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Making Permaculture Stronger

In this podcast Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger chats with Rosemary Morrow about permaculture design process.

Rosemary Morrow on Permaculture Design Process (E01)

On June 22nd, 2017, Dan Palmer recorded this lovely chat with Bridget O'Brien about her work on permaculture design process as part of her permaculture board game she's called "Adapt" (check it out here).

Bridget O’Brien on Permaculture Design and Adapt – the Game (E02)

In this track Dan chats with Alex Bayley about the agile software development movement and permaculture design process. Alex has a blog series exploring these topics here.

Alex Bayley on Agile Permaculture (E03)

In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys a rich dialogue with Ben Falk from Whole Systems Design. Dan and Ben explore issues and themes around:

 heathy living processes of design and creation
 working with clients
 the relation of necessity to beauty
 part of what it might mean to enjoy an authentic, healthy, connected life.

In Dialogue with Ben Falk (E04)

In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys a wide-ranging conversation with Darren J. Doherty from Regrarians.org. Darren and Dan explore:

 Darren's 25-year journey with design process including:

 how he got started
 key influences along the way
 key realisations along the way

 The Regrarians Works Pattern and the Regrarians Platform
 The current state and trajectory of permaculture including why good people so often seem to leave
 The relationship of Darren and the Regrarians approach to permaculture
 much else, including the new 10 week REX® Online Farm Planning Program (that Dan is looking forward to participating in as a student)

We really hope you enjoy the episode, and please do leave a comment sharing any feedback or reflections below...

Dan and Darren recording this episode last week in Bendigo, Australia
Oh yes, one more thing - during the closing comments at the episode's end, Dan refers to this video clip:

https://vimeo.com/128967954

Darren J. Doherty on Design Process, the Regrarians Approach, and Making Permaculture Stronger (E05)

In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys a high-energy, cut to the chase dialogue with Dave Jacke from Edible Forest Gardens. Dave and Dan explore:

 Dave's 38+ year journey with design process and permaculture including:

 his first design project at Simon's Rock College
 his initial contact with permaculture and then Bill Mollison
 his initial contact with the writings of Christopher Alexander (especially Alexander's 1964 book Notes on the Synthesis of Form)
 his experience studying at the Conway School of Landscape Design
 his relationship to permaculture
 his ecological design process

 Permaculture's design process enigma (has a lot to say about ecological design but not a lot to say about ecological design process)
 The relation between the designer, the designing, and the designed
 Problems with the expert/hero approach to design
 The relation between rationality and feeling/emotion inside ecological design process
 So much else...

Dave Jacke's work has been referenced many times in previous posts, and was the sole focus of this one.

We really hope you enjoy the episode, which is feeling like beginning of a longer conversation, and please do leave a comment sharing any feedback or reflections below…

Dave doing site analysis at Yandoit Farm, Victoria, Australia, 2016

In Dialogue with Dave Jacke (E06)

In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys a rich conversation with his friend and permaculture colleague Hannah Moloney from Good Life Permaculture in Hobart. Hannah and Dan explore:

 How Hannah got into all this
 Hannah's journey working as a professional permaculture designer
 The permaculture design process Hannah uses
 The tension between providing a service people are willing to pay for and honouring sound process at the same time
 Much more

Here are some of Hannah's design diagrams (more here):

 

Her and Anton and their daughter Frida's beeuitiful pink home on a hill (more here):

and Dan, Hannah, Anton (and young Frida) in 2015...

and 2016...

Hannah Moloney on Permaculture Design, Business, and Life (E07)

Dave during the chat with Dan
In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys another high-energy, cut to the chase dialogue with Dave Jacke from Edible Forest Gardens.

The first episode/instalment can be found here.

This second instalment of an energy-rich conversation that is far from done includes:

 Dan sharing his recent feeling that in framing permaculture design processes using linear-sequence-implying flow charts a (kind of big) mistake is being made
 Dave putting flow charts and other things in a successional (but non-linear!) framing where they have their role in the learning journey
 Dave sharing his cutting edge, hot-off-the-press, so far unwritten about approach to framing design processes as ecosystems
 The relation between what he calls the four ecosystem ps:

 properties
 principles
 patterns
 processes

 Why Dave avoids using the name permaculture
 Much, much else!

Dave Jacke’s work has been referenced many times in previous posts, and was the sole focus of this one and this one.

Oh yes, the Ludwig Wittgenstein quote Dan mentions was:
One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at (Philosophical Investigations)
and the quote Dave shared was:

Ecological communities are not as tightly linked as organisms, but neither are they simply collections of individuals. Rather, the community is a unique form of biological system in which the individuality of the parts (i.e., species and individuals) acts paradoxically to bind the system together. —DAVID PERRY, Forest Ecosystems

Finally, you can organise yourself a copy of David Holmgren's amazing new book Retrosuburbia (which Dan quotes from at the start) right here.

We really hope you enjoy the episode, and please do leave a comment sharing any feedback or reflections below…

Dan during the chat with Dave

A Second Dialogue with Dave Jacke (E08)

In this episode Dan from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys a conversation with permaculture elder Robyn Francis from Djanbung Gardens.

Amongst other things Robyn shares on:

 Her recent return to India (having in 1987 co-taught India's first permaculture design certificate or PDC course alongside Bill Mollison)
 What she was up to before hearing about permaculture
 When and how she got involved in permaculture
 Her own impressions of Bill Mollison's character having worked alongside him
 How she got started in permaculture design
 Her approach to permaculture design process including the roles of

 Visioning / strategic planning
 Restraint overlays

 Her work with communities including Jarlanbah Community
 Her view on the state of the global permaculture movement
 A taste of all the amazing projects she is currently involved in, locally, bio-regionally, and abroad (including PDCs in China)

﻿
A short video about IPC India 2017 featuring Robyn

Robyn Francis on her Permaculture Journey (E09)

In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger speaks with Jascha Rohr from the Institute for Participatory Design which is based in Oldenburg, Germany.

With his partner Sonja Hörster, Jascha has created a fascinating and powerful way of framing design process they call the Field Process Model. The Field Process Model brings together inspiration from Bill Mollison's core model and Christopher Alexander's generative process against the philosophical backdrop of field theory (rather than the systems thinking backdrop permaculture usually stems from). Here it is sketched at a high level in two dimensions (get your head around this first, where reading this article is highly recommended)...

...here in more detail in three dimensions (or of course four if you include the movement or dance through time):

Here are field process model originators Jascha and Sonja during the recording, which happened on February 20, 2018.

The red squiggle indicates a certain four-volume set of books, the second volume of which just happened to also be sitting just behind Dan...

Jascha Rohr on the Field Process Model (E10)

I'm excited to share here the beginnings of a (Carol Sanford inspired) framework in my second conversation with perma-powerhouse Meg McGowan (the first was here). It is a framework I feel is going to inform much of Making Permaculture Stronger's evolution moving forward. Here is a preliminary sketch laying it out as a starting point to crash test and improve together (or download as pdf file here). Huge thanks to Meg for taking the time to help me share and start developing it. Oh yes in this episode I also share my brand new project Designing for Life that will be developing in conversation with Making Permaculture Stronger moving forward. Exciting times my friends, exciting times!

Visit Meg's blog here, the interview on the other podcast she mentioned here (episode three), her pyramid of wisdom here (note: compare with this). You can also go listen to the mentioned chats with Carol Sanford and Joel Glanzberg and Bill Reed by clicking on their names (where you'll find further links to their sites and work). Finally, if you would consider supporting Making Permaculture Stronger financially, then visit our support page and mega-thanks in advance for what you are making possible in terms of supporting and fast-tracking the evolution of permaculture's wildly exciting potential in the world.

Exploring a Framework for Thinking about Permaculture Design in conversation with Meg McGowan (E24)

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