Regenerative Design Education: Living Praxis with a Friendly Universe

By Marna Hauk, Jayanna Killingsworth, Julie Malone, Zoe Nelsen, Tamara Wells, Mandisa Amber Wood

This article was selected as a feature article by Kosmos Journal earlier this year and appears in its entirety here: http://www.kosmosjournal.org/reader-essay/regenerative-design-education-living-praxis-with-a-friendly-universe/

We seek not rest but transformation.
We are dancing through each other as doorways.
We are ripples crossing and fusing, journeying and returning
from the core of the apple, the eye of the mandala,
the cave in the heart of the rose,
the circle without boundaries centered on silence.
–Marge Piercy, from “Circling”

We design enfolded in the rich, transdisciplinary rise and texture of the encircling Earth, which is also our body, which is also the uncoiling possibility spaces of thriving. Regenerative design is a set of living systems design approaches that offers a wide-armed embrace of related ecomimetic and systems design practices including sustainability, permaculture, whole systems, biomimetic, and ecological design. Participants in a graduate course at Prescott College describe some of the key strengths of designing, beyond sustainability, for regeneration. These groundswelling approaches can inspire living buildings and regenerative architecture, and guide ecosocial planning and design at multiple scales for social justice integration and biocultural thriving.

Regenerative Systems Design Lens: Benevolent, Creative, Friendly Universe

The first principle of social permaculture is that the universe is inherently benevolent and creative (Aal & Adair, 2008). In our graduate course we held universal friendliness as a key design principle. We co-authored this collaborative inquiry with the idea of benevolent, creative universe as a design lens for the three practices of regenerative systems design we explore.

Creative Flow in Regenerative Design

Active engagement in creative flow requires an intuitive, reflective, and expansive appreciation for the energetic systems and socially constructed realities design both promotes and challenges. The creative cycle is an intuitive process that requires aesthetical feedback and understanding while letting go, exploring the unknown areas of inner and outer worlds. The ability to replicate, through various forms of art, the intricate and seemingly eccentric ways of nature demands attention to the source.
The exploration of one’s personal creative flow offers opportunities for considering intentional interactions that are rooted in a desire to create and reflect universal kindness, a source of infinite patterns, rhythms, tones, and pulsating energies, all fractalized harmoniously (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Original Artwork by J. Killingsworth (2016)

Relationships also ask for a quality of presence and commitment, advocacy and refinement. We let go into the unknown while maintaining trust in our universal interconnectedness. Futurists such as Soleri and Callebaut can contribute to regenerative design through art, architecture, urban planning, biomimicry, and ecology by creating living systems for sustainable actions.
Regenerative Design Prompt 1: Connect it. Visualize and design to strengthen the hidden or potential flows of connection, kinship, relationship, gratitude, and synergy.

Honoring Feedback

Honoring feedback includes activating and opening to the reverberance of the cosmos in and through design colleagues, inspired by universal friendliness. Feedback is present in all aspects of experience. From the naturally occurring processes around us to the music we choose and the interactions we have with others. The systems within our bodies continually provide subtle feedback to sustain life. When such processes fail, we struggle to survive; when we learn to turn this wisdom inside out, we thrive.
Honoring feedback requires self-knowledge and reflection as well as a willingness to listen with empathetic openness to the learning needs of others. Feedback allows for ecosocial systems corrections, reduction of frictions, and the nourishment of brave and creative collaboration. Reverberance is a quality of feedback that happens concurrently at multiple scales and in amplifying emergence. Designs honoring our feelings saturated in contexts of biocultural depth, meaning, and embedment catalyze the regeneration of Earth within, which we might think of as Earth congruence, Earth empathy, or Earth reverberance.
Regenerative Design Prompt 2: Cycle it. Close three loops to allow your design to speak with itself. Generate positive feedback.

Embodied Practice

Embodied practice opens the flows of feedback through the physical, emotional, and relational experience of interacting with learning, meaning-making, and active participation in the adaptive co-creation of reality with all members of a given community, including the more-than-human world. This practice reconciles the often privileged rational stream of perception and decision-making with many other flows of available information. Each practitioner becomes a network of integrated perceptions, responses, and ideas in and of themselves, within a greater network of individuals participating in cooperative community creativity.
Regenerative Design Prompt 3: Thrive it. Embed yourself within the Earthly matrix, and within the design process and design.

Conclusion

Regenerative design views the generation of these vibrant, bioculturally responsive meshes as vital and congruent in both process and form. The designs and designer-context-Gaian mesh-bodies become a portalway of multispecies collaborative embodiment and co-presence.
Regenerative designs can encourage the interconnection between people and the dynamic forces of nature through regenerative curriculum, art, architecture, agriculture, rituals, and community engagement. Through universal friendliness, regenerative design holds the potential to decentralize inequities in wealth and power and ensure Earthly thriving. 

Incubating Social Creativity and Regenerative Creativity

T. Fisher photo of Stancell's Mural "We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest"

The fields of social learning and social incubators are cultivating, I would suggest, the endeavor of incubating social creativity.

Social Learning. Wals and Leij (2007) in their prefatory remarks to a book on the topic of social learning and sustainability education (free downloadable ebook available) point out the spectrum of meaning for social learning --  from learning among deeply socially contexted inviduals to focusing on the learning processes of 'social aggregates' (pp. 19-20). They suggest that social learning involves facilitating dynamic contexts for richly socially contexted, diverse groups to engage with sustainability challenges along this spectrum. Complexivists have referred to this as extending the locus of learning to the learning community [and not (only) the individual] (Davis & Sumara, 2006) or as the learning of collective beings (Minati & Pessa, 2006). Sterling (in the 2007 volume linked above) imagines a "connective cultural consciousness" in which sustainability social learning can help cultures "ride the storm" of climate change by undertaking radical social learning at the scale of paradigm change.

Granted, these ideas of social collectives are not actually novel. To note, elder cultures (such as those featured by Bowers' scholarship on the learning commons and traditional cultures) have long understood that learning communities offer a deep connection, empowerment, and nurture than individuals operating in isolation or even individuals collaborating.  Educational theory is still catching up.

At the same time that learning theory is learning to jump scales and study aggregates, enterprise theory and incubation of entrepreneurship (and ecopreneurship even) is undergoing a similar shift from rugged individualism to .... social incubators.


Social Incubators. Social media, crowdfunding, honoring social good and values-infused endeavor, and open-sourcing as well as increasingly accessible organizational infrastructure through internet technologies have radically opened the field of enterprise innovation. The idea of separate "enterprises" are themselves melting as densely interconnected networks of creatives and service brocades transfigure entrepreneurship. The rise of social enterprise incubators (also these examples) and the generosity economy all reflect a parallel to the shift described in educational theorizing toward attending to the social dimensions of learning and social learning. 


Incubating Social Creativity. Without falling into the western tendency to reify the new (as is often the case in unconscious neophilia), the social evolution of our species involves attending to complex emergence. Our culture is evolving to attend to emergence, autopoiesis, and self-organization as signs of complex innovation and novelty.  Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein (2010) propose complexity-informed strategies for facilitating ecologies of innovation. 

Attending to innovation in a deep sense means attending to creativity. Csiksentmilhalyi (1999) noticed how the systems of field and culture contexted and vetted individual creativity. R. Keith Sawyer (2010) takes off from jazz improvisation to develop a complexity-informed social creativity called collaborative emergence. In collaborative emergence, creative collaborations by groups of people spark emergent phenomena at the group scale. Ecologies of innovation extend this emergent process to locality and cultural scales, even innovating public services (for example in Peterborough). At the scale of locality and neighborhood, the Transition Town movement exemplifies this shift; City Repair and Placemaking serves as another beacon. Social creativity has been credited with rapidly accelerating software innovation (Granof, 2013). Many other theorists have also explored social creativity (including John-Steiner, 2000 and Sawyer, 2008). Social as a descriptor in social creativity can function in two ways, either to convey that the phenomena is generated by social aggregate or that it is geared toward social good.

Researching Incubating Social Creativity. My original mixed methods research is surfacing methods and means for catalyzing social creativity. I research the "social" in creativity across both dimensions of meaning of social: (1) that it is generated by groups and systems of creativity and (2) that it has an intention toward social good, in this case sustainability and regeneration.

I am studying how to incubate multi-scale creativity. By generating processes, habits of curiosity, and cultures of individual and small group creative processes as well as setting up learning cultures favoring social creativity, we can facilitate and encourage the underlying practices, habits, and cultural matrix to nurture social creativity.

The research is surfacing how creativity, the seedbed for innovation and personal and cultural flourishing, can be sourced in nature and bioculture and aligned with increasing the integrity of culture, place and planet. This regenerative creativity emerges at multiple scales and produces empathy, connection, and earth-aligned action. Incubating social creativity catalyzed by ecofractal patterns from nature and bioculture develops what Bowers (2012) calls ecological intelligence and what Goleman, Bennett & Barlow (2012) name ecoliteracy, an emotionally and socially engaged ecological intelligence.  I would suggest that to incubate this kind of regenerative cultural and social creativity can source shifts not only in social learning and social enterprise, but also in multiple other domains and transdisciplines as part of the enlarging and interconnecting tapestry of cultural regeneration beyond sustainability to thriving.

In the coming months we will be sharing snapshots of the emergent findings from this research.

Resources

• Bowers, C. A. (2012). The challenge facing educational reformers: Making the transition from individual to ecological intelligence in an era of climate change. In D. Ambrose & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), How dogmatic beliefs harm creativity and higher-level thinking (pp. 112-122). New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
• City Repair. (2013). Website. Retrieved from http://www.cityrepair.org
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a systems perspective for the study of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity. New York, NY:
  Cambridge University Press.
• Dawson, J. (2012). Building an economy on gift and generosity [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/blog/building-an-economy-on-gift-and-generosity-jonatha-dawson
• Goldstein, J., Hazy, J. K., & Lichtenstein, B. B. (2010). Complexity and the nexus of leadership: Leveraging nonlinear science to create ecologies of innovation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Goleman, D., Bennett, L., & Barlow, Z. (2012). Ecoliterate: How educators are cultivating emotional, social, and ecological intelligence. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass and the Center for Ecoliteracy.
• Granof, P. (2013, October 9). Social creativity: The engine of software development [Blog post]. Wired - Innovation Insights. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/10/social-creativity-the-engine-of-software-development-in-the-social-era/
• Sawyer, R. K. (2008). Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York, NY: Basic. 
• Sawyer, R. K. (2010). Individual and group creativity. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (pp. 366-380). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Stancell, P. Mural of "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." On Wikimedia Commons. Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts Program.
• Transition Network. (2013). Website.  Retrieved from http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
• Wals, A. E. J. (Ed.). (2007). Social learning towards a sustainable world: Principles, perspectives, and praxis. Pays-Bas: Wageningen Academic Publishers. Retrieved from the publisher at http://www.wageningenacademic.com/sociallearning 

Image Credit: 

Photograph by Tom Fischer, 2009, of a Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia. Mural Artist is Parris Stancell, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts program. Photo Creative Commons 2. Left to right: Malcolm Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass. The quote above the mural is from Ella Baker, a founder of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), a civil rights group that helped to coordinate "Freedom Rides" in the early 1960's (from Wikimedia Commons).

Ecological Creativity and Poetic Perception - Part 1

From Rankin, 2013, Eyescapes

Here's an excerpt from Laura Sewall, an ecopsychologist and graduated from Brown studying visual psychology and neuroscience. This is from an essay called "The Skill of Ecological Perception," published in 1995 in Ecopsychology - Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, Edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner.  

 "Skillful perception is a devotional practice....In relation to developing an ecological consciousness, skillful perception necessarily includes emphasizing perceptual practices that help us to extend our narrow experience of self and to experience sensuality, intimacy, and identification with the external world. Skillful perception is the practice of intentionally sensing with our eyes, pores, and hearts wide open. It requires receptivity and the participation of our whole selves, despite the potential pain. It means fully witnessing both the magnificence and destruction of our Earth. It is allowing one's identity and boundaries to be permeable and flexible. I refer to this way of perceiving as ecological perception. Mindfulness and practice brought to the entirety of our sensory experience clearly serve to alter consciousness and behavior. Ecological perception is most essentially the perception of dynamic relationships.... There are five perceptual practices... (1) learning to attend, or to be mindful, within the visual domain; (2) learning to perceive relationships, context, and interfaces; (3) developing perceptual flexibility across spatial and temporal scales; (4) learning to reperceive depth; and (5) the intentional use of the imagination." 

New Edition of the Journal for Sustainability Education - And an Article on Earth Regeneration

The 2011 edition of the Journal of Sustainability Education came out this week. It features many interesting case studies, interviews, and peer-reviewed journal articles, including:

• An interview with Stephen Sterling, who wrote possibly the best handbook on Sustainability Education (interview by Terril Shorb).

• An academic article about Pedalogy and Pedagogy - Living Soil and Sustainability Education: "We introduce an ecologically grounded metaphoric language rooted in living soil as an alternative regenerative framework for linking sustainability pedagogy with pedology (the study of soil). Five principles that guide this relationship are presented: valuing biocultural diversity, sensitizing our senses, recognizing place, cultivating interconnection, and embracing practical experience. Nurtured within an environment of curiosity, wonder, and questioning, and set to the rhythm and scale of localized ecologies, soil serves as an embodiment of life right beneath our feet rather than the reach of distant stars. In learning gardens, living soil and pedagogy surface in dynamic ways to create an ecological landscape of sustainability education." (by Professors Dilafruz Williams and Jonathan Brown, Portland State)

• An article on complexity and sustainability education featuring four natural patterns: composting soil, spring bud burst, chrysalis metamorphosis, and hurricanes, as models for increasing depth, collaboration, diversity, and creativity in learning. These are tied to regenerative earth education (by Marna Hauk of the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies).
  

Gregory Cajete's Book Native Science - Natural Laws of Interdependence

I am inspired to share some quotes from Gregory Cajete's book Native Science - Natural Laws of Interdependence. Cajete, a brilliant professor and Tewa Indian from Santa Clara Pueblo, articulates the Indigenous ways of knowing underlying Native science traditions in this book. I have been studying the roots of terrapsychology, which offers methods for accessing place as a feeling and expressing being, and the many meanings of earth/Earth/dirt/Gaia, as well as developing a theory of ecological creativity. Cajete's work touches on all these topics. Here are a few gems, I will continue to share more in the coming time!

Cajete, G. (2000). Native Science - Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.

From the chapter, "Telling a Special Story"

• "Native science continually relates to and speaks of the world as full of active entities with which people engage. To our sensing bodies, all things are active. Therefore, Native languages are verb based, and the words that describe the world emerge directly from actively perceived experience. In a sense, language 'choreographs' and/or facilitates the continual orientation of Native thought and perception toward active participation, active imagination, and active engagement with all that makes up natural reality....If, as Merleau-Ponty contends, perception at its most elemental expression in the human body is based on participation with our surroundings, then it can be said that 'animism' is a basic human trait common to both Indigenous and modern sensibilities. Indeed, all humans are animists." (p. 27)
• "We all use the metaphoric mind to describe, imagine, and create from the animate world with which we constantly participate. Just as the focus on participation in Native science brings forth creative communion with the world through our senses, so too does the application of the metaphoric mind bring forth the description and creative 'storying' of the world by humans. Science in every form, then, is a story of the world." (p. 27)
• "Because its processes are tied to creativity, perception, image, physical senses, and intuition, the metaphoric mind reveals itself through abstract symbols, visual/spatial reasoning, sound, kinesthetic expression, and various forms of ecological and integrative thinking. These metaphoric modes of expression are also the foundations for various components of Native science, as well as art, music, and dance. The metaphoric mind underpins the numerous ecological foundations of Native knowledge and has been specifically applied in creating the stories that form the foundation of the complex and elaborate forms of Native oral traditions. Realizing that the greatest source of metaphor comes from nature, these stories are filled with analogies, characters, representations drawn from nature, metaphors that more often than not refer back to the processes of nature from which they are drawn, or to human nature, which they attempt to reflect. Because Native science is thoroughly wrapped in a blanket of metaphor, expressed in story, art, community, dance, song, ritual, music, astronomical knowledge, and technologies such as hunting, fishing, farming, or healing, rationalistic scientists, its 'younger brothers,' have difficulty understanding its essence of creative participation with nature." (pp. 30-31)
  

From the chapter, "Sense of Place":

• "Native people expressed a relationship to the natural world that could only be described as 'ensoulment.' The ensoulment of nature is one of the most ancient foundations of human psychology. This projection of the human sense of the soul with its archetypes has been called the 'participation mystique,' which for Native people represented the deepest level of psychological involvement with their land and which provided a kind of map of the soul. The psychology and spiritual qualities of Indigenous people's behavior reflected in symbolism were thoroughly 'in-formed' by the depth and power of their participation mystique with the Earth as a living soul. It was from this orientation that Indian people developed 'responsibilities' to the land and all living things, similar to those that they had to each other. In the Native mind, spirit and matter were not separate; they were one and the same." (p. 186)
• "All human development is predicated on our interaction with the soil, the air, the climate, the plants, and the animals of the places in which we live. The inner archetypes in a place formed the spiritually based ecological mind-set required to establish and maintain a correct and sustainable relationship with place. This orientation, was, in turn, reinforced by a kind of physical 'mimicry,' a 'geopsyche,' or that interaction between inner and outer realities that often takes place when a group of people live in a particular place for a long period of time." (p. 187)

Creativity and Connectedness -With Slices of Lemon and Guided by Beetle and Amaranth Blossom

I never studied latin, but I will never forget Mrs. Wolff in seventh grade teaching us poetry. We walk into class and she is slicing lemons. She invites us each to get settled in our chairs, and pay close attention. Then she has us each bite into a slice of lemon. A sudden ray of sun, a life-changing moment, an awakening. I will never be the same for that one slice of lemon.

I know this is going to sound so results oriented but I want my teaching to be elemental/alchemical when I'm "in the groove" - catalytic and activating: wings rise; sparks fly; empathy flows; wisdom deepens. So if I were assessing classroom experience, I would want to have a pulse on the direct embodied experience and the fruit of that experience for 'learners'/co-teachers. I wish we had a wow-o-meter that could measure the wow-waves when classes are amazing, synergistic, autopoietic. Then another question for me is what happens with the wow? Can we sustain it? Is some of it subtle and synchronistic (how do we optimize for subtle and synchronistic, guided by beetle and amaranth blossom as much as human mentation or design)-- Is that a longitudinal study? Is that about a way of measuring ecological (relational) richness? The more things it sparks, the better?

As in creativity theory, this might be a new thing related to the quality of elaboration and originality; amongst the main four - according to some-: fluidity, flexibility, elaboration, and originality. Or is it a different factor to assess for; there is definitely a tension between originality sourced in divergence and (innovation) and creativity which connnects. Perhaps there is a form of creativity which has been undervalued in innovation-addicted scientific reaserch on creativity, which perhaps would be a form of originality that would also favor connectedness and relationship instead of difference. It's possible what we need to cultivate now is ecological creativity that connects us to larger cycles and flows of Earth wisdom. Instead of a creativity of divergence and difference, a proliferating profusion of connection, biomimetic, pulsing, alive.