15 June, 2019
This is the best process we know to guide the successful design of a home, garden, lifestyle block, or community.
This day introduces the design framework and design process that designer/educator Dan Palmer and his colleagues have been honing for the last decade over in Melbourne. It’s clear, coherent, memorable and we think provides a “critical missing” to most permaculture education and literature.
The process starts with observation and works through the analysis and assessment of the people and site involved. Somewhere here, a general concept design starts to take shape, of which there can be many versions. Eventually, more detailed designs emerge and implementation can begin. Evaluation and management finish out the process, well, not quite “finish,” as this design process often spirals back around to more observation, more clarification of people, site….And on it goes.
In the morning we’ll explore holistic decision making and interviewing skills with group exercises and role play; we’ll go outside and get a taste of reading the landscape with our bare feet, our eyes, our hearts; and we’ll then break out the paper, pencils, and compasses to learn about base maps, scale, topography, slope, and aspect.
In the afternoon, the design process moves onto broad concept drawings on aerial and base maps. We’ll do a lot of design exercises with pens and paper, inside and outside. You’ll see examples of finished design work and you can begin to sort out what will work for your project presentation in 12 months time. We’ll finish discussing with the implementation and management phases of the design process.
Tutors
Catherine & Neville Dunton-McLeod, Guest tutor TBA
Register for this course
Download the program overview here
Designing for Climate →
Photos
Feedback
“Good design is as much about the people as it is about the land. Today, Dan got me feeling confidant about assessing both. I can’t wait for the next module to understand the whole process.”
Quotes
“Design is an elusive and enigmatic alchemy. Yet the magic of design lives, not in any design technique we might learn and use, but inside each one of us. The techniques serve only to connect each of us to our own living creative process. ” Jacke & Toensmeier,
Edible Forest Gardens, VII, p. 156
“Choose protracted and thoughtful observation rather than a brief period of observation followed by protracted and thoughtless labour.” Bill Mollison
