Emergent Design

A Designer’s Mind

This section by Jennifer English Morgan

Let’s start with how to step into the mind of a designer, and how to choose an appropriate design model.

Life on earth is balancing on precarious tipping points. We can consciously choose how to participate in life. We can forecast, create and steer the direction of our experience. It is our responsibility to consciously engage on this path as active change agents. Now more than ever we need designers and leaders who can facilitate and foster a transition towards a more regenerative culture. We have the potential to design integrative solutions even in the midst of planetary chaos, and reshape the direction of our evolution. The future of humanity hinges on our ability to design ways to inhabit the earth in an interconnected way.

Developing a designer’s mind allows us to engage clearly in an interconnected way as we use design models and processes. Without introspection and integration, and an awareness of the state(s) of mind, our designs will be continually restricted and fragmented by day-to-day distractions, attachments, unconscious conditioning, limiting beliefs and unresolved traumas (personal and collective). There are many dysfunctional designs paved with good intentions.

Emergent design means being intentional and present with your process. Staying present and having a realistic appraisal of the current moment creates authentic connectivity. The groundedness in and acceptance of what is, is the foundation for any change. In that sense, the first position and ongoing practice of a designer is to be present, centered and connected before, during and after taking action.

Routine reflection and observation keep us linked to the present moment and trains us to realize emerging opportunities and constraints. These reflection points also help us keep tabs on who and what is driving the design.

What follows is an optional, 33-minute meditation on cultivating a designer’s mind:

Guided Space Meditation

Five practices for cultivating a designers mind:

1. Anchoring: Create a routine space for life to emerge by finding moments of stillness. A great place to connect with this silence is by sitting in nature.

2. Presence: Practice mindfulness in everyday moments to cultivate presence. Create a ritual awareness when engaging in day-to-day activities like walking upstairs, opening doors, cleaning, watering the garden, etc.

3. Observation: Refine your ability to proactively accept what is arising in each moment, rather than resisting. Allowing and witnessing what arises will create a powerful momentum. If you feed or resist judgment or negativity, it will persist.

4. Assessment: Use knowledge, language, time, roles and models as tools, but don’t be defined or limited by identifying with their meaning. Don’t get stuck in conceptualization.

​5. Alignment: Recognize that many of your interpretations, judgments, beliefs, and motivations birth from thousands of years of complex social conditioning that resides within our ancestral DNA, impacting culture, your life experiences and family upbringing. Continually question your perceptions and motivations while at the same time dropping identification and expectations. Be sure your designers mind is in the driver’s seat, and not your ego, inner critic, judge or pain body.

For more on this, read my article Principles of Presence: Applying Design and Integral Theory to Personal Development.

​Start with the inner landscape

​After 24 years of serving as a professional designer, I stand firmly by the notion that we cannot navigate or effectively apply design models without skilling up in intra/interpersonal tools and practices. I’ve committed the last 15 years of my career to training hundreds of designers, mentors, facilitators, healers, and leaders, to navigate the present-day chaos and eco-social challenges, by responding in a regenerative and integrative way. 

The next two videos are about this crucial aspect of our work:

Design of Inner Landscape

Inner Landscape Design Nuggets

​Design is a roadmap for solving problems

​Design makes things happen. 

Creative job opportunities are growing for budding designers. The field is virtually unlimited because design permeates everything! At its core, design has to do with living intentionally. It’s about engaging with life. It’s embedded in us as humans, as the natural way in which we interact with the world around us. It’s how we make decisions every day. All of us can become active designers. There’s one caveat: the act of becoming a designer requires that a person apply a conscious design process. Unconscious decision making doesn’t equal design. The goal is for us to practice using an intentional design process.

There are all sorts of ways you can improve your conscious awareness as a designer. Let’s consider this as a pattern language:

1. Expansion and contraction pattern. Just like the pattern of breath which represents life, our design process works in phases of expansion and contraction. In expansion we inhale concepts, research and take in information and prepare our resources. As we contract and exhale we become more contemplative, make decisions and produce design ideas. We’re using that pattern throughout this course, think of the informational modules as inhalation and expansion phases followed by the design phases which act as a contraction in which you exhale and apply the ideas in your design. Of course, we also need to remember to keep on breathing.  The breath keeps us in the now. Change happens in transitions. This is at the core of Emergent Design.

2. Spiral flow of energy that includes linear directional momentum with cyclical transitions (like seasons) that move through the entire design cycle at each phase, creating a spiral of learning. Each circle represents a moment of expansion and contraction. The spiral is the middle where life emerges. The momentum is moving in one direction → yet it spins like a wheel through each design step (GOBRADIME) before moving onto the next phase, or the next breath of the process. The wheel spinning becomes a spiral each time we learn and incorporate the new data that’s emerging. This spiraling means that both we as designers and the project are evolving. In actuality, this spiral is what the design process looks like, as each step contains a reflection of the entire process mirrored within itself.

​Applied social systems design

This section by Jessica Peterson.

You have read and listened to multiple aspects of co-creating your physical design with the social relationships that go along with any ambitious ecological culture-evolving project, or any project for that matter!

​In this video I discuss this particular framework’s origins and its practical applications for the 6th Ward Garden Park, the first edible forest garden in Montana, which was designed by my company, Inside Edge Strategies and Design, along with Dave Jacke and the community of Helena, Montana.

Watch this video and then jot down a few names of stakeholders within your design concept.

Social Systems Design - Designing for Regenerative Landscape and Culture

Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons:

1. Define clear group boundaries.
2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.
3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. Make sure the rule making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.
5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.
6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.
7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.
8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

The next section I will walk you through the emergent model for Social Systems Design, so that you can practice!

For a longer and more in depth listen to how we applied Social Systems Design to the 6th Ward Garden Park Project, you can listen to our podcast on The Permaculture Podcast.

In her article, “Permaculture and Emergence: An Introduction to Design,” Jennifer English Morgan writes “The process of Emergent Design creates awareness and agility, enabling people to gain more skill in embracing life’s uncertainties. When we are intentional, present and holistic in our thinking, we can release expectations and indeed be proactive in harnessing the opportunities of the present moment. If we accept change, upgrade our outdated modes of operating, and move towards an approach that values and serves life, then we are tapping into powerful possibilities.”

​Creating a strong emergent design for how people will interact cannot be underestimated in its ability to make or break an ambitious ecological project. Even if your project only includes your family in terms of planning and impact, the family members are all stakeholders. Each of them have different characteristics, which will determine their impact on your project. Your neighbors are also important stakeholders, even if you may sometimes wish they weren’t!

Emergent Design is oriented toward holistic and regenerative living. A framework using the same cyclical process of design (discussed in our Introduction to Design) is appropriate for overlaying and integrating social systems structures into your landscape design. 

To support the connection between it and how it would fit into the emergent design structure, I’ve created a diagram (below) following my video on Social Systems Design, illustrating how to think of social systems design with an emergent design framework.

Assess: According to the goals of your project, this is your opportunity to think about who is currently involved in your project and who you would like to be involved. What might they have to offer and what might they need? What niche will they fill for the project, and how might they interact? Who is missing from this project? What needs are not being met?

Design: You’ve identified your gaps and, correspondingly, who needs to be a part of the discussion. Now design your conversation container and invite your stakeholders to the table. You’re outlining performance objectives both prior to the conversation and with your stakeholders, once you’re in dialogue.

Develop: Here is where you can get incredibly creative with how you overlay your social system on your physical design! Jennifer mentioned xMind, and this is a great software for creating mind maps that show connections. You can also use the worksheet I provided and jot down your notes from the conversation. You would also create memorandums of understanding (MOU) in this stage.

Implement: Test your social system! Be ready for some components to work really well, and many more that will need to be tweaked.

Evaluate/feedback loop response: For any of the four stages mentioned above, you will need to integrate evaluation of your objectives, i.e. respond to the feedback loop. We can get stuck because we are unwilling to make a change once we write something down or render a design, but as linear as these frameworks can look (or circular in this case), they are anything but that. The more connected you are with your feedback loops, the better and more regenerative your social system and landscape will be. 

​Tracking the learning journey: the art of feedback, evaluation and renegotiation

This section by Jennifer English Morgan

Every design should include ample and intentional feedback, evaluation, and, when necessary, renegotiation. Setting up pathways for providing clear feedback, renegotiation, and evaluation creates healthy relationships and productivity, and helps avoid burnout and exhaustion. Even if you’re the only stakeholder in the project, it’s still imperative to track your progress and manage and tweak your process.

Pathways for reflection and accountability generate efficiency. These paths need to be accessible, practiced and integrated. Whoever uses them needs to trust the flow of information. Even if you’re working solo, you need to trust your system. Most of all, you need to trust in authenticity.

Being intentional and present with your process as a designer, and having a realistic appraisal of the current moment, creates authentic connectivity. Routine reflection and observation keeps us linked to the present moment and trains us to realize emerging opportunities and limitations. These are data points that you can (and should) track.

If all of us were actively practicing emergent design and authentic presence as we collaborated, then we’d be avoiding a lot of burnout, exhaustion, disharmonious relationships and botched designs. My goal with this section is to share best practices for being a talented tracker.

What follows here is an outline-format brainstorm about feedback and evaluation, based on observations I’ve made over the years:

Feedback.

It’s important to set up systems for tracking feedback. When people have active feedback loops designed into a system, they tend to get less stressed out.

I’ll give you an example. I’m a facilitator. I’ve experienced far too many unproductive meetings where people derail the agenda to try to change the process mid-meeting or go off on some tangent. To solve this, at the beginning of all my meetings, I establish three designated ways to provide feedback:

Capture feedback as it arises.

Create a matters arising board where anyone can place feedback or tangential ideas that aren’t in the flow of the agenda. The board is visible and available before and after each meeting. Someone from the group reviews the board and takes time to respond to questions, incorporate ideas or feedback and then communicates that to the team before the next meeting. This way the group trusts that the organizers are reviewing comments. If you’re working solo, this might mean having a notebook or journal handy for capturing aha ideas while you’re working, without getting lost in the rabbit hole.

Collect feedback during transitions.

A transition happens at the end of a meeting or between working groups, or perhaps a new team member exits or enters the scene. Giving people an opportunity to give written feedback during these times is helpful. You can create an online survey, or have people fill out note cards. You could also collect input from a group using a whiteboard.

In any case, it’s essential to gather the feedback and let people know the integration process. Then at some point there’s a re-entry of the content and an indication back to the group if feedback was incorporated or not. Perhaps it’s a change in a future agenda. It’s ok to skip incorporating feedback. Being explicit about what is and isn’t integrated helps people gain trust in the process. If you’re working solo this might mean scheduling time to journal between tasks, or at the end of the day.

Provide an ongoing portal for feedback.

Sometimes people think of feedback days after an event, so having a place to collect feedback is helpful.

How to give useful feedback:

• Get consent or give a heads up. Ask for permission. Don’t give solutions or unwanted advice. Pay attention to body language and the person’s reaction to determine if you should continue. If it’s personal say, “Would you be open to me giving you some feedback?” Be sure to pause and let them think. If it’s professional and you’re their supervisor, give a heads up: “I’d like to give you some feedback.” This example helps the employee prepare. Asking for permission engages the person as a proactive problem solver. Respect their boundaries if they say no. You can keep the door open by saying that they can let you know if they’d like to receive it later.
• Give feedback in private. Don’t criticize others in public or in front of another person unless that was the previous agreement. Understand that people are far more impacted by adverse events and feedback than positive. For example, it takes a number of compliments or positive reinforcements to cancel out one insult or criticism. Provide context. Communicate the type of feedback being provided and be explicit about the process for its delivery. Tell the recipient that there will be a designated time for them to reply to all the input if this is applicable. Perhaps give them time to process their feedback quietly, in writing or with a peer before responding.
• Be constructive. Use positive and proactive language. Focus on behavior, not personality. Don’t judge. Be specific, clear and concise. Don’t use technical words. Keep the tone of feedback collaborative. Use high vibration words instead of low vibration words.
• Feedback sandwich. Start and end with positive feedback. It creates intimacy and opens up the reward part of the brain which helps people stay out of their defensive response mechanism. Give critiques in the form of questions, for example, “How do you think that your presentation went?” or “How do you think this x impacted y?” Share gratitude.
• Understand your motivation. Be clear about why you are contributing feedback. Can the person do anything about it? Are you sure it isn’t your hang-ups or hurts? Would appreciation or validation work better? What is the logjam, the one essential feedback?
• Diversify types of feedback. Mix in positive/appreciations, empathy/connection/how it impacted you or reminded you of a similar experience. Recommendations or resources, suggestions for improvement, resonance and agreement, questions or considerations, and encouragement are helpful.
• Think cumulatively. Integrate your feedback with something said earlier in the conversation or a previous meeting. Notice and comment on cumulative improvements or transitions.

On receiving feedback.

• Honesty. Let someone know if feedback is unwanted or unwarranted. You always have the right to choose to engage with feedback. It’s ok to say, “No, I don’t want to hear your feedback,” or “I’m open to hearing feedback, and this is how and when I’d like you to share.” In some situations, choosing to be exempt from receiving feedback could cost you your job or friendship, so you’ll have to navigate this with careful and clear communication.
• Be open-minded. Consider feedback as constructive. You get to learn from others. You get to understand others and see a new perspective and likely grow. Listen non-defensively. Don’t interrupt or defend. Don’t take it personally. Stay centered. Say thank you. Decide how you can incorporate the feedback . What are you going to do about it? It’s up to you if you want to take it on board or not.
• Take your time. Don’t immediately respond to feedback, ask for a moment to reflect and gather your thoughts and questions. Repeat back what you hear.
• Triangulation. Check to see if others have the same feedback. Ask someone you trust if you’re unclear or confused about receiving or incorporating a specific piece of feedback. If you feel triggered, try combining forgiveness and humor.

Practice feedback loops.

• Requesting feedback. Ask for feedback to help build relationships and learn.
• Pattern reflection. What is your experience of receiving feedback? How has feedback you’ve given been received? How often do you incorporate feedback? Trial and error is self-collected feedback that is especially useful from a pattern perspective.
• Feedback on feedback. Ask for reflection on your style of giving and receiving feedback.

When feedback turns into conflict.

• Handling conflict. Be willing to compromise or agree to disagree. Value yourself by knowing your options, needs and wants. Respect the possibilities, needs, and desires of others.
• Be proactive. Express negative thoughts positively and receive feedback undoubtedly.
• Seek to relate. Empathic assertion example, “I hear that you are stressed and need more time, and I respect that you have been working very hard. We agreed that you would have the work with me by today, and because of my own deadlines, I need the work by next Friday at the latest.” Hold firm to boundaries if needed: Escalating assertion example, “If you don’t do x or continue to do y, this is the consequence z.”
• Create a culture of valuing feedback. If relating to or anticipating feedback is negative or stressful, it will not likely be productive. Value an open mindset. Know that input and perspective are essential for growth. Understand and discuss with your team, family or friends why feedback is useful. Consider that getting feedback is training offered for free. It’s about actions, not you. Learn and improve.

Evaluation.

Evaluation is a process of collecting information. It combines smoothly in conjunction with surveying and reflection. Evaluation is unique in that it is precisely about the past. Feedback is also very similar to evaluation in that both gather inputs on process and outcomes of a project or action. Feedback is often considered more specific to matters that arise which are unanticipated. Something bubbles up and needs a container to capture the reflection. Whereas evaluation is a particular process used to collect feedback at predetermined intervals. There’s overlap.

Evaluation is a powerful tool to help us celebrate or get unstuck, assess our outcomes and process, and redesign or tweak our forward momentum. There is often a fear of evaluation because of past traumas where it might have been completed in a judging mindset.

Evaluation is not about the success or failure of a project. It’s not about judging the good or bad, or the right or wrong way of managing the process. If you set your project up anticipating agility, you know and appreciate that life happens, and things don’t always go as planned. It’s not about accomplishing the desired outcomes, it’s more about being present with each decision along the journey.

Consider the analogy of a spider web and a ship. If you consider each strand of the web as a task, what happens to that web when the wind blows? Some of the tasks shift or break. Have you ever noticed how a spider takes the broken parts of their web and re-anchors the section with a new line?

With a ship, imagine that the structure is a container for your intentions. However, you can’t control the water or the storms at sea. This is life. The wind blows and changes the direction of our sails or the lines of our network and intentions within the web of our awareness. The evaluation is not about judging any of this as right or wrong. Instead, it’s about taking a clear assessment of what is real and perceived and using that information to make decisions. Successful evaluation is remaining open to ongoing feedback loops and dynamically tweaking the program accordingly.

Evaluation doesn’t need to be about collecting extensive data for scientific accuracy, reliability, and validity. Generalizations and recommendations are okay if that’s what you or your team decide. If you have clients or stakeholders, such as project investors or foundation support, then find out what type of evaluation they require. Don’t make this process over-complicated, or collect so much data that the results are burdensome.

Sample evaluation process.

This process can be as simple as a single meeting, an afternoon tea, or an entire weekend retreat. It’s up to you to determine how in-depth you want to make this evaluation cycle. The most crucial element is that it happens.

Define the goals, purpose, and scope of the evaluation and feedback loops. What types of information and outcomes do you want to track? How will you monitor and assess them?

1. Identify what will happen with the evaluation and feedback processes once they are implemented.
2. Determine who and what you will evaluate, and how.
3. Incorporate qualitative (your observations, opinions, and feelings) and quantitative (the facts and figures) measures.
4. Apply short and long-term assessment of yields/impact.
5. Revisit the beginning. What did you initially intend to track? For example, what were your original goals and how can you assess progress or achievement?
6. Gather all your feedback and evaluation data that came in during previous evaluation periods. 
7. Assess and interpret the data you collected.
8. Document the outcomes once you finish reflecting and assessing your evaluation data.
9. Shift into the renegotiation process if needed.

How often to evaluate:

Where and when to direct attention: 

Patterns. On an annual and quarterly basis, focus routine reflection on evaluation (past) and observations (present) of meta-level thinking. Assess the big picture, look for patterns and design fresh goals to move forward (future). Reflect on your values and long term goals, needs and desired outcomes. Track and assess your qualitative and quantitative data from this pattern level.

Details. On a weekly and daily basis, focus on performing rapid evaluations and reflections that lead towards making decisions, taking action or renegotiating. Stick to assessing what concrete steps need to happen, actual accountability, real-time capacity to perform, and the climate of the week or day (the elements that are mostly or entirely out of my control).

Renegotiation. Negotiating is a necessary and everyday part of life. Renegotiating means that for whatever reason we need to adjust and revise a previously arranged intention, design process, promise or agreement. Remember that effective and authentic renegotiations are far more crucial than completion of tasks. Have you ever been in a situation where someone just stops communicating, and you depend on them to complete a step in the project before you can move forward? Would it be better if they had described the change, rather than just left you hanging? Authentic presence, accountability and communication are key to renegotiation.

​Decolonizing our bodies and designs

This section by Diana Sette

Designing is truly a process of exploration and ideation. Ideation is a creative process where you gather ideas. Webster defines it as “the capacity for or the act of forming or entertaining ideas.” These ideas are basic elements of design. They can be visual, abstract, conceptual or concrete. It is a fluid creative process that starts with thoughts, forms, changes, adapts, develops, and actualizes. The design process is all about the generation of possibilities, of existing in a place of curiosity, questions, and openness.

We are often told designs are outside of our bodies. We are often told that humans are separate from nature. Let’s be clear, humans are a part of nature. We are nature, just as much as trees, birds, microbes, and mountains. So in the process of healing, integrating and decolonizing our connection with nature, we must find the ecological design in our bodies. We must see how our parts interact, observe how they are connected. 

Observe how your elbows feel when you walk. Observe how your nostrils move when you inhale oxygen into your lungs. Observe how quickly your heart beats when your knees bounce up and down off the ground. Design patterns and inspiration are found there.

Decolonizing your body is a step towards decolonizing your design. As a friend and community herbalist Jocelyn Kirkwood of Stonefruit Community Herbalists described to me, “so many of the designs symbolize parts of my own body…If we are creating systems, in what ways do these replicate systems of domination/control (i.e. colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism), and is the system solely for ‘production’, and how is that measured?” 

Jocelyn brings up important questions in how we practice and design for the earth in the same way we design for people care and fair share. What are our standards of beauty? Do the designs that permaculturists make address systematic oppression, or simply replace them? In short, our designs reflect our core belief systems whether we are intentional about it or not.

The idea of embodying the design process gets at the need to play, create, and experiment, while also applying the practical piece of preparing and protecting yourself from having to do a lot of work in the future, because you didn’t consider or plan for the consequences initially. This is why we create designs, so we can play with ideas and work through things in a manifest form, without all the heavy impacts of implementing a design that has not been thought through entirely. Using a design concept, prototype or schematic, is an important part of the process for creating long-term resilient design solutions.

When creating our designs it is important to remember the words of Indigenous Aboriginal artist, activist and academic, Lilla Watson who is quoted as saying, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

While it is possible to over plan, so much so that one is paralyzed and unable to see design implementation through, it is also true that taking time to slow down, can aid your work in the future. Creating a design concept allows resources (be it ideas, people, capital, etc. Think of the seven forms of capital) to align and propel you forward. “What you are seeking is seeking you.” A design plan is a manifest vision, and key to one’s ability to manifest said vision.

​May your design phase be a cyclical, spiral, intuitive, ephemeral, embodied, intimate, and felt experience. May there be magic in it. Wishing you all the best of luck in the process!

There are many ways to present the information in your design. This example is of an Asset Map, which helps to identify and analyze the strength of relationships or potential relationships surrounding the central design focus. Image: Diana Sette.

Homework

Questions for Review

1. Start a journal to observe your inner landscape and relationship with the design process.
2. Identify five personal goals related to reconditioning your thoughts/feelings, with specific practices you wish to experiment with over the course of this design cycle.
3. Assess your personal and professional relationship with design. What was your definition before and after engaging in this course?
4. What types of design thinking and models have you used?
5. Do you have any beliefs about design or world-views that limit your capacity as a designer, that you may wish to adjust?
6. Explore your neighborhood and look for examples of different types of design. It’s everywhere! Do you see examples of what you might call emergent design? Social systems design? 
7. Using emergent and holistic design thinking and principles, create intentions for how you want to engage as a designer. Write a few pages on this and see what comes up for you.  
8. Looking through a wide open designer’s dream mind, what does your regenerative future and design look like? What is present? How do things flow?
9. Reflect on a community-based design project you are currently engaged in. What are the inputs you are giving, and what are the outputs you are receiving?​

Recommended Hands-On

If you’re going for your advanced Social Systems certificate with us, you’ll need to create a fully-integrated social systems design project. Consider this your homework for this module: innovate and then illustrate the ways in which your design project is “emergent.” How will it have a lasting impact on the social systems it touches? How will it make the world a better place?