Ep1: Design for Change (Series Intro)
“The fossil fuel age has in many ways been a massive distraction from ingenuity. The most exciting thing about the age that we are entering is that we should see an amazing reawakening of that creativity. ”
“What gives me hope is that there are so many amazing thinkers and doers out there around the world who are working very actively towards this regenerative transformation.”
With Sarah Ichioka, at the Hive in Singapore and Michael Pawlyn at Cast Iron Productions in London, we kick off the Flourish Systems Change podcast by explaining why sustainability can never go far enough. In this first episode, urbanist Sarah and architect Michael share the origins and aims of their book Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, which is the jumping off point for this podcast.
Show notes
Sarah and Michael’s book, Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency is now available at Triarchy Press.
Link to the IPCC 2018 special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C, a clarion call for change.
Read Donella Meadows’ seminal essay Leverage Points on how best to intervene in a system in order to make change happen.
Discover why we need to shift from a ‘sustainable’ to ‘regenerative’ mindset: "The world's most sustainable office building isn't enough to save the planet" wrote Phineas Harper | 12 October 2018 in Dezeen on Foster + Partners winning the RIBA’s Stirling Prize.
Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission of Bhutan, sets out four pillars of Bhutan’s gross national happiness philosophy: sustainable socio economic development, preservation and promotion of culture and traditions, good governance, and conservation of the environment.
angel Kyodo williams is a Zen priest, writer and activist who applies wisdom teachings and embodied practice to social issues at the intersections of race, climate, and economic justice.
In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer uncovers how other living beings ‘asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass’ - offer gifts and wisdom, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.
Dr. Yunkaporta is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World. He is an academic, arts critic, a researcher and member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.
Bill Reed is an internationally recognized planning consultant, design process facilitator, lecturer, teacher, and author in sustainability and regeneration.
William (Bill) McDonough pioneered the concepts of Cradle to Cradle Design™, the Circular Economy and the Circular Carbon Economy.
Naomi Klein has been one of the most powerful voices for social justice for decades. In ‘This Changes Everything',’ she advocates “changing the world—before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap—or we sink”.
Ann Pettifor’s book, The Case for a Green New Deal proposes a radical new understanding of the international monetary system.
Herman Daly was a co-founder of the International Society for Ecological Economics, as well as co-founder and associate editor of Ecological Economics. His work helped define the concept of ecological economics that integrated the key elements of ethics, quality of life, environment and community.
The 15-Minute City concept by Carlos Moreno won the Obel Award in 2021, focused on solutions to the challenges faced by cities around the world.
Transcript
Episode 1 : Design for Change : Introduction to the series : 23 minutes
Sarah Ichioka 00:02
Hello and welcome to the Flourish Podcast where we discuss design for systems change. I'm Sarah Ichioka. I'm an urbanist strategist and director of Desire Lines based in Singapore. I'm delighted to co present Flourish with Michael Pawlyn, who is the founder of Exploration Architecture, and a leading architect in regenerative design based in London. Today, we'll be sharing about Michael's and my book called Flourish Design Paradigms For Our Planetary Emergency. We'll be talking about why we need to move from a sustainable mindset towards a regenerative one, and how we can all take a proactive approach to address climate change and biodiversity loss. I've really valued our working collaboration and growing friendship, Michael, I think when I was trying to think back, I think I dated it to 2008. It was great, the way that we were able to slowly build a series of collaborations.
Michael Pawlyn 01:31
Absolutely, you and I were kind of regularly meeting up just to sort of share ideas to see what was bubbling up on each of our radars and starting to build a really good rapport.
Sarah Ichioka 01:42
And it was great to see that we had so much we are coming from very different perspectives, right, you know, I'm coming from an urban design background, you're trained as an architect. But we're, we were both interested in the broader issues that shape our built environment and the potentials for individuals and organisations to maximise their agency to positively influence that,
Michael Pawlyn 02:06
Sarah, maybe now is the right time to talk about the that term, the built environment, which we both have a problem with, what does it conjure up for you when you hear that term? Because it makes me think of really sort of dull textbooks about infrastructure and so on.
Sarah Ichioka 02:21
I think it's a bit jargon-ie. I think those who work in the fields, probably we just dash it off as shorthand. And but when we're using built environment, we're talking about anyone who's involved in regulating, financing, designing, building, managing, or inhabiting our buildings, our public spaces and our infrastructure. So it's anything from the scale of how you fit out and interior through to how you could master plan a city, it is a bit of dull phrase that we've joked about a lot, we need to find a better alternative, maybe we can have a listener giveaway?
Michael Pawlyn 03:03
Well, it I think it is really about how we live in our cities and buildings. And so a lot of the things we're going to be talking about are relevant to anyone who's interested in in how we live now and how we might need to change or definitely need to change the way we live.
Sarah Ichioka 03:19
So if we first crossed paths in 2008, it was really an event. About a decade later, wasn't it? Michael, that first prompted us to come together to write this book?
Michael Pawlyn 03:35
Absolutely. Yeah, it was the the 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which I think it's fair to say we both found pretty shocking, really, not because we weren't aware of the issues, but it was it was just that, that was the moment at which we realised everything we'd been doing as a kind of industry in sustainable design for the last 25 to 30 years. It had not been anywhere near enough. And it was clear that we were a long way short of being on track because I mean, just to take one or two examples. More than half of humanity's total greenhouse gas emissions have occurred since the Brundtland reports was issued. And that is that's often mentioned as the sort of the point at which sustainability became mainstream. And so I think for both of us that moment, October 2018, that was just it was a pretty epic moment that required some really dramatic rethinking. After that, one of the first things I reread was this absolute seminal essay, Leverage Points by Donella Meadows. And what she argues is that because systems are complex, it's not always obvious where to intervene, to bring about the change you want. And she draws up a list of 12 different places to intervene in the system, in order of priority. And I realised from that, that actually, most of the stuff that was being done by architects and engineers and urban planners that was trying to bring about change was actually intervening way down that list. And right at the top of that list is trying to intervene at the level of the paradigm or mindset out of which the system behaviour emerges. And a paradigm is a kind of a big idea that is broadly held across society that determines to a large extent how our society behaves. And sometimes it's quite difficult to discern that paradigm. But you and I were clear when we were talking about this, that the paradigm of sustainability really needed to shift urgently towards a paradigm of regenerative design and development.
Sarah Ichioka 05:35
In addition to the IPCC report that Michael is referenced. Another key turning point for us that year, was when the UK's highest architectural honour, was awarded to the Bloomberg headquarters in the City of London. Now, in many ways, this is an incredibly beautiful building that has, you know, plenty of clever and innovative design ideas incorporated into it. However, when you run the numbers, the standards to which that building was constructed, are still consistent with a pathway towards a 3°C, temperature rise, which is, you know, kind of game game over for people and planet. And so, the fact that this building was being lauded as the world's highest standard of sustainable office building, was also a wake up call for for Michael and me, and, you know, others we respect in terms of just thinking, you know, this is really the end of the road for the sustainability paradigm, doing less harm has not gotten us where we need to go. And we need to urgently change.
Michael Pawlyn 06:53
Absolutely. And that was a building with an internationally famous architect, an extremely wealthy and philanthropic clients. And so in many ways, the conditions couldn't have been better. And yet, even in that situation, it was coming out with a building that was, was enough to lead us to collapse. And so it was clear from that, that sustainability, as currently conceived is not enough. And so we're not proposing that we should ditch everything about sustainability. There's a lot of validity to it. But we need to set a kind of new Pole star of regenerative design that sets the bar much higher, and goes beyond simply mitigating negatives to, to, to optimise positives, across a whole range of sort of systemic issues.
Sarah Ichioka 07:39
Also, that focus on a very mechanistic form of measuring just very particular things, rather than looking at a building in a holistically transformative way, I think also pointed, pointed the way for this need for paradigmatic rethink
Michael Pawlyn 08:01
Absolutely. And when we asked around, we found out that some of the practices with the best reputations for delivering sustainable design, even those practices, were only delivering about 10% of their projects that in a way that was consistent with planetary limits. And that, again, revealed to us just how far adrift we are from designing in a way that is going to safeguard the future.
Sarah Ichioka 08:26
You're right, Michael. But the exciting thing is, what gives me hope is that there are so many amazing thinkers and doers out there around the world right now who are working very actively towards this regenerative transformation. And they, they need help, they need more people to step up and say the way things are currently going is just not sufficient. We can and need to do more. And we need to come together to do more to expand our agency, but we feel that it's an important step on that transformation, to make sure that we are aware of the old mindsets, we may be bringing,
Michael Pawlyn 09:15
yeah, when a particular view on something is very dominant, it's very difficult to see how that is not necessarily the unavoidable reality. So just as one example, if people say time is money, and that's that has been repeated so often that people have come to accept that as reality and it takes a really progressive thinker, such as the person that led the Gross National Happiness Project in Bhutan. And he said, No, time is not money, time is life. And actually, if you reframe it that way, it starts to make a lot of the old ways of doing things immediately seem kind of unacceptable. You know, if you if you have an approach of thinking the time is money, then it almost kind of excuses ways of monetising people and commodifying time and so on. If you shift to time is life, it encourages people to think much more carefully about what what they're actually going to do with with a precious time on Earth.
Sarah Ichioka 10:12
This reminds me of the work of the Zen Sensei, Angel Kyodo Williams, who talks about the urgent need to co author a new story that all of us can see ourselves in, as opposed to those, you know, the limited group of more powerful who may have authored the stories that we've inherited. The new story can also include strands of much older stories as well.
Michael Pawlyn 10:40
And I think a really encouraging shift recently has been seeing some really vocal spokespeople and writers and thinkers talking about indigenous wisdom. And I'm thinking of people like Tyson Yunkaporta and Robin Wall Kimmerer. And perhaps this, this is partly instigated by the whole Black Lives Matter movement and the way colonial frames have been challenged.
Sarah Ichioka 11:04
It's, it is a time when a lot of these old frames, you know, whether they're patriarchal frames, or colonial frames, heteronormative frames, or frames of white supremacy, etc. It's painful, but it's it's an it's unnecessary pain to to have those stories exposed as what they are. And I think that it, it helps in a way to understand that new stories can be constructed.
Michael Pawlyn 11:32
One of the points we we made in the book is that the fossil fuel age has in many ways been a massive distraction from ingenuity and because it's just been so easy to burn fossil fuels to meet all our needs. And one of the most exciting things about the age we're entering is that we should see an amazing reawakening of ingenuity, the architect Bill Reid says that, ultimately, we've got to get above that sort of line of neutrality, because if all we do is mitigate negatives, then then inevitably, it's just going to be part of a degenerative cycle. And somehow, we need to get above that line of what sometimes called 100%, sustainable, which Bill McDonough calls 100% less bad, and get into the realm of having a positive impact. And I think the other major flaw with sustainability is that it's very anthropocentric, you know, is just about humans and future generations, and it doesn't really see us as part of nature. And the framing of regenerative design and development is very much about kind of setting that ambitious target of, of ultimately getting to a state where we are co evolving as nature.
Sarah Ichioka 12:36
Absolutely. And I think that regenerative practice also acknowledges the tremendous damage that's already been wrought. And the fact that we can't, we can't pretend that we're starting from a neutral baseline, right. There's also, you know, are all so many of our systems of living, of designing, of building, of constructing, of how we power our buildings, how we get around, have all been based on an extractive model. And so we have the really daunting, but also tremendously exciting challenge of changing all of that completely.
Michael Pawlyn 13:20
Naomi Klein talks about the era of extractivism. And moving from that to a realm of regenerative impact.
Sarah Ichioka 13:28
Exactly. And we, we do talk in the book about some of the implications for even things like governance, or how we might structure an economy around concepts of care, for example, which, you know, seems so seems so far from our current norms. But actually going back to Naomi Klein, she is she's one of the the many voices you've pointed out that actually, you know - a quote unquote - "green economy" can be so much better. It doesn't have to represent a loss in the way that it's often depicted by its opponents that will be sacrificing things, it's actually a really positive transformational goal for us to reach towards. That gets me on to another topic that I think is really essential to how you and I have approached this project, which is, we want to encourage people to think about what agency they have, where they are, and to maximise it. And I think one of that challenges of sustainability, at least as it's been applied within the built environment sector is so often it's reduced. It reduces designers down to specifiers. Essentially, because sustainable approaches, if you just pick the best rated materials are the best rated construction techniques, that's kind of the best that you can do. And whereas, how would you describe a regenerative approach to design
Michael Pawlyn 14:58
I think as designers were trained to rethink things from first principles. And so absolutely, that there is a kind of transformation we need in the whole idea of agency in the idea of our capacity to bring about change.
Sarah Ichioka 15:13
But that's always something that we have to remind ourselves of too, right? I think it's so easy to, it's it is, it is really easy to feel overwhelmed, or to feel emotions like despair. And for anyone who's informed about circumstances, you know, that there, those are very important, valid emotions that we need to process. But it's, it's, it's, it's somehow being activated by feeling those emotions, to feeling awake and alive to the challenge that we face, but then stepping into your power, in terms of maximising whatever potential you have within your professional and personal spheres, to engage. And one of the things I've really enjoyed about researching the book is looking for those examples that we found of people in organisations who are doing just that. One of the reasons, right, Michael, one of the reasons why we've wanted to engage with this podcast is to be able to continue these themes outside of the book, but with a very strong orientation towards action now. So when we're inviting our guests on who's thinking really inspires us, we're going to be engaging with them to ask them about what actions they're personally taking, and what concrete steps for action for agency expansion. They want to share with us and our listeners, and I'm really excited to to learn from them and help to share some of their ideas with a broader audience.
Michael Pawlyn 16:46
Definitely. And I think that also connects with one of the other concerns we have that there's been a real lack of debate and discussion about how change actually happens. And it's not necessarily obvious how it happens. So, you know, when I set up my company in 2007, I was convinced that the way to bring about change was to collaborate with great teams into develop exemplar projects, and then it would all be so obvious the positive benefits of that, that it would just get this sort of rolling wave of positive change happening, and it didn't happen. And that's because I think, partly because the system is not ready for it, there are some major system blockers. And so we want to talk about how change happens, and sometimes how change doesn't happen. So if you've got a very dominant existing frame, or paradigm, or way of looking at things, that can be enough to stymie the changes that are possible. So you know, a lot of the changes we need, as ideas they've been defined for a long time, you know, the idea of ecological economics was defined about 50 years ago by Herman Daly. The idea of the circular economy was very clearly articulated 40 years ago, we've known how to do zero carbon buildings for 20 years. And so the key question is, why is this not happening. And that's something that we we really want to engage with in the podcasts. And then what I think we're going to try and give our listeners is by bringing together quite a diverse range of interviewees. Some of them are going to be economists or philosophers or designers or activists, all of whom have their particular perspective on on what this transformation means from sustainable regenerative.
Sarah Ichioka 18:28
We do see our work as integrated. It's, you know, it's a small contribution to a broader movement of holistic social and cultural transformation. And it's important, I think we should references we're using the term regenerative quite a lot. It's important that we reference it, this actually has its origins in agriculture. So practitioners, specifically applying that term in the context of a form of agriculture, in many ways informed by long term traditional practices, but that looks to build up this the health of the land that is planted, and also the health of the communities who plant the land, etc. So regenerative agriculture looked to find ways to work in an integrated way to farm with nature. And so now the big challenge, we and others that we admire are posing to the design communities, the built environment, communities, how can you transpose that mindset to think, how can you design with nature? How can you design as a part of nature? How can you inhabit a building as a part of nature? These are obviously huge questions. We have not been able to completely comprehensively cover in a book that was written in less than two years. But that's why we're so excited to be engaging with this podcast as a way to expand the conversation and continue the conversation. And invite new voices into this conversation, Michael, I think I mean, you and I are both really looking forward to learn more.
Michael Pawlyn 20:08
Yeah, definitely. And I think a kind of enduring concern of ours is that in this moment in as we emerge from the pandemic, and people talking about a green New Deal, and so on that there is a real risk that we could miss this moment. And we could just go through a sort of shallow transition, that doesn't solve our problems. So for instance, you know, if you just look at transport for a moment, the politically easiest thing to do would be to just shift from fossil fuel vehicles to electric vehicles. And that really wouldn't address broader problems, such as you know, it wouldn't do anything to address congestion, or social isolation or obesity. And if we were to go through a sort of deeper transition that would move towards ideas like the 15 Minute city, where you plan towns and cities so that people can access everything they need, within a 15 minute walk, that will be far more transformative. And that is something that I'm really keen to explore in this podcast.
Sarah Ichioka 21:10
If you're interested to learn more about principles of regenerative design, or any of the many fascinating topics that we've been discussing together today, you're warmly invited to visit our website, which is simply : www.flourish-book.com. And we'll also have a link to subscribe to our website there as well. That website will also include links to all of our socials. The podcast is sponsored by Interface, and based on the book, Flourish Design Paradigms For Our Planetary Emergency by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn.
Michael Pawlyn 21:47
We're really delighted to be supported by Interface on this podcast, and we couldn't have wished for a more suitable sponsor, really,
Sarah Ichioka 21:56
And it's really nice to be able to build on our relationship with them because Interface were the sponsor of Exploration Architecture - Michael's architecture firms, first solo exhibition hosted at the Architecture Foundation in London when I was the Director there.
Michael Pawlyn 22:14
So thank you all for listening, and we're really looking forward to where this discussion goes.
Sarah Ichioka 22:19
See you next time.
Michael Pawlyn 22:20
Okay, bye now.
Sarah Ichioka 22:26
The Flourish podcast is recorded at Cast Iron Studios in London and the Hive Lavender studio in Singapore. Our co producers are Kelly Hill in London and Shireen Marican in Singapore. Our research and production assistant is Yi Shien Sim. [The podcast is edited and features brilliant original music by Tobias Withers.]
Flourish Systems Change is bought to you by Interface
Production credits
Presenters Sarah Ichioka & Michael Pawlyn
Audio producer & composer Tobias Withers
Producers Kelly Hill (London) Shireen Marican (Singapore)
Research & production assistant Yi Shien Sim
Podcast cover art by Studio Folder
