Re: Designing community

Aloha,

Catching up during a brief burst of high-bandwidth availability - not ignoring
your question Chris, it's a good one...

> Maximizing beneficial connections amongst the humans is certainly
> permaculture but can we actually 'design' community? in recognition of the
> fact that living systems SELF-organize?
>
>>Sooner or later, it all comes down to human relatings.
>
> Could you elaborate a little, as I know this is a theme of the workshop
> you facilitate, and I suspect much is being left unsaid...

We *always* design community - though not necessarily consciously or with
attention to consequences.  Suburban housing tracts (for just one example) are
"designed" by someone (or an absence of design happens, as some of us might
say ;-) and that "design" has consequences.

We can "design" community precisely *because* living systems self-organize
(that living systems self-organize is of course a subjective observation and
explanation, not a "rule" or "law" from somewhere outside of ourselves).

We can choose how to go about organizing ourselves.  We know this because we
already do so.  Question is, do we like the consequences of how we're doing it
now?
If not, we can organize differently.

We can create structures and processes that we think are likely to get us
consequences that we do want.  If that doesn't happen as much as we'd like, we
can observe, perhaps see why not, and re-design our structures and processes
to perhaps be a bit more likely to get us consequences we do want.  And so on.

As far as I can see that's what we've been doing for thousands of years.  It
looks to me like that's what's going on here, and in intentional communities
and eco-villages and food co-ops and cohousing groups and rebellions against
governments of all kinds and so on and on.

How much of the consequences we're getting are what we want and what design
changes need to be made so we get more of what we want are the ongoing design
questions...

When I say that sooner or later it always comes down to human relatings, I
mean that "what we want" inevitably involves our most basic interactions with
other human beings.  To love and be loved, for example.  To experience peace,
for example.  To experience compassion, for example.

So whatever layers of technology or verbiage or abstraction we paste on top of
those interactions, that's where "getting what we want" begins, perhaps
departs from, and returns to eventually.

That's the short version... ;-)



John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Design & Technology Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john-/Gao9/[email protected]
http://eco-living.net

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