HDS

Ask for project planning seminar "Filling a Sustainability Shopping Cart" or Browse my 4D sustainability method.

Sustainability is a 'steep hill' to climb, so having a planning horizon 'looking over the hill' to where we are really going helps a lot. Of course, looking 'over the hill' also helps identify the plans we have for climbing ever steeper hills... which we so urgently need to change.

A Whole systems view: Finding the right problem as you work on finding the right solution

1) Helps you find what's missing.
A search strategy needs two parts, exploring for what's unexpected & then playing with ways to connect it. Our CO² inventory methods, for example, normally actually miss 98% or more of the CO² our economic choices produce. I figured that out from learning how to measure a project's share of the whole earth's CO². Our effects in a whole system are just much larger than what we can readily trace. Which measure do you use? How do you explore the difference?

2) Helps you find what's connected
The organization of natural systems is physically distributed, and always changing. You trace their connections by watching them learn about their environments, asking how they and their environments will respond. Sometimes responses multiply, or vanish, give in or push back. When you relieve congestion to promote growth, for example, the answer is kind of obvious. It only lasts if you switch to stabilizing growth too. Most change is counteracted, and it pays to know in what way..

3) Learning starts with #1
And that leads to better questions and choices consistent with effects that multiply or vanish because of #2.

We have come to live in a very complicated world, find ourselves interfering in complex natural systems we need for survival, and... don't really understand them. Our main persistent problem is that the organization of systems is largely 'invisible' to us. Learning to make it visible takes some guided effort. Natural systems are actually physical cells of accumulative relationships that have both a location and a life-cycle, like storms or cultures. Seeing them as wholes is the key. Natural systems emerge without controls, so watching for emerging relationships is one of the direct ways of finding and watching them. They're continually reorganizing as they work, starting simply and becoming more complex as they grow. They might then stabilize and then later end in disorganization and decay. That 'life-cycle' is summed up as the natural cycle of change, (¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸), growth before decay. For us, problem solving is a 'thing in a box' defined by models and equations, but natural systems don't do that. They always emerge from indefinable environments and our problem definitions have no environments, except us. To help get the right problem in the box, then, we need to use our models to see how the real things are similar but different, and keep changing the models. Natural systems are vast 'collaborations' of independent parts, and mostly 'out of control'. Partly because how they work is mostly invisible to us, we've treated nature as the enemy of our being in control, and that can be fatal. The idea of sustainability is partly accepting our need to make peace with the earth. It's also about learning new kinds of creativity. It's amazing, but all natural systems begin with very sleepy but steady proportional accumulation around a beginning pattern, that then emerges as if having a grand design and direction of its own. You can search, but there's no design, there's just a local process.

Though we know the earth is fragile, we haven't seemed to notice that our method of multiplying our wants and needs adds to our burden on it. That's partly because direct effects in a complex system are untraceable. We've mistakenly thought that made them deniable too. It doesn't. My DollarShadow & TotalEnergy methods provide an accurate simple way to measure the difference. Knowing your real effects gives you more real choice. That it also reveals our choices may contain 50 times or more energy and CO2 impact than we previously understood does change the picture, showing that simpler solutions won't work. Previously we only counted the impacts that could be individually measured, like the fuel burned in our cars or in heating our houses. The far bigger part is all the unaccountable work of bringing those things and all their supports to you. I developed the DollarShadow & TotalEnergy statistical method using the properties of whole systems, hoping that learning to see our individual parts in the whole would give us a better understanding of the whole, and how it is pushing back.

We've always known that our problem with sustainability was a matter of misunderstanding, rather than effort. Some of that misunderstanding seems to come from very ancient habits, like a belief in the earth as infinite. Stabilizing growth has historically been the main issue of sustainability, right from the beginning of civilization. Now in switching to stabilizing the earth there are a large number of institutionalized habits and perceptions left over from that. I treat it as science, a set of wonderfully fascinating, important and productive puzzles. Perhaps the best way to get a balanced picture of the relation between growth and the earth is to learn how to estimate your own true total energy impacts on the earth. It's not hard, and the surprising result is that your distributed (and so unaccountable) impacts are about 10 or more times what we can specifically identify [dollarshadow.htm]. There's also a problem with the principle tool of sustainable design, efficiency improvements. There does indeed seem to be a lot of room for efficiency improvement, in the engineering models at least, but improving efficiency is increasingly complicated and over time naturally produces diminishing returns. You can see it in the global trends [World-eff_grow.pdf]. Consequently, our sustainability choices address only a small part of the problem and by a method that gets progressively less effective over time. Understanding the mix of physics and common sense behind this may be a little like learning how to walk with new legs, needing a little stumbling to get it to work. It's a matter of finding the little accumulative steps that then you take off with confidence.

Services: I offer help for exploring and interacting with complex natural systems. What I design are model learning processes, both for exploring complex natural systems and for the creating natural systems that explore. I'm also engaged in a variety of basic research in sustainability science and consult on research methods. Please inquire.

4Dsustainability
I use a comprehensive 'four dimension' (4D) whole systems sustainable design method. You start with small easy steps that build. It's based on the universal learning process, searching 'outside the box' for what to put 'in the box', including leads for going further, and then adding up the whole effect. Used for design it's a matter of exploring inside and outside the way you've defined the design problem. It helps get the problem right as well as the solution. It helps find creative new kinds of value. A Connection Wiki templates and guides for adaptation to any team's level of expertise for how they envision their collaboration process. It's meant as much to prompt discussion of one's collaboration design as to suggest a specific template. My early one page hand sketch of the central idea might also be suggestive. My one page project sustainability sheet shows another way to diagram how all the pieces fit together. Its a flexible method intended to create a wide array of good choices and encourage featured sustainable design experiments, 'bright green spots'. Because of the DollarShadow principle, that Money = Energy, one of the best parts of real sustainable design, is finding that it creates real value for free.

Engineering Natural Systems
What's initially most different and difficult about engineering with natural systems, be it large scale planning or self-adapting software and controls, is recognizing the line between opportunities for controlling things, and the parts of independent complex systems that need to remain beyond control. The latter need to be recognized as independent and treated with respect. Things beyond control, and living systems of all kinds that are owed our respect inherently, need to be avoided or engaged with. That's partly because their internal workings can't be explained, and so part of the trick is learning to feel natural responding to them. It's a small but significant role change to interact with systems that have always had their own independent behaviors, which we may never have noticed before. Like a handshake, engaging with the world beyond our control requires taking the role of one of two independent homing devices recognizing each other. Like a person-to-person handshake, it simply can't go smoothly using a statistical model of where the other party's 'hand' is supposed to be. It takes active dynamic coordination between independent things, recognizing the emergence on new behavior, and connecting with it.

Our principle handicap, of course, is our inability to recognize how natural systems develop their organization. The best way to learn is to study their whole life-cycles, and from repeated observation find the patterns of the whole behavior. Why we find it hard seems mainly that emergent organization is a pattern of changing organization in time. People prefer to think of organization as fixed in time, like rules. In nature the 'rules' tend to be fluidly changing. That's seems why we generally don't see things like continually multiplying the size and complexity of the economies as changing their organization, or their relation to the earth, for example. It's a tragic oversight as we are just now beginning to see. A method of raising pointed questions about how organization changes with development provides a way to see reorganization coming. It exposes the beginning of emergence, and learning paths for understanding how to respond. It connects what we can observe of their their developing internal networks with their growth phases.

Another handicap comes directly from nature. Natural systems are local network cells of relationships that evolve as individuals, so consequently we begin our observation of them quite 'out-of-the-loop' and unable to see what's hidden or happening inside. Their organization is a kind of 'dark matter' for observers because it's so internalized. In a substantive way they do represent independent interior universes of relationships. It's not a trivial challenge to break in, but having tools that tell you when and were to look helps a lot. What you need are a combination of scientific observational discipline, free thinking, intimate knowledge of the details, and to be in a frame of mind for seeing through your own assumptions. A brief but good sketch of the scientific foundations of the model is on my short research note page for the SASO-07 conference, PICS.htm. and in my research web Physics of Happening.

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Tips

Help needed

keep good dated records and observations, since the subject is the parallel flows of accumulating events, and the main indicator of what's connected is when it occurred. Undisturbed piles are good dated records, like all of history...

Over the past year I've been trying to set up a little business plan for myself, basically how to continue mostly just having fun doing this, while making it more useful. Simplifying ideas and connections would be quite welcome.

Any systematic mapping of any domain, like 'all the pencils in an office', produces a direct image of the whole system of the domain that can be explored for how it displays patterns of the whole. To make it valid you just need to make the 'all' part real, because that brings out the process of feeling around all the corners and edges of the feature you're using to help you explore the system.

In correspondence, mostly just say things plainly, with simple warmth an color, but don't explain. I do enjoy worrying out a problem, but there's no way to do that with email, because explanation requires a context or perspectives. If I don't get it on the first pass I'll miss things almost entirely.

natural system research & design methods Eco at Synapse9.com / Phil Henshaw AIA AAAS 02/18/08

natural system research & design methods
Eco at Synapse9.com / Phil Henshaw AIA AAAS 02/18/08