The leading edge of sustainability is moving beyond green design and into regenerative development - the process of integrating buildings, communities, and their inhabitants as healthy contributors to the living places of which they are a part. Because sustainability is ultimately about sustaining all life, a mental model shift is required to work towards this next level. To ‘develop' means to create new potential. This requires of us both inner and outer work. It is a process of shifting ourselves from being occupants of the land to becoming inhabitants - conscious participants in the co-evolution of life for the purpose of continually regenerating and healing the whole system. This course will teach the principles and processes required to design in a regenerative manner. Local sites will be explored to teach students the process of living system pattern understanding and its practical application.
Course start time: Sunday, 5pm
Course end time: Friday, 5pm
- Competency Level: Intermediate to Professional
- AIA credits: 35 -- Qualifies for HSW and SD requirements.
Course Purpose
To help all attendees and stakeholders learn how to see the uniqueness of places through the exploration and understanding of interrelationships and patterns of life in each place, in a way that reveals the essential systemic connections extant at Yestermorrow as an example of the larger wholes in which places are nested, so that Yestermorrow and its students can improve their own long-term health and those of their broader communities as they grow and evolve together.
Course Objectives
- Develop an understanding of the importance of working systemically and holistically with the patterns of place.
- Develop a basic understanding of a process that participants can use to perceive interrelationships and patterns of systems and places.
- Provide participants with the means to begin developing their capacity for using this pattern recognition as an essential tool for improving the health of their projects, their work, and their communities.
Sunday Evening - (7:00-9:00)
7:00 Introductions
Purpose of the Course
Overview of the regenerative design & development process, its importance, and its effects.
- Technical System Design (Mechanical worldview)
- Living System Design
- Regenerative Design and Development - A Whole and Living System Process
Monday
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Overview of the regenerative design & development process (continued)
- Pattern recognition (physical/functional) and nested systems
- Essence pattern recognition (next level)
- Process "map" for implementing regenerative design & development
11:00 Outdoor observation skills exercise
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Update and review of work to date from last year's course
2:00 Outdoor pattern recognition skills exercises
4:30 Break and Dinner
7:00 Reflections and documentation of discoveries
Tuesday
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Essence patterns overview
Identify necessary fieldwork and research teams (changes - what, when, why occurred)
- Biological/habitat patterns (mapping, watersheds, geology, soils, hydrology, flora, etc.)
- Landscape structural patterns (built environment/infrastructure patterns)
- Social and cultural/historical patterns
- Client essence
11:00 Organize small group field work and online research
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Small group field work continued - outer boundaries driving tour
4:30 Break and Dinner
7:00 Reflections and documentation of discoveries
Wednesday
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Reflection and Essence patterns discussion
Identification of additional fieldwork
10:00 Small group field work continued
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Small group field work continued
4:00 Documentation of discoveries
5:30 Break and Dinner
7:00 Integrative Design
Thursday
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Reflections and assimilation of patterns being observed
Essence patterns (relationships) and site energies (flows) discussion - large and small scale (site and valley)
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Team design sketches and documentation (including narrative)
4:30 Break and Dinner
7:00 First iteration design review
Reflections and documentation of discoveries
Friday
7:00 Exercises and Breakfast
9:00 Team design sketches and documentation
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Design Presentations
4:30 Wrap Up and conclusions
Required Reading
Reading the Forested Landscape. Tom Wessels (is a book you will want to bring to class with you - either read beforehand or consult in the evenings as we study)
Being Nature's Mind, Indigenous Ways of Knowing. Zimmerman
Regenerative Design, Sustainable Design's Coming Revolution. Pamela Mang, Design Intelligence, 2002
Living Systems, the Internet and Human Future. Speech by Elisabet Sahtouris
Living Systems Design. Bill Reed
Gift of Good Land (Chapter 9, Solving for Pattern). Wendell Berry
Entering this land, a history of Knoll Farm. This can be ordered online from Center for Whole Communities' website.
Designing from Place. Pamela Mang and Bill Reed. Click here.
Suggested Reading
The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building. 7group and Reed
The Living Universe. Duane Elgin
Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything. Ervin Laszlo
My Stroke of Insight. Jill Bolte Taylor
Patterning as Process. Marvick and Murphy
Regenerative Design (Chapters 1 and 2). Lyle
Tending the Wild. M. Kat Anderson
The Web of Life. Capra
Ecological Design. van der Ryn, and Cowan
The Education of Little Tree. Forrest Carter OR Grandfather. Tom Brown
Fox Haven Report. Regenesis
Gardening in Eden. Nabhan and Anderson
Photo Gallery
Video
Events