Do you keep a vegetable garden?
I do. I guess people would call me a gardener, but that would be a stretch! As each sign of Spring begins to appear in the dank-cold of winter, the garden in my dreams – the garden I know I can create – begins beckoning me to action. And then the seed catalogs start showing up. Yes, they’ve got my number!
I have a couple of basic problems with gardens though, and when I really think about it, I have just one. I’m not a fan of vegetables. I even took a plant-based cooking course hoping I would learn to love my veggies! I don’t hate them – especially vine ripened tomatoes and fresh sweet corn. But squash, turnips, kale, green beans – those are all things I know I should eat, but, you know. Bacon. Fresh baked bread, pizza, cinnamon rolls. That’s the stuff of inspiration!
Yet still, year after year, I toil in a garden that will mostly go to waste. But lately, my garden is getting better and I’m getting better at gardening. I’ve been learning about a design science called permaculture that is making me focus on the whys of what I’m doing. When I first started studying permaculture, I realized how closely – if not exactly – permaculture principles corresponded to principles and foundations of user experience design.
Both approaches force designers to get out of our own heads and do massive amounts of research before ever putting pencil to paper to plan. In fact, permaculture practitioners strongly recommend spending a year observing a property before designing it. A year! Can you imagine a client waiting a year for us to collect data before starting on a website project? Not terribly realistic is it! But let me tell you some of what a permaculture designer does in that year.
Observe. Observe what?
- Direction of prevailing winds
- How water flows through a property
- Locations of warmer and colder areas of the land
- What kinds of animals roam through
- Variations of solar exposure through the year
- Types of native vegetation and how prevalent it is
- Severity of slope and where they occur
- Soil composition
- Patterns of human usage of property
And much more. They gather a lot of data about the current state of the land – they know the property and the inhabitants intimately and identify key patterns of both before even drawing up a plan for how they might change it.
What might a UX web designer learn in a year, what might we look for in an environment?
I know what you’re thinking, a year is impossible. And our first thought might be that a biological environment found in agriculture is far more complex than the business environment of website owners. We may find that to be true – then again, we might not. What might we observe in a year?
What might happen if we resisted the urge to level the land, scar it with blades, and drown it in chemicals? In less esoteric terms, throw a template at the problem.
Great permaculture designers, like great UX designers possess the ability to suspend their drive to fix shit. Yes, they have the skills to make something remarkable, but remarkable to whom and for what? Would the land support it? Will the property owners eat the vegetables? Will the end users move closer to their goals? Will the client be able to update their content?
Designers like this would never start a conversation with “well, if it were me, I would…” They will start the conversation with “I’m going to need some time…”
That is the mark of a great designer. After all, a designer is someone who solves problems. Beautifully.
This is part of a series exploring the possible connections between permaculture design principles and user experience web design principles. Seems far fetched, but I think we can learn a lot from the world of permaculture design.