sing, 1997)

SuNstainable DesignWays™ is a communication and educational tool, developed by the author to apply ecological design principles at multiple levels of scale. During two years of pilot trials in Southern Africa, it evolved into a participatory methodology for applying principles of sustainability. This work was carried out in the context of severe landscape degradation and conditions of extreme poverty.

An understanding of patterns provides an essential link between insights into the interconnected nature of ecology and design. In the DesignWays process, principles of living systems biology act as a metaphor and basis for design, especially the way that ecological processes are embodied in patterns. Ecological design is a process in which societal forms of production, housing and infrastructure are integrated into the landscape. Spatial arrangements and patterns play a key role in mediating flows of material and energy and in determining the long-term environmental effects of these developments.

The DesignWays process embodies three principles: effective participation through envisioning and planning for the future, a transparent and innovative design process and use of patterns and systems theory as the theoretical framework for design. The paper will address these themes, illustrated through examples from projects in Southern Africa, and draw on systems theory to illuminate the theoretical underpinnings of the design process.

Introduction

PERMACULTURE By Chief Maama Masopha

Working with nature is my hobby,

Working with nature is part of my life.

Permaculture, where were you

When we lost the vegetation we had?

Permaculture where have you been?

Now that we are starving,

Why did you delay to be known,

While we have many specialists?

My country is now bare.

Who can we blame?

Herbs are diminishing,

Drought has taken advantage.

Where shall we get the herbs?

What will the herbalists do?

Importation is becoming our motto.

Our soils are very poor,

Their good structures are gone,

Their textures are destroyed,

Yet you are present and silent.

Why did you hesitate so long to be applied in Lesotho,

Yet you are known by the world?

Chemicals have spoiled our soils,

The ecosystem is disconnected,

People and animals are suffocated,

Chemicals are very expensive,

Farmers cannot afford.

How can we solve this problem?

For how long do we ask for funds

From countries which have the same problems?

Why can’t we change?

Not only the attitudes of people,

But do.

Many of the social and environmental problems we face will not be solved without a fundamental re-thinking of how we interact with the environment. In this endeavour, the skill of ecological design [1] is becoming increasingly essential. SuNstainable [2] DesignWays™ is a communication and educational tool, developed by the author to apply ecological design principles at multiple levels of scale (Tippett 2000) . During two years of pilot trials in Southern Africa, it evolved into a participatory methodology for applying principles of sustainability. This work was carried out in the context of severe landscape degradation and conditions of extreme poverty.

Research into this process is characterized by the following assumptions: sustainability [3] offers a valid and important conceptual framework for planning and design, public participation in this process is advantageous and a trans-disciplinary [4] approach is essential to understand the complex issues involved in sustainable planning.

Landscape Dynamics and Context

This tool was developed in the rural areas of South Africa and Lesotho, a small mountainous kingdom completely landlocked by the Republic of South Africa. Lesotho has a high dependency on foreign aid, importing 90 % of its food and with few exports apart from manpower for the mines of South Africa. The high veldt landscape is characterised by grassland with shrub and tree cover, with denser tree cover in riparian zones (Schmitz 1984) . Alpine wetlands contribute to biodiversity in the highlands. In both countries the landscape is experiencing ecological decline, severe erosion and desiccation. This was particularly extreme in the lowlands of Lesotho, where a large proportion of the population is concentrated and very few patches of native vegetation remain. The few trees are largely composed of (non-native) eucalyptus and pine, species that are promoted by government and foreign aid forestry programs, and which are unpalatable to livestock. Water erosion, leading to sheet and deep gully erosion, is the most visible form of land degradation. In the dry winter months, wind erosion dominates (Grab 2000) , and dust storms in the lowlands of Lesotho are common occurrences.

Figure 1 Typical erosion in Lesotho

As Wood and Handley (2001) have pointed out, landscape change is a process linked to human activity, and landscape dynamics trace “the relationship between humankind and the natural environment”, a relationship which must be understood in an attempt to improve the productive capacity, character and ecological integrity of landscapes. There are many drivers of landscape change in Lesotho, including an increased level of unemployment amongst men who can no longer find work in the mines in Southern Africa and the breakdown of traditional grazing management as the chieftainship structure is eroded and replaced by a largely urban political elite. These social pressures are compounded by an increase in the use of herbicides and tractors (initially funded by aid projects), which clear large areas of native vegetation for intensive agriculture, often leading to intense erosion of the fragile soils on steep slopes. A generation of farmers have lost skills of organic farming and working the land without pesticides and herbicides. The need for the use of pesticides increases with the diminishing native vegetation, which otherwise provides some natural control of pest population, and the loss of many traditional open-pollinated seeds, which are more hardy. Economic pressures on farmers are increasing, as they find it increasing difficult to afford pesticides and hybrid seed. Many of the farmers we worked with were delighted to learn low cost ways of managing their land using local and traditional resources.

Many of the pressures on the landscape and the remaining vegetation stem from people attempting to meet basic needs, such as wood for cooking and heating (exacerbated by the extremely cold winters).This pressure has lead to a high level of deforestation, with overgrazing preventing reforestation. With a reduction in traditional uses of native grasses for thatching and basket weaving, there is an increase in the burning of these coarser grasses and the reedy vegetation around alpine wetlands, in order to increase the growth of grasses palatable for grazing.

In the Rustenberg area of South Africa, the drying up of the land and reduction of sources of water is leading many large scale landowners (largely white Afrikaner farmers) to abandon the area for agriculture, leaving a population of semi-illiterate former farm workers, often with few skills in managing the landscape as a whole, though with some knowledge of traditional land use practices still remembered and in use, largely amongst the older generation [5] . There is extreme rural poverty and few sources of employment in this dry and harsh climate. There are more areas of native vegetation extant, and less obvious signs of erosion than in the hills of Lesotho, but sheet erosion and reduction in productive capacity of the soil is a severe and growing problem.

Both landscapes are what Savory (1999) classifies as ‘brittle’, with erratic rainfall, mainly falling in the summer months. Rainfall can be torrential, increasing erosion, or very sparse. It is postulated that deforestation on mountainsides and global climate change will increase the extremes of high rainfall and drought conditions. In Lesotho, water has played an extremely important political role, due to the creation of the Lesotho Highland Development Project to supply water to the industrial area of Gauteng in South Africa. This major dam and water redistribution project will have severe ecological and practical consequences for the areas and populations downstream and around the dam. Roughly 70 cubic metres per second are transferred from the Katse Dam through major tunnels in the mountains to South Africa (Grab 2000) .

In both countries, there was a widespread belief that there were very few problems in Western countries, a belief fostered by insensitive foreign aid projects, which tend to highlight local people’s sense of their country being ‘undeveloped’ and in need of Western aid to help solve their problems. This attitude is exemplified in the following quote from the textbook Development Studies for Lesotho:

“Countries such as England, The United States of America, or Russia, are called developed countries, because they do not have as many problems as the developing countries have” (Nkome, Mgijima et al. 1985, pg. 6) .

Many of the development projects that have been undertaken in Southern Africa have focussed on large-scale infrastructure projects which have neither worked to preserve the local traditional culture, nor developed small-scale centres of local economic growth. An understanding of the interrelated pressures leading to landscape decline in these areas lead us to a realisation that an attempt to address landscape regeneration required a holistic view of the ways in which human needs were being met in the environment. It also required solutions to meet those needs in a way that would reduce the pressures on the surrounding landscape. This was exemplified in the projects we worked on in South Africa, at the Tlholego Development Project. "Tlholego is a rural sustainable development project, …which is situated on 120ha (300 acres) of land outside Rustenburg in the Northwest Province of South Africa. Over the past ten years the TDP has become internationally recognized as a reference site for ecological design and sustainable living in a Southern African context" (www.sustainable-futures.com).

One of the projects we worked with was to design a model rural homestead with local farm workers, which could be built with local labour, largely from local materials. These homesteads could not only meet the urgent need for housing, but also for water collection and reuse, passive solar heating, recycling of household wastes (compost and manure) into fertilizer, and food grown without costly pesticides in the land surrounding the house. Such a meeting of needs required ecological design, integrating human settlement into the landscape.

Figure 2 Model rural homestead

During the two years we spent in Southern Africa, a process was developed to engage people in the process of design, integrating ecological principles with landscape ecology. This development stemmed in part from the difficulties encountered in teaching ecological design in the way I was used to in the West (UK, Germany, California). Most of the ways I was used to presenting information about ecology had very little meaning to my colleagues in Southern Africa. For example, suggestions that people think of a forest as a model, or to think of the whole being more than the sum of the parts, were not met with the easy acceptance I was used to from my teaching in Western Europe or America. This forced me to think deeply both about what I really meant and why these principles were important, taking me beyond my facile acceptance of principles at their face value, and leading me to think of ways in which to communicate these concepts in a meaningful and engaging way.

Much of what I learned has practical implications for design processes in the West, where many design projects make a shallow gesture towards ecological concerns, but fail to address fundamental issues of redesigning human settlements and industrial infrastructure in a way which is compatible with sustaining the ecospheric functions and narrow range of environmental conditions on which economic activity rests.

DesignWays Process – Overview

"Green plans are also about rescuing the concept of planning from the scrap heap of history. ...I realize now that, in terms of the environment, the difficulty with planning was that we were not looking at the problem on a large enough scale. We did not have a structure that was comprehensive enough to do what had to be done: approach the problem with the intention of solving it" (former Minister for Resources under Jerry Brown, Governor of California, Johnson 1995, pg. 1) .

The DesignWays process provides an approach that integrates landscape planning, ecological design of human habitations and productive infrastructure within a goal of improving social capital and organisational structures. It encourages strategic planning. Planning integrates three main processes: creating a vision and setting goals for the future, designing ways to achieve these goals, and managing the process of actions towards these goals over time. Design is the creative process of developing new ideas and possibilities and integrating them within the context of a particular organization, place and time. It is the active process of engaging with the environment and others to achieve desired outcomes. In the DesignWays methodology, management is seen as flexible, taking into account changes in context and in the goals themselves over time, influenced by the concept of 'adaptive management' [6] .

In DesignWays consensus-based heuristic guidelines act as an organising structure for decision making, whilst the participatory process encourages people’s own interpretations and expression of values in design. The generic principles are distinguished and made particular by grounding design ideas in the particular context of a place and group of people. The DesignWays process provides a way to integrate the generic, essential principles that a sustainable plan requires, with the contextual, value-dependent, historically valuable aspects of a particular place, community or development.

The ethical basis of the DesignWays method lies in exploring connections, encouraging creativity and articulating a coherent approach to encouraging ecological sustainability and meeting human needs. Its practical approach embodies three principles: effective participation through envisioning and planning for the future, a transparent and innovative design process and use of patterns and systems theory as the theoretical framework for design. The remainder of this article will address these three themes, with examples from the work that the author and her partner, Buddy Williams, an ecological architect, carried out in Southern Africa.

Participation

"Sustainability will only be possible if, among other things, greater consciousness is arrived at of the implications of particular lifestyles. For such a consciousness to emerge, human beings, at the individual and community level, must begin to truly feel that the Earth's health is a shared common concern, that this planet is our only home, and that our urban ways of living need to be radically reconsidered if environmental damage is to be halted. For this radical shift to take place everyone will have to feel part of the solution as much as part of the problem. ...Involvement is the key to the development of sustainable human settlements" (Ruano 1999, pg. 23) .

Human creativity represents a vast, and often under-utilised, resource. In searching to improve quality of life, the most powerful tool lies in encouraging people to engage their own inventiveness. While there is widespread awareness of the value of engaging participation in planning processes (e.g. Handley, Griffiths et al. 1998; Linehan and Gross 1998; Darier, Marchi et al. 1999; De Marchi, Funtowicz et al. 2000; McFarlane 2000; Rijsberman and van de Ven 2000; Roe 2000; Trenam 2000) , there are many difficulties in engaging effective participation. Engaging local stakeholders in the process of planning and design itself can be an effective way to increase the value of this participation, both in the quality of the final plans and in the value of the involvement for the participants.

The more people are involved in decisions about future developments at various levels of scale, the greater will be the cumulative positive effect on meeting human needs in a sustainable way. Involving people from a particular place in the design process increases the local character of the design. Chances of success are increased due to knowledge of local context and resources and the increased sense of ownership and commitment, which is engendered by such involvement. Increasing participation in design requires a transparent design process, which can be understood and followed by many people (Rowe 1987) . The characteristics of the design process are discussed in the next section.

An important aspect of participation in the DesignWays process is the learning of skills. These range from strategic planning, to creative thinking, to group communication skills. By actively engaging people in thinking about the future of their area, it is possible to develop what practitioners of systems thinking call a ‘learning organisation’ (Senge, Kleiner et al. 1994) , one in which inquiry into the future builds skills in all participants, thus broadening the possibilities for creative solutions and increasing the practice of ongoing adaptive management to move towards those solutions.

DesignWays encourages participants to ask - 'what is it we are really trying to do, and how can we design a better way to do it?' Creative thinking techniques aid the development of 'out of the box' thinking and innovative ideas (de Bono 1992; Buzan and Barry 1993) . The focus is on the quality of communication, searching for areas of agreement and consensus, developing a wide range of ideas and options and encouraging each person to contribute ideas through the stages of the design process and the tools used to engage participation.

The strength of this approach is exemplified in the work of Shirley Sifunda, a community information officer with Ecolink [7] in South Africa and a student on two of the DesignWays courses taught by the author at the Tlholego Development Project near Rustenburg, South Africa. In her presentation to the International Permaculture Conference in Perth, Australia in 1996, she talked about using this process to encourage 500 women in an impoverished region of South Africa near Swaziland to grow food and develop an income from the resources in their villages. They then turned to the task of reclaiming a degraded hillside, designing and implementing a productive agro-forestry system, with trees for fuel and fruit, as well as herbs for medicine and animal fodder. She also talked of her work teaching prisoners the skills of design, and the increased sense of hope for the future engendered by this process due to the awareness that they were learning skills that could improve their surroundings and possibilities for employment. As Sifunda (1996) states, "[DesignWays] is a useful resource because it shows us how to identify community needs and how to create job opportunities".

Presentational Tools

A challenge inherent in any strategic planning process is to make the process engaging and complex data relevant and meaningful. This challenge lead to a focus on the media used to engage participation. Techniques of Mind Mapping â [8] were integrated with the use of media with movable parts that can be manipulated by participants. Such a use of ready-to-hand, movable parts is common in Participatory Rural Appraisal (e.g. the use of beans to show weighting in matrices for assessing resources in a community).

"The emphasis placed by [Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)] methods on diagramming and visual sharing is particularly noteworthy… in a PRA based on the visual sharing of a map, model or diagram, all who are present, -both insider and outsider-, can see, point to, discuss, argue about, modify and refine conceptual diagrams and representations. Those who cannot read and write are not excluded; everyone has a "visual literacy" which allows them to actively participate in the PRA process" (Pimbert 1994) .

The fact that the ideas and concepts can be moved is important in encouraging people to seek out alternative connections and relationships between ideas. These visual, movable tools proved to be highly effective for engaging participation and deep discussion of goals and the application of design principles. The method of 'participatory diagramming' has been extended into research methodology in rural communities with promising results [e.g. \Kesby, 2000 #998].

Figure 3 Using the templates in design process

Presentational knowledge, the ways in which knowledge is distilled and ordered for communication, is not always treated as a significant factor in research into participatory stakeholder engagement. Heron (1992) has described presentational knowledge as the way we “order our tacit experiential knowledge of the world into spatio-temporal patterns of imagery and then symbolize our sense of their meaning in movement, sound, colour, shape, line, poetry, drama and story…. [It offers] a bridge between experiential knowledge and propositional knowledge” (Reason 1994, pg. 42) . With Tufte (1983) and Bertin (1981) I would agree that the way in which data is displayed can materially affect interpretation, and would add, from the experience of using this design process, that there is a non-trivial relationship between the forms of knowledge presentation and means of engaging participation and the results that are gathered. This concept has echoes in other fields:

“It is quite clear from the history of architecture, and the history of ideas for that matter, that developments in representational techniques- such as perspective drawings and the systems of geometry of Pascal and Descartes – have had a profound effect... Such developments have altered what we can represent, see, and therefore understand and imagine” (Rowe 1987, pg. 99) .

Of equal importance is the way that participation is encouraged, with participants actively engaged in writing and drawing ideas and placing them in clusters on large diagrams which represent the evolving picture of the group process. The use of Post-it® notes (or blue tack and pieces of card) for brainstorming allows a greater range of input in a group, as everyone has a chance to write ideas down. This method allows shy and quiet people to input into the process in a non-threatening way. Often the facilitator will gather ideas in and read them out. The anonymity of having ideas 'on the table' and dissociated from the author can both allow more controversial ideas to be aired and also facilitate a more constructive attitude to group discussion, as people are able to see connections between their thoughts and other people's, and are less apt to take a dogmatic and oppositional approach to defending their own ideas. This technique was developed from de Bono's (1990) concept that it is important to have people in opposing positions attempt to design a solution to these at a higher conceptual level, where seeming opposites can often be resolved, or alternatives found that meet both concerns. In some action research literature, such design is referred to as a dialectic process, 'which craft agreement out of disagreement' (Dick 1997) .

It can seem trite to say that it is important to 'put the Post-it® notes and pens (or coloured pencils) in the hands of the people'. However, the fact that people can write on the note pads both in set times and throughout discussion in an ongoing process, to record any stray thoughts or new concepts that emerge, is very important in encouraging participation and a sense of flow and inclusiveness in the process.

Process

DesignWays was designed as a step-by-step activity in order to make it easier to deal comprehensively with complex situations. Each stage builds on the previous one, and feedback is used to reinforce lessons learned and make links among different aspects of the design (Tippett 2000) . There is an emphasis on fluid shifting between different levels of scale, so that participants learn to see their particular projects and areas within a larger context, and are able to cultivate ‘whole systems’ thinking through the stages of the design process. The use of a clear sequence with overarching patterns and principles provides a framework in which creativity is encouraged to flourish.

There are some stages of the design process that are enhanced by being carried out in a particular order, but for the most part it is the relationship between the steps that is important. This is similar to Checkland's (1991) understanding of the stages of soft systems methodology – the steps can be seen as a mosaic, which can be carried out in a variety of orders. It is the facilitator’s role to understand the reasoning behind the steps and the relationships between them in order to tailor the process to the context and requirements of the participants.

Similar to appreciative inquiry methods (Bushe and Coetzer 1995; Carnegie, Nielsen et al. 2000; Fry 2000; Gergen and Gergen 2000) , the focus is on valuing the positive aspects of the situation, and looking for a vision of what people would like to see. A higher degree of creative thinking is encouraged when people focus on the positive, instead of on problems and limiting factors (frequently the starting point of planning processes, and indeed the initial starting point for action research as set out in Checkland's (1991) book Systems Thinking, Systems Practice,). Thus, it is important that a consideration of problems and limiting factors are kept until after there has already been a considerable degree of work on brainstorming ideas and creating goals. This stage can then be used to brainstorm more creative ideas, as solutions to the problems, once participants have improved their skills of creative thinking.

Decision making

Decision making in this process is designed to help deal with potentially conflicting aims and to increase the tendency towards sustainable solutions. During the phases in which creative brainstorming is the main focus, there is an attempt to suspend judgement, such that new ideas can emerge, and even improbable ideas can be probed for their underlying meanings and value without being immediately discarded. Decision-making in this process is used to build a rich picture of the concepts that have been generated and how the participants relate to these concepts. Four considerations are taken into account:

· Does this advance the groups’ goals and values? How important is it to these goals?

· Is this moving towards sustainability?

· Is this likely or possible given the limiting factors and problems in this context?

· How does this fit in with a strategic plan for advancing goals and moving towards targets (e.g. economic feasibility, cost effective decision for investment)?

Figure 4 Integrated decision making

The DesignWays process aims to help people design systems that increase coherence (in the sense of a consistent and logical connection (Goldsmith 1993) ) among their actions, values and sustainability. Some of our most important work in Southern Africa consisted of providing an opportunity for people to think through their values, and to clarify what is deeply important to them. This was particularly important in a rapidly changing social context, in which many traditional values have been denigrated in the face of development projects which tend to give a message that traditional ways of managing resources are primitive, and thus are in need of being 'developed'.

The DesignWays process encourages a focus on common goals and values. It also gives people tools to see how they can enhance those values and improve the quality of their lives at the same time. As Savory (1999, pg. 91) states, “Common sense tells us that making a decision that is not in line with our values is illogical. But that is precisely what humans have done throughout history”.

Consideration of values and goals is an essential prerequisite to the decision making process. This is a skill which Savory considers very important in creating a sustainable future, citing many well meaning projects which have not fundamentally evaluated their decision making process, and have thus failed to enact deep seated change. This realization lead to the development of an alternative decision making model in Holistic Management (Savory and Butterfield 1999) , a model which has profoundly influenced the development of DesignWays, particularly through the work of the Participatory Land Use Management (PELUM) team from Zimbabwe (see UNESCO 2001) [9] .

As well as encouraging a focus on common values, multiple layers which look at different aspects of decision making allow for a richly textured picture to be built, encouraging an exploration of conflict and the challenges inherent in developing new ideas. The information gathered during the analysis of problems and limiting factors is built into the decision making process, so that the limits and problems which do exist in a situation can be used as a filter to determine practicable actions.

The Western educational system (and, as a colonial residue, a common model for education in Africa) has not equipped us to understand long term effects of our actions on the larger system of the Earth and it’s systems at different levels of scale. The educational component of the DesignWays approach is therefore essential. It focuses on The Natural Step [10] framework, providing a shared mental model for understanding sustainability, which offers clear framework for assessing projects against a long term goal of sustainability [11] (Holmberg, Karl-Henrik et al. 1996; Martin, Cook et al. 1999; Carnegie, Nielsen et al. 2000; Jonsson 2000; Robert 2000)