3. Design as a Transformative Process

Key themes:

  • Skill flexes to increase abilities in eco-social design are potent in their 'world-changing' effects
  • Growing permaculture design into thinking, feeling, social organisation & infrastructure fields beyond simple material systems
  • Attitudinal understandings of designing e.g. everything can be re-designed, each system is unique
  • Integration of both analytical & intuitive processes
  • Value of templates, cycles, procedures and rituals as a way of managing design processes
  • Make design thinking visible
  • Design evaluation in from the outset so we can better respond to system feedback
  • Need to democratise design processes (everyone is a designer)

Notes from call:

  • Jennifer designed a plan for healing, implemented & has been healing!
  • Design is not just for specialists, we can all re-design our lives
  • Re-designing religion!

Readings:
 

  • Bill Molliso, Designer's Manual
  • David Holmren, Principles of Permaculture
  • Christopher Alexander, Pattern Language


Tools:

  • Gadie
  • O'Bredimet
  • SADI
  • GoSADIMET
  • Gather Goals, Analyse & Assess
  • PASER
  • 4 Questions
  • Inputs & Outputs
  • Intrinsic characteristics
  • Path of least resistance
  • Yeoman's scale of permanence
  • Gantt charts
  • Program evaluation & review techniques (PERT)
  • Analytical estimating
  • Cynefin mapping
  • Appreciative enquiry

Went well:

  • Strengthened in myself my dedication to becoming a skilled ecosocial designer

Was challenging:

  • How much there is to learn!

Integrating this learning into my pathway:

I want to write a list of design tools/frameworks I have not used yet so that I can learn to use them for example in my Gaia Uni documentation or within my permaculture diploma

4. Thinking about Worldviews

Key themes:

  • World views are how we bring order & pattern/our personal & collective maps of reality
  • Extremely beneficial to develop literacy in multiple world views e.g. unlearning our own, understanding others, finding useful world views for social justice & ecological restoration
  • The patrix (patriarchical matrix), its manifestations, intersections & strategies for elimination e.g. re-valuative counselling
  • Introduction to spiral dynamics

Notes from call:

Readings:

Online/Sites/Downloads
- Mematics 101
- Project Worldview website
- Critiques of project worldview website
- The Matrix of Domination, Patricia Collins
- Discrimination Portal, Wikipedia
- Why I now believe consensus with unanimity causes conflict, Diane Leaf Christian
- Divide & rule (check)
- Scientific racism, wikipedia
- Intersectionality paper by Kimberle Cranshaw of the African American Policy Forum
- Coordinator class, Michael Albert, Z-Net community
- Reevaluation Counselling, rc.org
- Gaia Uni RC Community on GEL site
- Spiral dynamics, Wikipedia
- Also section of Spiral dynamics, Wikipedia
- Spiral dynamics article , Christopher Cowan & Natasha Todorovic
- Past human responses to climate change (check)
- Slideshow from the Bradshaw foundation in Australia

Recommended books
The Selfish Gene, 1976 Richard Dawkins
Theatre of the Oppressed Play ??
Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Collins
Spiral dynamics, mastering values, leadership & change, 2006, Christopher Cowan & Don Beck
A world lit only by fire, William Manchester
 
Tools:

  • Project worldview
  • Re-evaluation counselling
  • Spiral dynamics

Went well:

  • Using the 4 aspects of world views to explore my relationship to the land, groups, other individuals & my relationship to knowledge

Was challenging:

  • Restimulation around speciesm
  • Designer distress around project world views website!

Integrating this learning into my pathway:

  • Will look into re-evaluative counselling options in the UK
  • Will use the term 'patrix' in my work & communication
  • Will consciously consider other people's world views more

Glossary:

A worldview = bring order & pattern to confusing, conflicting & competing ways of interpreting our individual & collective maps of reality.

Worldview literacy = ability to explore world views systematically & to learn/unlearn world views that are congruent with ecological restoration and social justice.

Meme = An information pattern which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory, mostly by means of imitation & which is subject to a selection process.

Patrix = patriarchal matrix of oppressions

5. Growing Leaderful Communities

Key themes:

  • How a culture thinks & acts around leadership has a great deal of influence e.g. structures, governance & management, participation, relationships to leadership
  • Leadership models favoured by radicals that aren't working/continuing distress/re-strimulate in relation to irrational authority & hierarchy imposed by the patrix
  • Spiral dynamics leadership memes
  • Need for a leaderful model e.g. active commitment to eliminating the patrix, support for restimulation (for all), demonstration of competence to fill leadership roles, valuing support roles
  • Role of support persons

Notes from call:

  • Need to actively & consciously construct leaderful communities that have a large capacity for flexing & following their leadership (Andrew)
  • Leadership we need, patrix we don't need

Readings:

Tools

  • Re-evaluative counselling
  • Support person resources
  • Art of mentoring e.g. acorn roles
  • Dynamic governance
  • Sociocracy
  • Holocracy
  • Designing productive meetings & events
  • 10 Faces of innovation
  • World Cafe
  • 6 Thinking Hats
  • Future Search
  • Open Space Technology

Went well:

  • Timing of this element aligned with a gathering I had organised with 2 others which had provided perfect opportunity to live the above tools e.g. supportive roles & the difference these made
  • Recognsing my own leadership abilities & feeling empowered vs feeling distress around control/power

Was challenging/re-stimulation:

  • Being 'led; feels like loosing self-determination
  • Brought up lots of past experiences of taking a leadership role/showing response-ability & then facing other people's distresses/criticism, dealing with informal hierarchies and so forth.
  • Re-learning & challenging my anarchist world views/consensus organising patterns in radical movements

Integrating this learning into my pathway:

  • Explore leadership in my masters, give this area prominence & energy
  • Design events/spaces/groups with supportive roles & make this more explicit
  • Encourage the leadership/leaderful conversation in groups & movements I organise with
  • Aim to make use of the tools introduced in this element that I have not experienced
Updated on 28 October 2013, 18:34; 2112 page visits from 23 August 2012 to 31 October 2025