Henshaw
Design Systems:
Resources for Sustainable Design - Engaging with
Complex Natural Systems,
Phil Henshaw
id @ synapse9.com
A culture is a natural system that is constantly learning. You can create "value for free" by discovering complementary features and avoiding lines of conflict, supporting the learning process of your problem solvers for discovering the cultures of the place you are working with and what they are learning. Mental and theoretical models are important to have, for lots of things, but they're more informative if they are used to help you discover the reality of the natural systems rather than to represent them. Have a diversity of measures of the whole effect you intend, understanding clearly the difference between the limit of growth in stability and exhaustion.
The catch for engaging with natural systems,… is you need to see them first. You do it by learning to watch the weaving of their intermittent flows, shared use of paths, their mediums of exchange, and finally to recognize that most natural systems, like cultures, are really organized something like cellular organisms.
HDS-TotBalanceWorksheet.doc - A rigorous template for calculating you global impact on the earth.
DollarShadow. – the basic science behind it
$Shadow1.xls – an Excel template; a way to do display complicated conversions so they read like a sentence
HDS-SustProjectChecklist.doc – an outline of the general natural systems sustainable design model
For resource collection not linked here see www.synapse9.com/design
4Dsustainability
an exploratory design cycle for understanding your
problem as a living part of nature
hand sketch - the hand sketch it came from
Home page – Consulting services – Physics of Happening - intros to the work I do