Before diving headlong into the second principle of Permaculture, I realized that I need to back up and keep exploring this notion of applying a biological design system to something that is non-biological – namely the World Wide Web. While it is indeed true that the web is not carbon-based, it is (IMHO) inherently human – or maybe more precisely, human-centered. At least it should be.
I’m not saying at all that data is biological (although that line is being blurred in places too!), but I am saying that when we design systems, humans are doing the design for other humans. Therefore the process flourishes as we move those systems closer to mimicking or emulating natural systems.
Permaculture designers create designs that don’t fight nature, but work in harmony with it. They follow and record how the arc of the sun changes with the seasons and use that information to influence where they put say, the chicken coop or the bee hive or a grove of apple trees. A web designer might observe the ebb and flow of web traffic and see if it corresponds to events on the calendar or shows on television, or time of day and adapt web functionality (say a content strategy or types of ads to display) to take advantage of those changes.
The point is, humans are naturally drawn to patterns, just as nature is constantly creating and adhering to patterns. People are evolutionarily predisposed to seeking and interpreting patterns to make sense of the world. When people come to a website, that’s exactly what they’re trying to do – find a pattern they can grab on to and explore the world you as a web designer have created for them.