can we even begin to reach sustainable design solutions from a holistic perspective. The concept of scale -linking can help such collective design processes. Van der Ryn and Cowan explain:
Scale-linking systems imply a holism in which everything influences, or potentially influences everything else — because everything is in some sense constantly interacting with everything else. Nature is infused with the dynamical interpenetration of the vast with the minute, an endless dervish mixing. Matter and energy continually flow across scales, the small informing the large and the large informing the small… . Unless we work with nature’s own finely tuned scale-linking systems we endanger the stability of life on the planet. … If we are to properly include ecological concerns within design, we must take seriously the challenge offered by scale linking. We need to discover ways to integrate design processes across multiple levels of scale and make these processes compatible with natural cycles of water, energy and material.
— Van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, 34–35
Interactions between the agents of complex dynamic systems can occur over a wide variety of time scales and the material effects observed can be the result of multi-causal, time-delayed, non-linear relationships. This makes it impossible to control or predict the behaviour of such systems beyond a very limited horizon of time and space. Scale-linking not only links the minute to the vast but also long-term cycles like fluctuations in the Earth’s average temperature with short-term cycles of, for example the speed at which oxygen is given off by a single leaf during photosynthesis.
The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (2000) emphasized: “our perception of time profoundly influences our perception of change.” He argued: “a drastic change at one scale may appear trivial at another” and posed the important questions: “How can we evaluate the significance of changes that occurred over timescales beyond our limited human experience? Or of changes we observe today in the context of planetary time” (Gould, 2000, p.95).
These are questions that we should be aware of when we make any kind of decision or propose any type of new design. While on the one hand it may help to be aware of these long-ranging time scales, on the other hand we will have to take decisions despite nature’s intrinsic unpredictability and uncontrollability. Gould therefore argues that we should use the appropriate scale of human time for most of our decision making in full awareness of the fact that “only the evolutionary invention of human consciousness, the most powerful biological innovation (in terms of potential for imposing changes at all scales) since the origin of life itself, has made human time a relevant scale for consideration at all” (Gould, 2000, p.110). Gould suggests:
Human culture and scientific invention represent the most potent force — in terms of potential for change at unexampled rapidity — ever unleashed upon the planet. Biological evolution, at its most rapid conceivable rate, cannot possibly achieve even one percent of the potential speed of human cultural change. … So long as human culture endures, the Earth will face the unprecedented power of a force for change that, in a mere 10,000 years — an effectively immeasurable moment in planetary time — has transformed the surface of this planet by agriculture, urban design, and the technologies of thousands of inventions from gunpowder to the mariner’s compass, in a manner so rapid, and to an extend so unprecedented, that the magnitude of difference from previous patterns can only inspire astonishment. … But we may also use our mental and moral might to win the greatest evolutionary prize of all: persistence into earthly time. The novel forces that make the small scale of our human moment so relevant for the first time in our planet’s history represent both our greatest danger and our finest hope.
— Stephen Jay Gould, 2000, pp.110–111).
As I have suggested at the beginning of this thesis, if our collective intention as a species is to continue our own existence and thereby allow the evolution of consciousness to continue, the most effective design strategy is based on the intention of maintaining health across all scales of the whole, in other words, appropriate participation in natural process resulting in sustainability.
Technological capabilities have given our species an unprecendented potential for transforming the Earth forever, and within a few decades or centuries — a cosmic instant. Human adaptation to human induced and other natural changes will have to be primarily cultural in order to be effective over such a short time frame, since biological adaptations occur much slower. One of the first people to highlight the evolutionary significance of the cultural change associated with sustainability was Ian McHarg (1969).
Changing the intentionality behind human design on all scales is the crucial, up-stream adaptation that can catalyse the transformation toward a sustainable civilization and the continued evolution of our species. Education for eco-literacy, as well as spiritual practice can promote such a cultural change, resulting in a meta-design change that reorients the intentions behind all human design towards synergy, symbiosis and salutogenesis — the hallmarks of sustainable design.
Charles Darwin has so often been misunderstood and misinterpreted that it is sometimes hard to separate his scientific theory of natural selection from the paradigm of social and economic Darwinism and the dogmatic neo-Darwinian thought publicised by scientists like Richard Dawkins (see Dawkins, 1976).
While focussing on the individual species, individual, or even gene, as the unit of survival and explaining evolution as a competitive struggle for survival, has a certain explanatory power, a focus on how inseperably these ‘units of survival’ depend on the wider whole that sustains and contains them allows us to gain a type of knowledge that will inform the kind of holistic and salutogenic design strategies that actually promote human survival.
In Darwin’s opinion, it was not the fittest and most competitive individual or species that survived, but the most fitting individuals and species that adapt to their ecological niche through both competition and cooperation and are able to adapt to a changing environment. He wrote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” (in Gould, 2000, p.96).
The lesson for designers behind this insight is that we have to create designs that are flexible and adaptable and leave us a high number of potential pathways into the future rather than closing certain pathways for ever through the destruction of other species and the eco-system services upon which we depend. This requires a keen awareness of both temporal and spatial scale.
Briggs and Peat argue that our modern linear understanding of time is “mechanical, impersonal, external and disconnected from our inner experience” and propose that we can “reconnect ourselves with the living pulse of time” by “living within the new dimensions of fractal time” (Briggs & Peat, 1999, p.125). They suggest that “as we explore time’s fractal details, mircoevents flood in on us full of nuances hardly noticed before, while at the same time we begin to sense the flow of water and slower waves of time — the movement of the sun across the sky, the warming of the Earth, the growth of a seed, the aging of trees”(Briggs & Peat, 1999, p.128).
Insights from chaos theory make us aware that “each system contains its own measure of time and, as systems connect into environments, time becomes ever richer and multi- dimensional” (Briggs & Peat, 1999, p.133). This understanding helps us to turn time from an abstract human concept into a participatory experience that joins us to natural processes. “Seeing time as a measure of process in touch with its environment accords more directly with our experience than seeing time as the equal interval ticking of the mechanical clock” (Briggs & Peat, 1999, p.135). Appropriately scale-linked design will require us to be sensitive to such fractal dimensions.
Both temporally and spatially, the patterned whole is expressed through processes within processes, systems within systems, networks within networks, holons within holons — a holarchy that transcends matter in the enternal now of its continuing transformation. Humanity is an expression of and a consciuous witness in this process of the whole transforming.
As conscious and responsible participants in this process, which affects us just as profoundly as we affect it, salutogenic and appropriately scale-linked design will have to become an active cultural choice supported by widespread individual participation — a fundamental strategy that will unite humanity in conscious contribution to our collective survival which so critically depends on the health of our communities, ecosystems and the biosphere.
Gunderson and Holling (2002) developed the concept of panarchy, defined as “a nested set of adaptive cycles arranged as dynamical hierarchy in space and time”(Gunderson & Holling, 2002, p.101) to better understand the interactions across different spatial and temporal scales in complex dynamic systems. They have applied this approach to understanding the dynamic of natural processes at the community, ecosystem and biosphere scale.
The studies of many ecosystem ecologists clearly indicate that “the most telling properties of ecological systems emerge from the interactions between the slow-moving and the fast-moving processes and processes that have large spatial reach and processes that are relatively localized.” Gunderson and Holling emphasize that “those interactions are nonlinear” and often contribute to the health of the overall system as they “maintain the resilience of ecological systems” (Gunderson & Holling, 2002, p.9).
Brunckhorst describes this scientific approach to “understanding how systems of functional elements are linked at a variety of scales” as hierarchy theory (Brunckhorst, 2002, p.20). He suggests these scientific theories can act as a tool for thought in the design process. They can help us to understand nested hierarchies, or holarchies, within interconnected systems. Brunckhorst argues: “ a nested hierarchy of ecological units such as ecoregions, bioregions and landscapes can be a powerful tool for planning integrated terrestrial and coastal-marine management.” Such scale -linking “provides a framework for ecologically sustainable development… .” Brunckhorst proposes: “nested spatial contexts can further provide for more meaningful environmental impact assessment and more strategic planning of restoration efforts, water quality and monitoring needs, integrated catchment management, research, biodiversity assessment and integrated conservation planning” (Brunckhorst, 2002, p.21).
Local community groups and individual action are essential, as are communication and partnership with them, but all our actions must be planned for scales and priorities that will contribute to maintaining ecological processes and function at larger scales. In fact we must be able to innovatively plan and manage nature and society at multiple scales — reflecting, in essence, reality. To do so and to be able to make sense of it, a hierarchy of ecological units will be required from global biosphere to local human settlement and natural communities — top down and bottom up.
— David Brunckhorst, 2002, p.17
The pattern of health that connects the different holonic scales into a healthy holarchy is expressed through an interconnected network of symbiotic, synergistic and salutogenic interactions at each scale and across all scales. This justifies why, in order to create effective sustainable, design we will have to both think and act locally and globally, at the same time. The figure below shows a visual representation of the nesting of structural and functional components of ecological units within the biosphere (see Figure 4.1).
Since sustainability is an issue that is both global and local at the same time we will have to be mindful of the effects of any design or planning decision across scales. This involves clearly a great deal of unpredictability and uncontrollability due to the complexity of interrelated scales and processes. “It is necessary to build a framework that can bridge the critical gap from local to global, but which is still practical to implement at local, national, and continental level of social and ecological organization.” Brunckhorst rightly emphasizes that “the vision for such a framework and its ultimate creation will require an enormous amount of cooperation at all these levels to facilitate not only ownership, but responsibility …” (Brunckhorst, 2002, p.23).
As climate change, resource depletion, and ecological and social disintegration continue to reveal the unprecedented severity of the immediate challenge to human survival our species will be put through an evolutionary rite of passage. We have to rapidly recognize that the short- term fine-tuning of evolution through competitive interactions within and between species is a fleeting epiphenomenon of the underlying health and wholeness maintaining symbiosis and synergy of intra- and inter-specific cooperation.
Long-term survival fundamentally depends on an ocean of co-operative and symbiotic interactions that underlie the competitive surface ripples. Either we learn to integrate the diversity of religious, ethnic, and cultural points of view, along with conflicting national and economic interests, into an overall co-operative, global solidarity in the collective maintainance of the planet’s life support systems, or our species’ appearance on the stage of evolution will prove to be fleeting indeed. Sustainability is fundamentally about humanity’s coming of age — what Clare Graves called ‘a momentous leap in human nature,’ and the emergence of a global consciouness and conscience.
Sustainable solutions are best implemented and focussed on a local and regional scale, but, globally, such implementation will require global cooperation, communication and exchange of knowledge and skills. Brunckhorst stresses: “The regional scale is the critical level at which to reconcile ecological functioning with social institutions if we are to develop novel solutions to natural resource and human sustainability” (Brunckhorst, 2002, p.23). This insight is supported by most of the ecologically literate designers mentioned in this thesis.
The issue of scale is also linked to risk management and an appropriate response to the insight that natural processes are fundamentally unpredictable. How do we confront the fact that even well-intended, salutogenic design solutions may turn out to have unpredicted and possibly even destructive effects? The precautionary principle applied to design is to test out the effects of a proposed design solution on a scale small enough that the likelihood of being able to contain unforeseen negative effects through rapid feedback is maximized.
In general, it may be wise to take Wendell Berry’s warning against large scale, or universal design solutions seriously: “No amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough, to work responsibly on a gigantic scale” (in Orr, 1992, p.29).
Lyle suggests: “design decisions are best made at the smallest possible scale,” since “the smaller the scale, the more precise an understanding of the situation the designer is likely to have”(Lyle, 1985, p.40). David Orr proposed that we have to become more sensitive to the velocity of the processes we design and set in motion, as well as the different velocities of change occurring at different scales. In The Nature of Design (Orr, 2002), he illustrates the importance of contextual and appropriately scale-linked design solutions:
The ecological impacts of increasing velocity of water are easy to comprehend. We can see floods, and with effort we can discern how human actions can amplify droughts. But it is harder to comprehend the social, political, economic, and ecological effects of increasing velocity of money and information, which are often indirect and hidden. Increasing velocity of commerce, information, and transport however, requires more administration and regulation of human affairs to ameliorate congestion and other problems. More administration means that there are fewer productive people, higher overheads, and higher taxes to pay for more infrastructure necessitated by the speed of people and things and problems of congestion. Increasing velocity and scale tends to increase the complexity of social and ecological arrangements and reduce the time available to recognize and avoid problems. Cures for problems caused by increasing velocity often set in motion a cascading series of other problems. As a result, we stumble through a succession of escalating crises with diminishing capacity to act intelligently. Other examples fit the same pattern such as the velocity of transportation, materials flows, extraction of non-renewable resources, introduction of new chemicals, and human reproduction. At a local scale the effect is widening circles of disintegration and social disorder. At the global scale, the rate of change caused by increasing velocity disrupts biological evolution and the biogeochemical cycles of the earth.
— David Orr, 2002, p.49
Let me emphasize again the crucially important insight that scales of time and space are not separate but interpenetrate each other. It is a critical step on the path of learning about sustainability and appropriate participation in natural process. The complex and dynamic interactions occurring at and across all temporal and spatial scales, through both biogeochemical and social processes, are non-linear and fundamentally unpredictable.
It seems most appropriate to aim to limit the vast majority of processes designed to meet human needs, as much as possible, to a spatial range and velocity that will match the natural processes occurring in a particular local environment and not to exceed local limits. At that level of local, human scale we will be able to learn more effectively about appropriate participation, sustainability and salutogenesis, since we can be much more aware of the immediate and long-term effect of our actions on the local environment.
Speaking in general terms, the advice to scale-down and slow down promises more appropriate designs. To do so effectively we have to scale-link locally and regionally based sustainable solutions through national and international cooperation.
What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realization, fulfilment? Is it a matter of good or people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small scale units.
— E.F. Schumacher, 1997, p.54
With regard to the creation of an overall sustainable human system that integrates appropriately into natural processes, the more of its sub-systems that are acting sustainably, the higher the likelihood of the larger systems overall sustainability. Any approach to sustainability based on hierarchically imposed rules by a centralized authority is bound to fail, since the processes of appropriate participation are always specific to a particular location and endorsement by an active and responsible citizenry.
It is highly unlikely that a generic solution applied without careful adaptation to the particularities of locality would be truly sustainable. Van der Ryn and Cowan rightly point out that sustainability “will take endless forms, the very diversity of design possibilities helping to ensure that the whole patchwork quilt of technologies, cultures and values is sustainable.
Bringing sustainability home is about growing a culture of sustainability that is suited to the particularities of place” (Van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, p.63). Just as quantum physics and the world’s mystical traditions support the realization that we live in a fundamentally interconnected universe, true sustainability requires us to co-operate in the local implementation of sustainable practices everywhere in order to create a globally sustainable system.
At a local scale, people’s actions are known and so accountability tends to be high. Production is distributed throughout the community, which means that no one individual’s misfortune disrupts the whole. Employment, food, fuel, and recreation are mostly derived locally, which means that people are buffered somewhat from economic forces beyond their control. Similary, the decentralization of control means that the pathologies of large-scale administration are mostly absent. Moreover, being situated in a place for generations provides long memory of place and hence its ecological possibilities and limits. There is a kind of long-term learning process that grows from intimate experience of a place over time.
— David W. Orr, 2002, p.10
As suggested in chapter one, sustainability can be regarded as a community based process of learning how to participate appropriately in natural and social process. The appropriate scale for this learning process has to be predominantly local while at the same time there is an urgent need to consider local solutions in their global context.
Many communities today are made up of people that have lost the immediate connection to the particular place they inhabit. Local, place-based knowledge has been undervalued for too long. Traditional and indigenous knowledge is disappearing rapidly. The process of sustainability requires that we preserve and value these social and ecological histories of place. They crucially inform appropriate design. The current planetary crisis requires global cooperation in empowering local communities to strengthen their ability to collaborate in a locally adapted process of learning about sustainability and appropriate participation.
The planetary emergency is of an urgency that defines narrow conflicts of material, political, religious, and economic interests as anachronistic. If we do not refocus our lives, values and ideals around our innately human ability to cooperate, we will continue to be locked in the iron cage of a paradigm of control and competition, and humanity’s hope for a humane and sustainable future are dwindling fast. It is not idealism, but a holistically informed realism to regard local and global cooperation as our only chance to create a sustainable human civilization.
Faced with the diversity of globally relevant design challenges, like climate change and social and ecological disintegration, it is only a matter of time until the realization will be forced on us that if the global boat, in which we all sit, sinks, nobody keeps their material wealth or power over others. Only if we learn the important lessons of intra- and inter-specific cooperation and symbiosis will there be a long-term future for the human species.
The transformation towards a sustainable human future on Earth will require us to collectively provide the information, knowledge and capability required by local communities to begin this long process of learning how to co-adapt human needs to the conditions of local ecosystems. The architect Christopher Day makes the following link between the global and the local:
For better or worse, globalism is here to stay. Better and worse! Socially it’s broadening; culturally, enriching; but economically, disempowering — with the social (and cultural) consequences of being a victim to global capital agendas. Global and local, though polarities, aren’t mutually exclusive. In our global world, the challenge is to be local, be in the place in which you are now. To re-find roots and anchor connections to place.
— Christopher Day, 2002, p.146
Intimate knowledge of a particular place and the way that long- and short-term cycles of environmental variables affect which behaviours are truly sustainable and which are not, grows over time. It is this knowledge that increases during the community based learning process thatis sustainability.
Van der Ryn and Cowan argue: “ecological design begins with the intimate knowledge of a particular place. Therefore, it is small-scale and direct, responsive to both local conditions and local people” and suggest that “if we are sensitive to the nuances of place, we can inhabit without destroying” (Van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, p.57). Locally appropriate designs and the communities who employ them wisely are the building blocks of a globally sustainable culture.
After a very detailed study of what may be considered the appropriate scale for the design of human systems based on evidence from traditional cultures, human societies throughout history as well as modern organizations, Kirkepatrick Sale published Human Scale.
His research lead him to become a passionate advocate of the bioregional design approach and to stress the importance of adapting all design to the specific conditions of a particular place. Sale suggests that “it will take some time before people recognize that the project of understanding place is neither nostalgic nor utopian” and emphasizes that it is “the realistic sort of occupation anyone can participate in every day that has an immediate and practical chance of curbing our present waste and recklessness” (Sale, 1982).
It is important to realize that while the smaller scale of the locally adapted community is the primary scale at which the sustainability revolution will take place, all other scales of design have to be synergistically interlinked. One of the central propositions of this doctoral thesis is that the interconnection of sustainable design across all scales will create the highest potential and probablility for the synergetic emergence of sustainability as a property of the entire system. We can contribute to the health of society and the planet by appropriate scale-linking of the many already existing sustainable design solutions.
A design conceived at a scale too large for the material invariably has a sterile uniformity that betrays a lack of detailed understanding. On the other hand, a design conceived at too small a scale usually fails to fit the larger context. Our material requires us to go to a larger scale whenever the concern we are dealing with is too large to be fully comprehended. Different concerns, having different scope and character, require somewhat different design approaches and different levels of detail. We have still to explore the functional difference between design at one scale and at another.
— J.T. Lyle, 1985, pp. 40–41
Not only do we have to explore and understand the functional differences of designing at different scales, we also have to gain a much deeper understanding of how to synergistically link our design approaches across scale, so that they do not negatively affect each other, but rather support each other mutually.
The shift toward a sustainable civilization will gain sufficient critical mass and momentum as soon as we manage to integrate sustainable design solutions across scales. In order to do so we need to reach a level of ecological literacy that allows us to understand nature as inherently scale-linking across different magnitudes of physical space and processes, as well as across an interacting and mutually permeating matrix of different temporal scales and cyclical processes with vastly different time horizons.
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[This is 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.]
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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
