Practitioners trace the origins of permaculture design to an Australian forest service worker in the 1970s. His name is Bill Mollison and together with his graduate student David Holmgren, they offered us all a radical shift in thinking about agriculture by observing and re-creating what happens in a forest. You probably have never heard of permaculture, but you might have heard of agroforestry, food forests or other naming variations on the same theme.
Permaculture as a design science, consists of 3 ethics and 12 principles. The three ethics are:
- Care of the Earth
- Care of People
- Return of Surplus.
Those are rather deep concepts and together with the 12 principles they are explored in Mollison’s seminal text book Permaculture: A Designers Manual. It’s around 600 pages, so if you have a free Saturday or 60, you can read it at your leisure.
In thinking about the connection between user experience design and permaculture design, I realized that by slightly changing the wording of the first ethic, the ethics can be applied to web design. I would change the first law from “Care of the Earth” to “Care of the Web”. That makes total sense to me. Let me explain!
See the Web as it is – an ecosystem
Before I realized there was a connection to web design inside permaculture, I felt it. You could call that a hypothesis, but it’s not! It was intuition, or recognition on some level, and it is certainly taking me some time to put it all together! But I started with this notion of environment. What does that really mean?
It is the ecosystem or milieu in which a thing can exist. Right? And isn’t true that that a milieu can be anything that supports a given life form? But can we apply that idea to non-carbon-based elements? I think so.
There is a lot that has to exist for a website to have life. There is even more that needs to exist in order for a website to matter – or as the third ethic states, generate a yield (and, in fact, a surplus).
So the question then becomes, what is the ideal environment that needs to exist for a website to generate a surplus?
Wow see, it’s helping us already! That is a great question to start any web design project.
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.