A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

How can we be the authors, artists, and architects of our lives? By recognizing who we already are. We are all designers. We each have agency.

Inner Essence

We are living beings who express authority through the mind, authenticity through the heart, and autonomy through the body.

• Authority (mind)

• Authenticity (heart)

• Autonomy (body)

Outer Expression

This inner essence is combined with an outer expression of life.

Each of us are a unique perspective and a singular collection of experiences in space and time. When we connect to everything around us, we discover our abilities of awareness through the senses, attunement through the spirit, and actualization through the soul.

• Awareness (senses)

• Attunement (spirit)

• Actualization (soul)

Designers: Agents of Change

We are already in the process of designing the world around us. We are waking up to the collective influence we can have on the world as a species. With that awareness comes the ability to learn, to grow, and to mature into the opportunity and the responsibility to integrate with the complexity, diversity, and beauty of life all around us.

This is what it feels like to be alive, to understand that we have agency, to be agents of change.

Author, Artist, and Architect of Life

• Authority (mind)

• Authenticity (heart)

• Autonomy (body)

• Awareness (senses)

• Attunement (spirit)

• Actualization (soul)

• Agency (life)

A Theory of Everything

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The inner essence is connected to the outer expression of the whole. The metaphysics is connected to the physics in a way that creates life.

Pataphysics is not a commonly used word. I have been using it a lot in my work, because I wanted a word that could describe what is outside of our memory of the past and the qualities of experience in the present. For me, it has become a word to describe the imaginative possibilities of the future. This ability to anticipate the future is what seems to make humans unique as a species. However, we might be wrong about that, because humans tend to be quite self-absorbed as a species and might be completely oblivious to the capacities of the life all around us. How could we possibly know?

Pataphysics is referred to as a “science of imaginary solutions.” In this phrase, the mind is connected to the heart in a way that mind and heart actualize systems as embodied solutions. The pataphysical is the realm of dreams, imagination, and possibilities that the heart reaches into to bring dreams, imagination, and possibilities into reality through our actions and interactions in the present.

Life Cycle

The life cycle begins with the body. As humans we create language by naming categories that separate the whole of experience into understandable parts: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, article, grammar, syntax, and sentence structure.

• Life connects to action through the body.

• Life connects to time through the senses.

• Life connects to cognition through the mind.

• Life connects to energy through the spirit.

• Life connects to emotion through the heart.

• Life connects to matter through the soul.

• Life connects to the whole through both physics (time, energy, and matter) and metaphysics (mind, heart, and body).

Life Processes

• Life exists only in the presence of qualia, in embodied action in the here and now, in the present.

• Life is in the process of the exploration of time through the senses.

• Life orients to the present through the quanta, through the context of the cognitive interpretation of the past.

• Life is in the process of creation through the interaction of the spirit with the energy of values, purposes, and intentions.

• Life reaches toward the possibilities of the future through the quest to understand the emotions, fulfill the desires, and direct the motivations of the heart.

• Life is in the process of formation by bringing matter and culture into form, in reality.

• Life integrates the whole of experience through the stillness of reflection on the process of incarnation that happens through syncretion, through the merging of the diversity and complexity of different cultures into one.

Life Senses

• The body connects to the centre of gravity.

• The senses are the body’s ability to savour life’s moments.

• The mind is the body’s ability to understand the insights of life that are connected through metaphor to the sight of physical forms.

• The spirit connects to the scent carried by the wind that represents the energy of the environment.

• The heart connects to the emotional sense of intimacy represented by the sound of voices in conversation.

• The soul feels the sensation of lightness and darkness, heat and cold, pressure and tension, pleasure and pain—all the experiences of being a physical body in a physical world.

• The experience of being alive is the ability to perceive each moment as a whole, the stillness of conscious awareness at the centre, connecting the body to time through the senses, connecting the mind to energy through the spirit, and connecting the heart to matter through the soul.

The Question at the Heart of the Quest

There is a mystery at the heart of the quest of being alive. How do we live in integrity with the whole if we are only measuring what is observable, measurable, and quantifiable? If the metrics for success leave out the whole experience of being alive, the quest leaves out the vital ingredients of what it means to be alive if the majority of lived experience is qualitatively beyond what can be quantified.

Language divides experience into the parts of speech. Language itself is a disintegrating process.

“Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

To understand the whole of a living system, we recognize that the parts of the system are in relationship with each other such that, if any of the parts are missing, the whole ceases to behave as a living entity.

Body

• Feature: Action

• Sense: Centre

• Essence: Inspiration

• Expression: Syntropy

• Experience: Present

• Process: Qualia

Senses

• Feature: Time

• Sense: Savour

• Essence: Interbeing

• Expression: Synchronicity

• Experience: Expression

• Process: Exploration

Mind

• Feature: Cognition

• Sense: Sight

• Essence: Intention

• Expression: Synthesis

• Experience: Past

• Process: Quanta

Spirit

• Feature: Energy

• Sense: Scent

• Essence: Intuition

• Expression: Synergy

• Experience: Interaction

• Process: Creation

Heart

• Feature: Emotion

• Sense: Sound

• Essence: Intimacy

• Expression: Synesthesia

• Experience: Future

• Process: Quest

Soul

• Feature: Matter

• Sense: Sensation

• Essence: Integrity

• Expression: Synarchy

• Experience: Culture

• Process: Formation

Whole

• Feature: Perception

• Sense: Stillness

• Essence: Incarnation

• Expression: Syncretion

• Experience: Reflection

• Process: Life

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

An animation storyboard created by Stephen Bau for the 40th Anniversary of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, made into animated GIF files.

Animated GIF file formatted for 1080 x 1080 pixels.

Join us for a spectacular in-person event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Buckminster Fuller Institute! This is designed as an immersive experience and will not be live streamed or recorded.

Get Tickets

We are thrilled to invite you to the Gray Area / Grand Theater on Mission Street in beautiful San Francisco, CA, USA.

This milestone celebration promises to be an unforgettable experience filled with inspiration, creativity, innovation, and special guests! We will celebrate forty incredible years of Buckminster Fuller Institute and the transformative work underway heading into our fifth decade! We'll also have updates on current projects to reach 100 million life-centered designers, regenerate bioregions, center indigenous knowledge in design, transform financial systems, engage with regenerative AI, uplift and build capacity for design scientists, support large-scale ecological restoration and more.

The event will feature sustainable local food served throughout the evening and a cash bar.

Schedule

• 5:00-6:15pm: Arrive, Connect, Light Food

• 6:15-7:00pm: Presentations from BFI Community, Updates, and Performances

• 7:00-8:00pm: Community Connection Time, Surprises, End of Formal Program

• 8:00-9:00pm: Music and Mingling for those wishing to stay later

This event is designed and produced by BFI and our partners Design Science Studio and habRitual. It will feature many artists, designers, and leaders from our community!

Register to Attend

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

Anxiety

In a conversation about a shift in culture that some of us are observing, or more accurately, if we are thinking of quantum mechanics and how there are no observers, only participants.

• What is anxiety?

• How does it make people feel isolated?

• How do we cultivate a non-anxious presence?

• What are some strategies for dealing with anxiety when it arises?

I asked some questions.

Is anxiety different from overwhelm? Is there a spectrum of experience from anxiety to stress, fear, overwhelm, panic, crisis, burnout, breakdown, and depression?

Systems Actualization

This week, in the Design Science Studio, Carol Sanford was interacting with members of coheART 3 in the Design Science Studio. She is dying with ALS.

She was talking about systems actualization as the process of self-determining epistemology in contrast to authority epistemology.

My own sense of overwhelm reached crisis level for me this past weekend. It had a lot to do with the ingrained habit of attempting to find authority outside of myself. Carol Sanford was pointing to something beyond self-actualization: systems actualization.

Paradigms of Reality Framework

• Extract Value: Domination, individualist, return on effort

• Arrest Disorder: Environment, stop waste, reduce harm

• Do Good: Humanist, anthropocentric, ideals proselytized

• Regenerate Wholes: Living systems, evolve capacity, essence expression, systems actualization through personal development

Her focus, then, was on the source of anxiety and the change that can be made through a paradigm shift.

When I was listening to Astra Taylor’s Massey Lectures, I noticed that she was defining the problem of disconnection, atomization, and the disempowerment of collective action as the manufacture of insecurity through the enclosure of the commons for the benefit of those at the top of the hierarchy. But ultimately, even they feel insecure. So, everybody loses. Everyone is in a state of anxiety. https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor

A couple weeks ago, I was recently introduced to a book to help me find my authority within myself by connecting to a higher power of my own understanding, The Loving Parent Guidebook https://adultchildren.org/literature/loving-parent-guidebook/

On Tuesday, I was in a couple meetings involving conversations about the potential and problems of artificial intelligence. We were talking about AI and the anxiety that this technology is producing about the value of being human and the value of work and creativity.

As I explore my own experiences in the outsourcing of work and creativity that has led to my own sense of disorientation, dislocation, displacement, and disintegration, this is the question that came up for me:

Our global society is a very dysfunctional family. Entire nations are in states of emotional insobriety.

A design challenge: How might we design a twelve step program for a world in states of trauma as a result of disembodiment, leading to physical, mental, and emotional insobriety (disconnection)?

For a social species, there is nothing more unsettling, more anxiety-producing than the insecurity that comes from disconnection. Ironically, the hyperconnectivity of our technological society has produced more disconnection, insecurity, and anxiety.

Carol Sanford might ask, “What is evolving in you? What systems are you actualizing?”

If we focus on the problem of anxiety, we are not regenerating wholes, evolving, and actualizing systems.

A group of us are exploring the possibilities of focusing on our inner and outer architecture. There is a tendency to focus on the artifact that solves a problem rather than understanding the source of the dysfunctional and entropic system. By focusing on actualizing a regenerative and syntropic system, the problem is solved through change and evolution, rather than an attempt to fix something that cannot be fixed. One cannot fix entropy. One balances that energy through dynamic equilibrium in the system that generates life and synergy and syntropy.

On Thursday, Alexandra Groome Klement from nRhythm was prompting the Design Science Studio to explore a shift in perspective from the machine metaphor to regenerative living systems.

Della Burford was pushing back on the word system. Well, system just feels like another word to describe a machine metaphor for life. Life is not a system. Life lives. So, it had me wondering, what word could we possibly use instead? And the closest I could get was a murmuration, because that feels much more alive. It’s all these individuals but then becoming a whole creating motion and life through their interaction, because they’re in tune with each other. They’re moving in concert.

Veronica Anderson, in my ensoulment session with her on Thursday, responded to this difference between a system and a murmuration.

“That’s wonderful! It actually illuminates the dynamic of codependency, because in a system, one part relies on the other part. They need each other. They basically don’t exist without each other. If one stops working, then the other has no value at all because the whole system stops working. And in a relationship which is based on codependency there’s a sense of, I need you to validate me and I’m going to validate you and that’s how we’re going to get our self-esteem needs met, because neither of us have internalized the function of esteem producing. And so we derive our value from each other in the system. In the murmuration, it’s like two trees that grow next to each other and they just are individuals being trees in the forest.”

Wholeness

Stephen: Seeing, even, feels like it’s a good metaphor. But I think it was being in that presence of experience of sensing and then having this immediate embodied response. Okay, so there’s an interesting connection that is happening. Where it’s mind, heart, body, perception, all coming together to recognize there’s this connection within to the whole.

Carol Sanford was talking about, “What are you actualizing? How do we regenerate wholes? The curriculum is all about these nested holons, in the Design Science Studio. So, that's been really I think, helpful for me as a model of I'm a whole being. How do I really embody that, in the here and now, in a way that is connecting to the whole that I already am?

Mark Wagnon talks a lot about, “We’re just trying to peel off the layers that are keeping us disconnected from what we already are. It’s peeling off those layers of perception. That go, “Oh, there it is. That’s who I am and who we are.” Yes, so that grasping. Why would I grasp over there? It’s here.

Veronica: So wholeness is a great subject. I read a version of Step Two recently, which is stating that we came to believe that there was a higher power who could help restore us to wholeness. And it's also stated, “restore us to sanity,” “restore us to clarity,” “restore us to wholeness.” These are all different versions of the same step. And that sense of wholeness that you feel comes from being contained by that higher power. So, when you’re embodying that sense of wholeness, it’s the ultimate paradox. You are whole, because you’re held by the higher power. So every time you can connect with that sense of wholeness, when you go into that, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” That “I”-ness itself is the doorway to your higher power when you’re in that state of presence.

There’s that very Christian adage of, I’m closer than your skin. That is what that’s referring to. It’s that, “More whole than whole.”

In Buddhism, the higher power is the total dynamic functioning or the whole thing. Once we acknowledge that that's there, then we’re willing to let go. And that’s step three. It’s not me. I don’t have the power. I can’t handle this messy financial situation. I can't handle the fact that I’m not getting the emotional intimacy I deserve and need and never had. I can't handle the fact that there are so many different things that I want to do, and not enough hours in the day, because I’m a gifted person, and I have so many talents. I have insane expectations of myself and I have identified with these expectations, and now I’m harshly criticizing myself. Instead of going into that overwhelm, and “Now I’m grasping for control,” we can let go. And that’s sobriety. That’s sanity.

Stephen: Yeah, so what Mooji was talking about, there's the identity and the ego. And what’s the consciousness behind that?

It reminds me of where I was going. It is just the being. Like the rods and cones in my retina in the eyeball that are just receiving. That’s kind of the image I had of being in the eye of the Divine and being one of those sensors. But then there’s all these other perspectives that are being held there. And so it’s the sense of, “I am divine, not the whole of the Divine.” I am a unique perspective on the world that is enriching the life and love of the Divine. And I can just be okay in that. I don't have to make things happen. That’s not my job. And if I just go into that place of gratitude, of, “Oh, wow! I get to have this experience!” And do it as a member of the Divine then that's enough.

Veronica: Yeah. Exactly. Through the pain, through the grief, through the anger, through the hatred, through it all. That’s all part of the whole and this is the place from which you take action. This is the place from which you move forward, and you do that based on what you’re receiving. In that receptivity comes the will of the Divine. Or the way reveals itself through you, and then that’s the action that you take. And that’s ensoulment.

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

Please join us for the monthly BFI community gathering with Stuart Cowan, BFI Executive Director. 

Stuart will be previewing his update of BFI at 40 and encouraging those who can make it to the upcoming anniversary event. We will then have time to see what emerges with our open discussion, shares and explorations.

Friday, December 1, 2023 at 11:00am PDT

Get a sneak peek into the Buckminster Fuller Institute 40th Anniversary Celebration…

Join us for a spectacular in-person event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Buckminster Fuller Institute!

We are thrilled to invite you to the Gray Area / Grand Theater on Mission Street in beautiful San Francisco, CA, USA.

This milestone celebration promises to be an unforgettable experience filled with inspiration, creativity, innovation, and special guests! 

We will celebrate forty incredible years of Buckminster Fuller Institute and the transformative work underway heading into our fifth decade! 

We'll also have updates on current projects to reach 100 million life-centered designers, regenerate bioregions, center indigenous knowledge in design, transform financial systems, engage with regenerative AI, uplift and build capacity for design scientists, support large-scale ecological restoration and more.

The event will feature sustainable local food served throughout the evening and a cash bar.

Schedule for Anniversary Party on December 15, 2023:

• 5:00-6:15pm: Arrive, Connect, Light Food

• 6:15-7:00pm: Presentations from BFI Community, Updates, and Performances

• 7:00-8:00pm: Community Connection Time, Surprises, End of Formal Program

• 8:00-9:00pm: Music and Mingling for those wishing to stay later

This event is designed and produced by BFI and our partners Design Science Studio and habRitual. It will feature many artists and designers from our community!

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

Geometrically Optimizing the Future

Bonnie DeVarco joined us for two sessions this week in coheART 3 of the Design Science Studio. Bonnie painted a portrait of R. Buckminster Fuller as a performance artist, wearing the suit of an accountant, while modeling how everything is made of energy, an integrity of physics and metaphysics.

Designing Solutions, Modeling Mind

The Whole Systems Artistry of Buckminster Fuller

I’ll be talking about nature, design science, whole systems, and what it means to be an artist within this context. My favorite quote from Buckminster Fuller is “I’m not trying to imitate nature. I’m trying to find the principles she is using.” And I love that he says “she.” You've got Mother Nature, Gaia, Pachamama. We really need to embrace the planet that we are a part of, that we live inside, this universe. And nature is our guide. And he used that so beautifully in his life. And I believe that much of what he did, in a modeling way, was absolutely art. So since all of you are artists, I talked to Roxi last week about, “Maybe, I’ll put together a little visualization—using a buckyball, of course—of artists. And, you know, art is one of the most transdisciplinary of disciplines. You can see writers, dancers, sculptors, designers, photographers, media artists, architects. There’s so many ways that we consider ourselves artists. An artist is using intuition and using inspiration and bringing creative flows into the world. Now Bucky was an artist, and he had so many people that he worked with, many of which were artists. And you're going to see some very familiar names here: Josef and Anni Albers, Bill and Elaine DeKooning, László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, Cy Twombly, Ken Snelson, John Cage, Merce Cunningham. Those were all people that were part of Black Mountain College—the first of its kind, very much like a bohemian, almost, art environment—that started in ’33 and ended in 1957. Bucky was there in ’48 and ’49. And some other folks—I will focus more on the people that were closest to him—Isamu Noguchi, Norman Foster, Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright. And my favorite person, that nobody knows, is Duncan Stewart. And you'll find out why. So I feel like the whole call of being an artist is to embrace intertransdisciplinarity. Almost like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It's one of those really long words that exists nowhere, but in my mind this morning, I thought, that's what it is. It's intertransdisciplinarity.

Synergetics

Early in the 20th century, inspired by the emerging realization in science that all manifestation in the universe is “energy” and “vibration”, Buckminster Fuller began experimenting with models of structural forms in the quest to discover how nature coordinates this energy to create all the beauty and magnificence of life. Fuller called himself a “comprehensivist”, one who holds a comprehensive perspective that seeks to synthesize apparent “parts” into an ever-unifying wholistic understanding. In his quest he discovered what he referred to as “nature’s coordinate system”, the geometric articulation of energetic relationships, which he named Synergetics.

This “energetic-synergetic” geometry became the foundation for his entire body of research and problem solving on behalf of all humankind and planet Earth for over half a century. He in fact once stated that humanity coming to understand synergetics was one of the most important steps in our evolution. As implied by the name, synergetics has at its core the principle of synergy: the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts. For Fuller, it became clear that by understanding the principle of synergy and applying it to all aspects of designing our social and technological systems wherein we can do “more with less”, we can achieve his stated mission: “to create a world that works for 100% of humanity through spontaneous cooperation and without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

— Cosmometry

Ephemeralization

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1938, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, materials, resources, etc.).

— Wikipedia: Ephemeralization

This is the process of evolution that I have witnessed over the past forty years as I have been learning, working, teaching, and mentoring in the many different ways that we have been practicing the process of design. Graphic design was classified, for tax purposes, as manufacturing when I first began my career. We were focused on the creation of physical artifacts. Years later, we are recognizing that we are actually in the process of designing entire social systems. That work is beyond the physical. In that sense, we have evolved the process of design from the physical to the metaphysical—a process of ephemeralization.

Whether we recognize it or not, we are in a process of geometrically optimizing our future through design. However, we are a very young and inexperienced species, still trying to make sense of our place in the world, which is putting at risk the physical, chemical, biological, and social integrity of our home on planet Earth.

How might we adapt by recognizing ourselves as relationships of energy in dynamic equilibrium with Universe?

U = MP describes a first division of Universe into metaphysical and physical aspects, the former associated with invisibly cohesive tension, the latter with energy events, both associative as matter and disassociative as radiation.

— Wikipedia: Synergetics (Fuller)

My own “Eureka!” moment happened this summer, when recognizing that the interface for life is found in the relationships of gravity between the Sun, Moon, and Earth, forming a tetrahedron of four spheres when we include ourselves as perceiver/observer/participant in the relationships of these four centres of gravity. In this interface, I was able to perceive the affordances for life and love—a model for life as an integration of physics and metaphysics: time, energy, and matter in a life cycle that integrates with mind, heart, and body.

Qualis

Life as an Interface

I had what felt like a “Eureka!” moment yesterday. Here is what it looked like. It was realizing that the community of the holobiont—a living organism composed of other living organisms—is connected by the same patterns at the scale of a human being, at the scale of a community, at the scale of a planet, and at the scale of a solar system. By making the…

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3 years ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Stephen Bau

The solar system is the model and the interface for life, instantiating relationships of energy as gravity and radiation. Life and love are the precessional effects of this dynamic equilibrium of relationships.

Responding and Adapting

This week, we also experienced a disruption in the relationships within the Design Science Studio, and there is a process that is ongoing to respond. The disruption happened around the definition of energy and the question of intelligence.

In response, we are learning how to navigate metaphysical gravity as pod navigators. We agreed together on a process. I added a step:

Circle back with those in navigator roles to validate that they felt supported and that needs for coherence, clarity, restoration, and resolution were met through the process of responding to disruption and rupture in the connective gravity and radiating tension of the commUnity of relationships.

Gravity and Love

543.21 The scientific word for the integral of all the special case realizations of gravity is love.
543.22 Love is the integral of gravity and radiation. Energy as either radiation or matter is the summa frequency, local-in-Universe, aberrational palpitation of comprehensive gravity embracement. Energy manifests itself as the palpitating, gravity-tolerated, aberrational pulsings-through of the plurality of exact centers of pure principles. This plurality of principles, being inherently different one from the other, have ever-varying interdomain proximities that produce varying push-pulls of the plurality of generalized principles influencing the locally-tuned-in event, which proximity variations depend on which set of principles are most informationally relevant in comprehending both the local and cosmic significance of any given local experience event.

— Synergetics: 543.00 Reality and Inexactitude

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

I designed a meditation practice for myself that is a way of growing new senses by recognizing the connections between myself as a living being and the rhythms of life reflected by the relationships of gravity between the Sun, Moon, and Earth.

I am just beginning Month 12, as outlined in my online notebook, The Apocrypha, in this article, Life Cycle: Connecting the Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul. This month focuses on the outer expression of the material body.

Week 45: To cultivate life, I am growing the sense of play, to create the possibility of freedom.

Week 46: To cultivate belonging, I am growing the sense of harmony, to create the possibility of unity.

Week 47: To cultivate shelter, I am growing the sense of place, to create the possibility of home.

I can sense the dissonance as many struggle at this time to find a sense of home amidst the violence and destruction of war and genocide. My practice feels even more necessary to live into the light of life as a contrast to the darkness of death that looms all around us.

My meditation practice was prompted by my work with Veronica Anderson in an ensoulment process that has been ongoing since February 2022.

This weekend, Veronica Anderson will be leading the second session of her Creative Empowerment course, offered through ViTra Academy. The session is planned for 9am – 1pm Pacific Time on Saturday, November 4. The World Weavers conversation begins at 8am.

I will begin the session and invite others to host the session, if anyone wants to continue the session past 9am, as I plan to join Veronica on the Vision Train.

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

This week, the Design Science Studio embarked on a quest to integrate a third coheART of members into the community of (r)Evolutionaries, Evolutionaries, Visionaries, and pARTners. Part of that process of integration involves the co-creation of a new regenerative culture by participating in the formation of a shared language. In the social body of the community, there is communication happening between the parts to create the whole of the culture.

Quest

In the quest to find a shared language, I have been in a year-long process to map our collective journey on the Earth, along with the Moon, around the Sun. The relationships between these celestial bodies are held together through gravity. These relationships are the physical metaphor—the quanta—for the metaphysical qualities of the experience of life—the qualia.

The mind makes sense of the qualia of experience by connecting ideas, words, and language to the things or beings in reality that they point to. We share words as a way to communicate the inner sense of experience with those of others, because we are not able to access the experience of others directly. We create a shared language for what it means to be alive.

In the quest to find a shared language, we often encounter differences that cannot be easily accommodated with what feels familiar—that is, part of the same family. Conflicts arise over differences in language and culture—differences of deeply held traditions, beliefs, and notions of belonging, especially to territory and land.

In my quest to find a shared language, I start with what I know and work out from there. What if we started with the whole, with Universe. I began with my notion of time. I began with our understanding of a year, of months, and of days. I was on a quest to find a shared language that could help me become more sensitive to the relationships of gravity that create our sense of time.

Ubuntu

Without you, I do not exist.

Time, Energy, Matter

Time does not exist without objects in motion. Energy does not exist without matter changing in relationship to time. Matter does not exist without the transformation of energy into various forms over time. These elements are inseparable and must be experienced as a whole. These three make possible the experience of being alive.

Consciousness

“Matter is derivative of consciousness.”

“What is behind the void?”

We are on a quest to find a way to understand a life-centered way of life. This is the quest of our time. A fractal understanding of time recognizes the life that grows out from a center in waves, creating similar patterns at various scales of time, energy, and matter.

Weaving Worlds

Through the shared breath of life, we are weaving our worlds together. Let’s share a conversation about co-creating a shared language together.

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

Self-organizing

In the Design Science Studio Weekly Watering Whole this past Wednesday, we were exploring the question, “What does self-organizing mean?”

As we begin the process of reading through applications and forming a third cohort (coheART) of people to realize the vision of a Design Science Decade, we have a lot of questions about how we become the synarchy that we aspire to be.

• How do we self-organize?

• How can we be self-sustaining?

• How might we engage in self-governing?

First, we enlarge our sense of self. If we enlarge our sense of self to the scale of a planet, this changes the way we answer these questions. If we enlarge our sense of self to the scale of the universe, we are transformed.

What Questions to Ask

To teach students resiliency in the unknown world ahead we must teach regeneratively—learning how to write a new question and make new connections each time we analyze data in the context of humanity, inclusivity, and within systems.

Design Science Studio

Diverse Voice and Talents

At the Design Science Studio, we believe in the power of diverse voices and talents coming together to nourish a better world.

Artists paint the world with vibrant imagination and challenge the status quo through visual expressions.

Designers co-create solutions with intention that harmonize form and function, bridging the gap between beauty and regeneration.

Ecologists decode the intricate web of nature’s delicate balance so we can live in harmony.

Climate designers cultivate designs that speak a language of nature, process, and sustainability for a resilient future.

Architects ontologically shape the physical and social environment in which we live, work, and play.

Scientists uncover the wonders of the natural world and apply that knowledge to find holistic solutions.

Performers let artistry break barriers and ignite a collective spirit of transformation.

Musicians harmonize melodies and lyrics to create soul-stirring compositions and inspire meaningful change.

Philosophers explore new paradigms and use critical thinking to improve collective sense-making towards a more considerate future.

Poets weave lyrical tapestries that illuminate pathways towards a future imbued with transformative possibilities.

Filmmakers craft captivating stories that shift perspective, ignite empathy, provoke thought, and inspire action.

Producers bring creative projects to life, orchestrating every element to create impactful experiences.

Creative coders harness the power of technology and coding to create immersive experiences that merge art and innovation.

Systems thinkers connect the dots and uncover the hidden patterns underlying complex problems to design regenerative systems that benefit all.

Activists give a voice for the voiceless, advocating for social justice and environmental preservation.

Thought leaders share insights, inspire discourse, and are at the forefront of shaping a new narrative for our world.

Join us at the Design Science Studio, where all these disciplines and more converge to co-create a thriving future for all of life.

Applications open now through October 1, 2023.

Applications open now through October 5, 2023.

Acceptance letters will soon be sent out.

www.designscience.studio

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

25 August 2023

At 11am Pacific Time on the last Friday of the month, the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) has been inviting the public to participate in an informal gathering to talk about what is happening in the community, including members of the BFI, participants in the Trimtab Space Camps, and members of the Design Science Studio. This past Friday, August 25, 2023, we were delighted to hear an update from Dr. Stuart Cowan, Executive Director, Buckminster Fuller Institute. Below is a transcript of his presentation. Listen to the full audio and follow along with the Otter transcript.

Dr. Stuart Cowan

This is our monthly last Friday call, connecting some of the broader BFI community. Really glad that you’re here. We’ll probably have some others joining as we go along. I’m Stuart Cowan. I’m the Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI). I joined back in December. I’ve met some of you over the last few months and it’s great to meet some of the others who are here. And I wanted to just give you an update on BFI. We have a lot of extraordinary things going on: some changes in direction, new possibilities. So let me kind of map where we’ve been over the last couple of years and then some of the fresh directions that we have at BFI and I’ll leave plenty of time for questions.

Regenerosity

As we think about BFI, a really important focus over the two years before I joined was Regenerosity (BFI: Regenerosity). It’s a phenomenal program. For those of you not so familiar, Regenerosity (regenerosity.world) is applying deep, regenerative thinking, design science thinking to rural—largely rural—regeneration projects in Africa, in East Asia and Latin America. And it’s developed about ten critical relationships with projects and also working with foundations to help them understand how to do philanthropy differently in a way that involves more trust, long term relationships, less and less reporting. They’ve been trying to mentor the projects, build their capacity and also help foundations understand that not every project needs to have a perfectly polished annual report and incredibly detailed application, and so forth. It’s a phenomenal program. And we all realized it’s kind of coherent all by itself. And, in effect, it’s operating as its own nonprofit now. So, technically, it’s now a fiscally sponsored project of BFI. That means that we’re the overall nonprofit umbrella. But it’s essentially a completely independent project. It has full autonomy as long as it doesn’t do anything outside the bounds of BFI’s mission and purpose. So I wanted everyone to know that that’s really flourishing. And we realized it’s really kind of separate from the other main activities of BFI. So we’ve given it wings and it’s off and running and doing very well on its own. And you can always get updates going to the Regenerosity website. And again, I’ll take questions on all of this at the end, so I’ll just run through some of the updates and then happy to provide any further details.

Design Science Studio

The second key piece is the Design Science Studio, run by my good colleague, Roxi. Roxi had some personal issues for a year, so she needed to skip a cohort year, but the amazing news is there will be a fresh cohort of the Design Science Studio starting in October. Applications are open. I highly recommend it. I know some of you have gone through the Design Science Studio before—a several-month-long structured process with incredible artists and designers and scientists working in a cross-disciplinary way. In the two years that it ran previously, it was a loose partnership between BFI and Roxi’s own company, which is called habRitual. Going forward, Design Science Studio will be a fiscally sponsored project of BFI. Just like Regenerosity, it’s going to have its own wings. It’s totally independent. It makes its own decisions, runs its own accounting, runs its own activities, but we’ll have a nice collegial relationship. As I run through what we’re doing now in BFI’s own Design Lab, there’ll be all kinds of projects that we’ll want to get Design Science Studio involvement in. And, likewise, we’ll be feeding things over to the Studio. And, of course, lots of people participate both in BFI activities and Design Science Studio. So we’re pleased to have a nice, loose, collegial relationship going forward.

Fiscal Sponsorship Program

The third key thing, for many years Buckminster Fuller Institute has offered a fiscal sponsorship program. So that means we just put this service of being an anchor, well run, well organized nonprofit now hitting forty on December 15—which is amazing! Very few nonprofits hit 40, I can tell you that. We’re able to offer our track record, our history, our brand. It’s a stable context to run funds through, and then we can lend our full 501(c)(3) nonprofit status to a qualified project. So we continue to offer that. And I would say, fairly selectively for new projects, because as we build out the Design Lab—and I’ll run through this—many of those projects are a great fit for fiscal sponsorship. And so more and more we really want to focus our fiscal sponsorship on synergetic activities, where these are projects that make a lot of sense for BFI anyway, and further what we’re trying to do. And then, of course, that’s a great service to offer that can help a new project get off the ground, get that early catalytic donation or grant.

Dymaxion Store

So, the next piece, Dymaxion Store, same as ever—up and running. And then, of course, all the amazing resources online. We did a lot of work towards the end of last year, getting World Design Science Decade documents online. There’s just such a wealth of information. So make sure you go into the BFI website and just really dig around. There’s just incredible detailed videos, key documents, links to other websites, around every aspect of Buckminster Fuller’s work.

Membership Program

Now, one thing that we’ve paused is events, just because we’re launching so much. So I’m excited to begin weaving events back in. Primarily, they were interviews, panels, where we could highlight really interesting people who had a real connection to Fuller. In many cases, we were able to do interviews with people, like Michael Ben-Eli, key collaborator of Bucky’s. So we’ll bring those back. We’ll have some themes. We might try to do some things around World Game, World Design Science Decade, and so forth. And we’ll make those available.

And, of course, we have our ongoing membership program as well. So lots of continuity. And we’ve decided with the Trimtab Space Camp, that’s an incredibly intensive offering. So we’re not going to do it in that form, for the time being—especially now that Design Science Studio is kicking back in. That’s an amazing alternative way to engage with these ideas. But we’ll be exploring ways to reach many, many more people through design science education offerings. So not the Space Camp as it was, but some things that that we’ll talk about now.

Massive Action

So instead of one very intensive cohort, over a few months with the Space Camp, we’re really excited to announce that we are partnering with a project called Massive Action. So Massive Action is being spun out of globally recognized design agency called the Massive Change Network. This was started by Bruce Mau and Bisi Williams. Bruce Mau is a globally recognized designer. Check out the documentary, it’s just M-A-U. I’ll put it in the chat. You can get it on Amazon Prime. Amazing documentary about Bruce’s life is a whole systems designer. And the goal of Massive Action is to reach 100 million life-centered designers—holistic regenerative designers who will take action in their communities. There’ll be 20 different cities.

There’ll be a physical exhibit space. There’ll be digital platforms. There’ll be ways to get a certification after engaging with the material long enough. And the goal is to really connect people to action in their regions. So it’s incredible. It’s epic. It’s amazing. And BFI will be very, very core to this effort. We’ll be designing educational modules. We’ll be providing case studies. We’re helping to shape the whole initiative. And so the 100 million life-centered designers, we hope, will also be exposed to design science—comprehensive anticipatory design science—and have lively case studies on how it’s been applied in the past and the present. And people will then connect to opportunities to work on these projects with amazing impacts. It’s an audacious project. But we’re excited because it’s a channel where we could literally begin to reach certainly hundreds of thousands of people and, over time, well into the millions. And while it’s a lot of work, it also means we can reach a scale, more than trying to run very detailed program for 100 people or so at a time. So we’re going to focus our resources more on this broader community with other amazing organizations that are co-designing Massive Action.

BFI Design Lab

So that’s the first project within what we’re calling the BFI Design Lab. This was launched a couple of months ago. And the idea of the Design Lab is to support what we call open innovation (OI) ecosystems. This is an important emerging idea. Over the last 10 years or so, we’ve heard a lot of talk around open source, Creative Commons—really interesting ideas about how we think about intellectual property, creativity, how to work in community in broader ecosystems, to co-create things and then accelerate their deployment in the world. With the BFI Design Lab, we’re totally focused on these open innovation ecosystems. And interestingly, even the National Science Foundation has a major grant solicitation right now to stand up these open innovation, open source ecosystems. So very exciting. We feel like it’s something that’s been emerging in different ways and different places around the world. And we feel that it’s very true to the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, who was always trying to think about reimagining entire industries, like transportation with the Dymaxion Car, like cartography with the Dymaxion Map, shelter with the geodesic dome. And I think he always had the sense that entire industries needed to transform and that would take huge collaborative efforts. He spoke about the world grid, for instance, which would be a way to collaboratively move electrons—fossil-free electrons—around the world following the availability of wind and solar as the Earth spun around its axis. Parts of that are being built out. But it’s a great example of that kind of audacious thinking to say, well, let’s focus on meeting a fundamental need for abundant fossil-fuel-free energy. And let’s not get too caught up in which company gets to grab and control that first. Let’s focus on what we would now call a commons to enable that transformation. So each of the Design Lab projects is not just one company or one nonprofit. It’s actually an ecosystem in its own right. It’s a creative ecosystem connecting together to achieve a shared set of themes. The first ecosystem, the first project within the BFI Design Lab is Massive Action, a huge educational collaboration—but education leading not just to reflection, but to ways to then connect out to projects, begin to do things, learn with each other, learn regionally, share globally, and get to work. So that’s number one.

Architecture for Planetary Regeneration

The second one is Architecture for Planetary Regeneration. So, equally audacious as Massive Action. And, by the way, all of this is on the website. So if you go to the BFI Design Lab on the homepage or the tab up top, you’ll see all of these updated—and a little bit of this is breaking news, so you’re getting a first hit of it now. But the website will get updated in the next couple of weeks. So you can always go there. Because these projects they’re going to keep evolving, there’ll be new partners. Some will have a natural lifespan. You do a sprint for a year. Done. Let it go. Some will go for many, many years. So you’ll always be able to see kind of this amazing ebb and flow, this matrix of Design Lab activity. So the Architecture for Planetary Regeneration includes a consortium of extraordinary organizations working on restoration and regeneration.

With the Architecture for Planetary Regeneration, we have One Earth, which is a fantastic environmental NGO that has mapped a global safety net for the planet, core areas that we need for biodiversity conservation. They’ve looked at a systemic transition from conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture, as well as a systemic transition from fossil fuel to a completely clean-energy-based economy. Another key partner, Open Future Coalition, some of you may know. They’re doing amazing work on civic innovation, on mapping solutions inventories, and so forth. The goal of the Architecture for Planetary Regeneration project is a lot like the goal of the World Game, for those of you that know about the World Game. It’s a way to work at multiple levels of scale. So zoom in on a particular watershed by a region out to an island, mountain range—whatever that next unit is—out to a continental scale, to planetary scale and move very fluently between these scales that are all entangled. They’re all interconnected. No region is isolated, as Bucky recognized. Of course, there’s going to be critical trade in things like minerals, which are extremely hard to find in most regions. They have an incredible differentiation around the world, where they’re located and plentiful. So you have to figure out, Okay, how are we going to trade in minerals? But you need a way to take amazing geospatial data, understand what’s going on in a regional-to-global context, take that solutions inventory that One Earth is developing—Open Future Coalition, Drawdown developed in the past—take that solutions inventory, and play that World Game process. So have stakeholders, have representatives from the community designed together, different winning scenarios for their region that feed into how their neighboring regions, up to planetary scale, might work. So literally, comprehensive anticipatory design science capacity—being able to apply that design science, at any scale, in cooperation with other efforts, working at whatever scale they want to, having the rigorous geospatial data, rigorous solutions inventory, to be able to design scenarios and then bring them to the table as an investment portfolio. So make this very real. So one step beyond the World Game, take the scenario and say, if enough people are voting for it and like this, there may be a set of projects that really should be proposed that have teams behind them, that need financing, and take those to suitable investors and get them funded and make them happen. So we have key partners working on global financial transition partners that have worked with the World Bank and huge financial entities. So we’re connecting this all the way from the grassroots of the grassroots and individual farmer just trying to regenerate their land all the way out to How would you connect that with global capital sources that start to have a more regenerative lens? And BFI’s role is really around design science to say, Wow. How can we take this data landscape, the solutions to the story, and build transition scenarios. And build those scenarios, get them funded, make them happen. So that’s the second project. Again, it’s audacious.

These are the kinds of massive things that Bucky always tried throughout his career. Just to raise the effort, create some energy around it. It doesn’t mean suddenly we staff this up year after year. We’re just part of the mesh, right. We’re working with others to create inspiration. We’re trying to get parts of this consortium resource to get the work to happen. It doesn’t all have to happen internally at BFI, and we’ve always been like that. The Buckminster Fuller Challenge was all about shining a spotlight on amazing projects and connecting them up and letting them learn from each other. So in that spirit, we’re trying to support these open innovation ecosystems and establish these open knowledge artifacts, design artifacts, iterate really quickly. As Bucky recognized starting in the 1920s—let’s be clear, this is pretty extraordinary: in the 1920s—he was recognizing what we now call the polycrisis or the metacrisis. He believed that we were going to run out of fossil fuels, we were going to run out of minerals, we’re going to run out of land. And we had to ephemeralize, right. We had to do much, much more with much, much less, and he thought systemically about that in many different sectors. And for the next 50 years, he worked nonstop to try to awaken the world to the sense that we’re on this fragile Spaceship Earth, right, this fragile biosphere. There’s no operating manual. We’ve got to figure this out. Time is running out. Time is of the essence. And we’re a little bit late, because, you know, Bucky proposed the World Design Science decade from 1965 to 1975. And it would have been great to run all of this back then. But we’ll just do it now. So in a sense, we’re trying to kind of play with the World Design Science Decade, which was an effort to engage architectural schools around the world to say, We need to think very systematically about water, energy, food, shelter, and how we can thrive within what we now call planetary boundaries.

Gaia Consortium

So Massive Action, Architecture for Planetary Regeneration. Third project: Gaia Consortium. This was actually formally launched this week. This is an effort to apply a new kind of artificial intelligence called Active Inference to planetary regeneration. And I think we’re all somewhat terrified at how quickly AI is evolving. There are—let’s be clear—there are bad actors. There are nefarious actors right now, that will try to do very, very terrifying things with AI there are others that are happy to let AI help us sort of buy more things we don’t need even more quickly or just kind of drift along. There are a handful of efforts to try to apply AI as a guide and a support for the incredibly tough decisions that we’re going to have to make to make Spaceship Earth work. So we’re betting on this particular effort to apply AI with really, really strong ethical guardrails in a way that just only will ever offer decision support. So it will always be incredibly transparent. Let’s offer decision support, so that local communities, regional actors, existing governance systems, can transparently understand the basis for that recommendation at any time. It’s not a blackbox AI with some neural net with a million parameters no one can understand. It’s AI that is co-created between people on the ground, human experts and the modeling system itself. And it can be one very important assistant co-pilot, as we make these really tough decisions at different levels of scale. So the Gaia Consortium has some extraordinary players. We’re one of the four co-founding organizations. We hope to get this resourced quickly. And, again, to me, it’s very much what Bucky always imagined would be possible: the Geoscope—this vision for a dome that could flash up regional situations, global situations, help decision makers in real time interact with the information, and Bucky knew there would be a wired internet, there’d be a global basis for distributed intelligence. And it would be very visual. It would be computational. It would involve simulation, gamification, all of these things. So Gaia Consortium is very much in that spirit, and I don’t take lightly the risks—lately the risks of engaging with AI. But we can’t not engage because they’re extremely dangerous things already happening and set loose on the world. So I think it’s important to have countervailing, ethically constrained AI. Do battle, honestly, do battle with the other digital beings out there. So that’s number three.

The Weather Makers

Number four, is an extraordinary effort led by The Weather Makers. This is a company based in the Netherlands, for profit, out of a variety of engineering disciplines. They have a vision to work with the Sinai Peninsula in northern Egypt: Green the Sinai. It’s now desertified. Three thousand years ago, it was well vegetated, had plenty of rainfall. And they have determined there are ways to begin to rehydrate, revegetate, bring back more local water cycles. And this would have enormous benefit for the entire Mediterranean Basin, which is drying out. So the the part of the Mediterranean next to the ocean is all drying out. Keeping more precipitation in that basin would be a very good thing. So what they figured out with many colleagues around the world, is that there are these sort of acupuncture points for weather, where if you do the right kinds of ecological restoration, you do the right kinds of efforts to rehydrate the ground, you can actually create regional weather benefits that even start to spring across the planet and help other areas as well. So we’re setting up an open innovation ecosystem around large scale ecological restoration, particularly with the lens of water functionality, rehydration, if you will, and The Weather Makers will be a key part of that effort.

Ecosystem Restoration Communities

The next project, closely related, is working with John Liu. He’s a wonderful environmental filmmaker, who started a global network called the Ecosystem Restoration Communities network. It’s a little bit of the twin to The Weather Makers work. This is working at very, very small grassroots scales, but then sparking out into a region, going up in scale. So it’s all a fractal. The Weather Makers are taking a big region and trying to project-finance that at scale, you know, with hundreds of millions of dollars. The ecosystem restoration communities effort is starting with ten thousand acres of heavily strip-mined land in coal country next to lovely Kentucky and using that as a place to imagine a regenerative economy that will spring out to regenerate a million acres in Appalachia. And the incredible thing there is the very first Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize went to John Todd, a mentor of mine, and John Todd’s proposal was to regenerate the Appalachian Mountains in a not dissimilar way to what Clifford Smith is now doing. So it’s beautiful to see these cycles.

So we’re working with the global network. There’s a beautiful project in Somalia, efforts to do earthquake zone recovery in Turkey. John wanted this network to support work in some of the most complex places in the world, war-torn places recovering from civil conflict, places that have become heavily desertified that are going to take enormous effort to bring back, working with people that have been marginalized for all kinds of reasons, and giving a chance at hope and potential by restoring land, water, growing food, rebuilding culture, and sparking out to the broader region. This whole network is very fragile. We’re helping them think about getting resource, like fundraising, helping them with governance, helping them with systems that will help each of these communities thrive within their separate networks.

Bioregional Digital Twin

And then, just quickly, so many more in the queue. We’ve reached capacity for the moment with eight projects. We would love to grow our staff, grow our team, and engage with more. But briefly, we are working closely with a project called Bioregional Digital Twin to create immersive visualizations, starting with the Gulf of Maine and in support of understanding, restoration of that region. So kind of a sister to the Gaia Consortium efforts and the Architecture for Planetary Regeneration: visualization, immersive visualization is really important. The strength of the Bioregional Digital Twin project is gamification. It’s built on a game platform, literally. So people can really feel what it’s like swimming around with seagrass and swim over to a patch that needs help, and then the next day they can go out in real life, literally, and say, Okay, I swam over there virtually, and, Okay, I’m going to get my boat. I’m going to dive down and do some planning the next day.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab

And then the last piece I’ll mention is our work with what’s called the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab. This is based in Australia. It was co-founded by five Australian Aboriginal custodians of land, who are very tied to their traditional life ways who are also bridge academics. So they all have advanced degrees from “Western” universities, and they are bridging between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing, and they’re offering their profound perspectives, not just on land management in Australia, of course, but their whole point, the whole point of that lab is an indigenous knowledge perspective allows you to think in a completely different way about ethics, and governance, and relationality, and connection. And we need this to figure out how we work with AI. We need this to know where and how to build and what our energy transition [might look like]. We need it for all of it. So we’re in profound conversations with them about sparking many, many of these labs around the world and connecting design science—non-Indigenous ways of thinking about design planning, engineering, economics, finance—bridging that with Indigenous ways and finding a shared path forward. So I think this is very profound and will inform all of our work.

Design Science Consulting

And then outside the Design Lab itself, we are setting up a new area of work that is design science consulting. So BFI itself, as a nonprofit, we can offer fee-for-service work, and so we’re beginning to talk to potential clients around applying design science for things like a family investment office that wants to do something about climate, and they just get pitched all day, “There’s going to be some magic solution.” The company thinks, “Okay, this will solve everything.” And we’re talking about, “That’s great. But we’re talking about systemic solutions.” So we would offer design science approaches to a family office that wanted to invest systemically in a region or around a theme. And we’d like to offer this to other kinds of entities. Help insurance companies think about risk in different ways from a comprehensive anticipatory design science perspective—pension funds, other kinds of large institutional players. So that’ll take some time to build credibility and stand up, but we’re beginning those conversations and I think we have something really powerful to offer within the design science tradition of really working holistically, working with long timescales. And then the anticipatory piece is really important, too. How do we begin to understand possible negative side effects and design for that?

So I will leave you with a big set of opportunities. There’s so many ways that I could really use your help with this work. You know, one is, you know, potential clients. If, as you go out into the world, you can think of a company that could benefit from an innovation lab that we could run for them or a family office that wants to think about investment in a different way—anything that might connect with everything I’ve been talking about with the Design Lab project, that could join the Design Lab. Is there something audacious that sounds like these things I’ve been talking about that would be a great next one, and I’ll put it in the queue. It’s hard to add right now, but we’re already building the next 20 amazing potential projects that we’ll begin to work with over time. So I’m always open to potential nominations for extraordinary projects.

It would be great if you want to connect with any of the projects that I mentioned. Many of them have volunteer opportunities, all kinds of things they could use, from communications, marketing support, helping with fundraising, diving in and doing technical work together, setting up the tech stack to enable this amazing open design and knowledge creation that they’re doing. So we’d love that and I can help connect you to those projects. If you’re not a member of BFI, please consider joining and please consider upping your membership level. I’ll just say this once. Love to have you and tell your friends to join. Tell people about BFI. Tell people we’re doing extraordinary work. If you can think of someone who could make a meaningful donation, or you can think of a foundation. This is the number one thing that we could use right now. We’re really trying to jump to a whole other level. This work is holistic. It’s about resilience. It’s systemic. And we need we need support to do this effectively.

So any ideas that any of you have, please just reach out to me. I’ll put my email in the chat right now. That’s a great way to reach out. So it’s just stuart at bfi.org. Who should I be talking to? What foundation actually would get this? What corporation would love to connect with this work? I would be eternally grateful. This is the moment that we really can have this huge inflection point in our work in the world. Get others to donate. Get others to join. Just let me know who might be interested in making a catalytic contribution to BFI.

And with that, I know that’s just a lot. There’s a lot has been happening all year. It’s been a sprint from the moment I joined BFI. I’ve been all in on this, I’ve given everything that I have. I couldn’t be more excited at the potential that we have in the world right now. People love to talk to BFI. People hear the name Buckminster Fuller—you’d be amazed. People all over the world, they just light up and they’ll have their favorite quote, and more people than I could ever have imagined will tell me, “When I was in high school, Bucky gave this talk in this tiny town in Kansas.” He went everywhere. Year after year he would travel the world, especially to reach young people. And those young people ended up devoting their lives to this incredible systems changing work. And it’s incredible to have that kind of identity in the world. To be the Buckminster Fuller Institute means virtually anybody would be excited to talk to us. And so it’s opening doors and opening collaborations.

Mark Smith

And you know what, I don’t know that many of us have really had a chance to meet you, Stuart. I’m just wondering if you can give us a quick look over your shoulder of the path that got you here.

Dr. Stuart Cowan

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Mark.

I grew up in the coastal temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. I was born in San Francisco, and I’m actually back in Berkeley. It’s wonderful to be back in the Bay Area where the BFI is based. But my family moved when I was very young. So I grew up in an amazing, wild, rugged part of the world, literally, orca whales, humpback whales, out front. fjords, ancient forests, and fell in love with patterns, nature, complexity, had a gift for mathematics. So I did my doctorate in system science at UC Berkeley, with a lot of focus also on ecological economics, wrote a book called Ecological Design. And so my whole path has been around design thinking, whole systems design thinking and how that intersects with regeneration. And as I really dug into that I realized we had to transform economic models. For everything we tried to do would constantly be penciled out, as you know, not having enough enough return, right—not being viable. So I’ve also been really involved in thinking about regenerative economics and regenerative systems design. I spent three years recently at Capital Institute working with John Fullerton. They’re a key partner of BFI. So John’s doing really important work on regenerative economics. He’s a huge Buckminster Fuller fan himself.

When I wrote my book, I had a long quote from Buckminster Fuller, I discovered Bucky by getting the Whole Earth Catalog. Somehow found a copy in Campbell River on Vancouver Island when I was a teenager and changed my life. Beginning to learn about Stuart Brand and Buckminster Fuller and just this whole amazing world of appropriate technology and systems thinking. So it’s been a long sustained path of really applying always systems thinking—that very technical, scientific side—but also soft systems change, how we understand community transformation.

I worked at Eco Trust, an amazing bioregional organization working on restoring Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest. So I’ve always really loved efforts on the ground to help bioregions flourish and prosper, but always been a planetary thinker as well and just trying to connect all these efforts up and down scales across disciplines and couldn’t be more delighted to have ended up at the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Buckminster Fuller Institute

BFI was founded in 1983 to inspire and support new generations of design science innovation. From 2007-17, BFI ran the globally recognized Buckminster Fuller Challenge, which awarded a prize to support the development and implementation of high potential solutions that “solve humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity.” As BFI approaches its 40th Anniversary, they have launched the BFI Design Lab—a non-profit design studio and accelerator—to support design science solutions addressing a wide range of fundamental needs including biodiversity, climate, food, water, energy, materials, shelter, transportation, health, and education.

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

Join the (r)Evolution

A message from the Design Science Studio.

Design Science

Design Science is a shorthand for what Buckminster Fuller named his discipline for coming up with inventions: “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science.”

Comprehensive

to see the big picture and recognize the synergy of the whole.

Anticipatory

to visualize a preferred future and work towards it.

Design

to align intentions with values and navigate directions with purpose.

Science

to observe and describe patterns as generalized principles and laws of nature.

Life is the foundation upon which we create value. Life, as qualitative experience, is beyond quantification. Life is the dynamic process of co-creation through interconnected relationships in flow.

The realm of possibility is endless, with so many horizons to explore in creating a future that works for all of life. Let’s begin our journey by delving into the profound realm of design justice and its vital influences.

Design Justice

Design justice is a framework that is:

Comprehensive

Design justice recognizes and challenges the historical and systemic inequities perpetuated by design practices.

Anticipatory

Design justice aims to center the voices and needs of marginalized communities, ensuring these communities are at the forefront of design solutions that address their unique challenges and promote inclusivity.

Design

Design justice plays a pivotal role in revolutionizing systems, policies, and structures from healthcare to education, transportation to technology.

Science

Design justice promotes equal access, amplifies marginalized voices, and shapes more inclusive and sustainable solutions to reconnect and reintegrate the syntropic organism of life that has been disconnected by the modern industrial machine of death and entropy.

A Lens

Design justice becomes a lens to guide us as we map the territory of the human heart and navigate metaphysical gravity. As Buckminster Fuller articulated in his poetry of art and science, “Love is metaphysical gravity.”

Call For Creators

The commUnity is the project. The journey is the destination. We are setting a course for a heart of compassion and a world of love—the inner and outer architecture of a life of integrity. Synergy literally means to work together (syn, together + ergon, work).

Ready to take the next step in your journey toward a future that works for ALL of life? Register for the DSS (r)Evolutionary Incubator now. Go to designscience.studio and submit your application.

Spaces are limited to 144 creators and applications close September 24th. Don’t miss this opportunity to join a vibrant commUnity of imagination activists and learn from leading experts. Together, let’s craft a future where design becomes a powerful catalyst for justice and equality, igniting hearts and inspiring positive change.

Wishing you the courage to design a more equitable future, we will be with you every step of the way,

Design Science Studio

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

TerraBiome

Exploring the interconnectedness of living systems and their shared role in the applied sciences, traditional wisdom, and ecological governance.

On behalf of Dana Ngo, TerraBiome, I am passing this message on to Trimtab subscribers to raise awareness and engagement around the dumping of nuclear contaminated wastewater from Fukushima into the Ocean.

I have invited Dana to present to tomorrow’s gathering and Dana has offered to come by and share a few words with everyone.

With gratitude,

Stephen Bau,
host of the World Weavers conversations

Communications Procedure to the Human Rights Council against Japan for Radioactive Wastewater Dumping

Dear beautiful community of World Weavers,

The time with World Weavers has been a beautiful one, and I look forward to returning with more energy and insight from the last few months of planetary advocacy. As some of you know, I have been deeply involved in projects which aim to protect oceans (and the planet) from further harm by radioactive waste, particularly with Fukushima, Japan.

I'm writing to you today with the hope that you can support an upcoming filing to the Human Rights Council to stop the dumping of this nuclear waste. This effort is being spearheaded by Ocean Vision Legal in Germany.

I am very happy to report to you, that Ocean Vision Legal has finished the Submission to the Human Rights Council to start a communication to Japan to stop dumping nuclear contaminated wastewater from Fukushima into the Ocean. We are submitting the Communications procedure, 11th of August (evening, GMT+8).

They are attaching a list of organizations and civil society groups to the letter, who endorse the communications procedure. Would you be able to endorse this procedure? Please attach names of your organization and logo by August 11th to this link for Anna’s collection:

https://airtable.com/appS3sAlqo9U2DKWb/shrPSXhibeYtSCZAH

With gratitude,

Dana

—

Dana Ngo

Lead Organizer

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

Connection

I am enough
because we are enough.
My body is connected
to the senses of the Earth.

I am infinite
because we are infinite.
My mind is connected
to the spirit of the Sun.

I am one
because we are one.
My heart is connected
to the soul of the Moon.

I am love
because we are love.
My whole being is connected
to the life of the Universe.

Mental Model

At the beginning of this week, I was exploring the possibility of creating a physical model of my poetry. I am planning that this will be the basis for my talk on Sunday with the 52 Living Ideas community.

Relationships

Connection is the theme of this mental model. The legal and political structures of our social, economic, and political systems have been built on models that are based on the individual in isolation from the collective. They are built upon personal property and personal worth, based on one’s access to financial capital and real estate assets. This mental model is in contrast to these human institutions. Instead, this is a model based on life and the connection of all life on Earth to our relationships with the Sun and Moon. These celestial spheres are interacting with each other through gravity, radiation, and precession. Everything is in motion. The orbit and rotation of these spheres set the rhythms of life. We are relationships of energy.

The View from Somewhere

From the outset, I want to be clear about the perspective I am offering. The modern world has created what appear to be two opposing models of the world: in the vernacular of the religious, these are the secular and the sacred. In the vernacular of science, they might be referred to as physics and metaphysics. Often, the split in understanding is categorized as a modern, scientific and Western philosophy and a traditional, mystical and Eastern practice. I am an integration of both, having been born to an English-Canadian mother and a Chinese father. However, in another sense, I am neither, because I have been disconnected from my roots by my experiences growing up in Canada, a country built around the erasure and assimilation of indigenous cultures.

Each of us have a unique perspective. The concept of the objective perspective of journalism is constructed from a culture that is built around the erasure and assimilation of indigenous cultures and the breaking down of collective communities of care into individuals whose reliance and dependence on national and corporate institutions is secured by division, separation, competition, and the atomization of the self to facilitate the governance of the many by the few.

Lewis Raven Wallace brings attention to this concept of perspective in the book, The View from Somewhere.

Language as Dynamic and Fluid

I cannot assume that we share the same language. The meanings of words are constantly changing as we form our shared understanding of language collectively through the process of communication. Art, communication, and design have formed my background in education and work. I have been working as a designer since 1988. I have experienced how the meaning and process of design and communication have changed profoundly as people adopt new technologies. We have been going through a process of ephemeralization, shifting from the design, prototyping, manufacturing, and production of physical artifacts to the design of social systems. In this process, I have also been letting go of this expected role in society of a designer as my primary identity. Working for a living has not really been working out for me recently. I am leaning more toward my first love as a child. I wanted to be an artist. I settled for design, because I was convinced that this vocation was my way of turning art into a living.

I have been working as a graphic designer in print, video, and web on projects involving brand and visual identity design, corporate communications, marketing, advertising, and web design and development. I have taught in a university setting and, most recently, I have been mentoring designers with an online platform for UX design—user experience design.

That is how I came to be interested in mental models.

According to Jakob Nielsen, “Mental models are one of the most important concepts in human–computer interaction (HCI).”

A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand.

Note the two important elements of this definition:

• A mental model is based on belief, not facts: that is, it’s a model of what users know (or think they know) about a system such as your website. Hopefully, users’ thinking is closely related to reality because they base their predictions about the system on their mental models and thus plan their future actions based on how that model predicts the appropriate course. It’s a prime goal for designers to make the user interface communicate the system’s basic nature well enough that users form reasonably accurate (and thus useful) mental models.

• Individual users each have their own mental model. A mental model is internal to each user’s brain, and different users might construct different mental models of the same user interface. Further, one of usability’s big dilemmas is the common gap between designers’ and users’ mental models. Because designers know too much, they form wonderful mental models of their own creations, leading them to believe that each feature is easy to understand. Users’ mental models of the UI are likely to be somewhat more deficient, making it more likely for people to make mistakes and find the design much more difficult to use.

Finally, mental models are in flux exactly because they’re embedded in a brain rather than fixed in an external medium. Additional experience with the system can obviously change the model, but users might also update their mental models based on stimuli from elsewhere, such as talking to other users or even applying lessons from other systems.

Business Models

In design, we focus on the development of successful business models. According to the design thinking methodology popularized by IDEO, a successful design process is able to design products that fit within the intersection of these three criteria of human-centred design:

• Desirable (human)

• Feasible (technology)

• Viable (business)

That is, the product meets a human need; the product is technologically feasible; and the product is an integral part of a viable business model.

However, if the focus of our work as designers is only on human-centred design, that means that we are leaving so much out of our model. The anthropocentrism of our approach has brought about the Anthropocene.

Life-Centred Design

(Note that the Canadian spelling of “centre” is one way for me to assert an identity that is different from an “American” identity, a sort of cultural inflection to accent my writing.)

I began with an expanded sense of what it means to explore the complexity of human experience by creating mental models that explore the inner sense of self from which we grow and build our social systems.

Again, this process expanded to include the more-than-human world of living beings with whom we share this planet. This has been a process of seeing myself as whole and then seeing myself within the whole of the living organism of the Earth, in relationship with the Sun and the Moon within the whole of the living universe.

It is from this perspective that I have been playing with the English language to find connections in all of these relationships of time, energy, and matter within the experience of being a mind, a heart, and a body. These triangles of relationships seemed to be pointing to something larger—a greater sense of the whole.

Becoming acquainted with Buckminster Fuller has enhanced my sense of the dynamic equilibrium of tension, compression, and precession that is an expression of universal principles of life within all of these interconnected and interdependent relationships.

Glossary

A glossary is a way of playing with language to create a shared sense of meaning around the words that we are discussing in this ongoing conversation we call life.

Physics

Time, energy, and matter are the primary elements of the universe that we explore through the study of our physical reality. I am drawing from Einstein’s equation E=mc² as a way to make a distinction between physics and metaphysics. Physics refers to that which is measurable and quantifiable.

Time

Time is an abstract concept that relates to physical matter in various states of change related to energy and motion that is perceived as a sequence of events. Time is one of the factors in the quantities that we measure to perceive change.

Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.

— Wikipedia: Time

Energy

Energy is an abstract concept that relates to physical matter in various states of motion over time, which can be stored as potential or released as a physical force, often referred to as work. The Greek word ergon means work.

Work, measured in terms of the quantity of heat to which it is equivalent.

— Wiktionary: ergon

Matter

Matter is an abstract concept that relates to the substance of physical reality that can be quantified by mass and volume.

In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume.

— Wikipedia: Matter

Metaphysics

Literally, metaphysics refers to that which is beyond (meta) physics. Physics refers to quantities—to that which is measurable and quantifiable. Metaphysics refers to qualia—to that which is experienced as subjective sensations, feelings, and thoughts within the complex of mind, heart, and body.

In philosophy of mind, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə, ˈkweɪ-/; singular form: quale /-li/) are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkʷaːlɪs]) meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".

Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, and the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characteristics of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.

— Wikipedia: Qualia

Body

The body is the aspect of a living being that experiences action and behaviours.

Mind

The mind is the aspect of a living being that experiences cognition and thoughts.

Heart

The heart is the aspect of a living being that experiences emotion and feelings.

Senses

The body and mind connect through the sense of time, which is perceived through interaction with the physical senses of the body.

Spirit

The mind and heart connect through the sense of energy, which is perceived through interaction with the spirit.

Soul

The heart and body connect through the sense of matter, which is perceived through interaction with the soul.

Self

The body, mind, and heart connect to the sense of self, which is the receptor of all the perceptions, including sensations, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Being

The whole being includes perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). These are the elements of experience defined by Jesse James Garrett in his talk on Design for Engagement. The tetrahedral model expands on this model to include the senses, spirit, and soul as connections between the metaphysical experience of the body, mind, and heart and the physical reality of time, energy, and matter. The tetrahedral model may be considered more of a tetra-ops, a foureyes, as the triangles offer windows to the soul through the four eyes of the tetrahedral structure.

Tensegrity

In tensegrity, both tension and compression are held in an integrity of dynamic equilibrium.

Gravity

Gravity is the inner impulse of the universe, a compression toward coherence, drawing in toward the centre of a body of time, energy, and matter. It may be noted that gravity tends to create a precessional effect of rotation, orbit, and spiraling motion to hold bodies of time, energy, and mass circumferentially in a sort of elliptical embrace, a relationship of dynamic equilibrium.

Radiation

Radiation is the outer impulse of the universe, a tension toward expansion, drawing out from the centre of a body of time, energy, and matter.

Precession

For a body in motion, precession is any action or movement that occurs at 90 degrees to its main direction of motion.

Another way to put it is that an entity may be moving in a direction towards its goal, but at 90 degrees to it, something else is happening that may be very beneficial to the overall ecosystem that the entity is in. This precessional action may actually be of such critical importance to the health of the ecosystem, that one can think of it as the entity’s “purpose”.

How Buckminster Fuller’s Principle of Precession Can Change Your Life

Love

Love is the integral of gravity and radiation. (Synergetics 543.22)

One could say that life and love are the precessional effects of gravity and radiation. Life is the physical effect of gravity and radiation, and love is the metaphysical effect of the inner and outer architecture of the universe.

Inspiration

Inspiration is the connection between the self and the body. The body forms the metaphysical connection between time and matter. The precessional effect of the body is inspiration. Interaction with other bodies creates syntropy, which is life.

Intention

Intention is the connection between the self and the mind. The mind forms the metaphysical connection between time and energy. The precessional effect of the mind is intention. Interaction with other minds has the potential to create synthesis.

Intimacy

Intimacy is the connection between the self and the heart. The heart forms the metaphysical connection between energy and matter. The precessional effect of the heart is intimacy. Interaction with other hearts has the potential to create a metaphysical synesthesia, a blending of hearts into a sense of collective unity and wonder.

Interbeing

Interbeing is the connection between the body and the mind. The body and mind connect through the senses, perceiving the waves of motion and vibration through balance (gravity), taste (chemical interaction, liquid), sight (light radiation), smell (chemical interaction, air), sound (air vibrations), and touch (heat, pressure, and physical vibrations). Interaction with other beings has the potential to create synchronicity.

Intuition

Intuition is the connection between the heart and the mind. The heart and the mind connect through the spirit, perceiving changes in emotional energy. For example, facial expressions signal shifts in emotional state. There is a particular energy associated with the tone of voice. The content of language can profoundly shift the energy in a room. Interaction with other spirits has the potential to create synergy.

Integrity

Integrity is the connection between the heart and the body. The heart and the body connect through the soul, perceiving changes in the physical and emotional states of the self, seeking a state of homeostasis and equilibrium. Interaction with other souls has the potential to create synarchy.

Syntropy

Syntropy is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as physical bodies.

Synthesis

Synthesis is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as mental bodies.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as emotional bodies.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as temporal bodies.

Synergy

Synergy is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as energetic bodies.

Synarchy

Synarchy is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as material bodies.

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

Bucky Inspired

Sunday, July 30, 2023 at 5pm Pacific Time

I am honoured that Shrikant Rangnekar at 52 Living Ideas has invited me to participate in the Bucky Inspired series. I will be a guest speaker for this conversation series on Sunday, July 30, at 5pm Pacific Time. Sign up on Meetup to join this online Zoom meeting.

Update: A video of the presentation was posted to the 52 Living Ideas YouTube channel, which was a 40-minute presentation followed by questions and answers.

I have been exploring mental models that help people to perceive the shift in awareness and consciousness that is required to transform the purposes, behaviours, and effects of our social architecture from building entropy machines to being in relationship with the Earth as a living syntropic organism, a holobiont.

By exploring the integration of physics and metaphysics, we can reconnect with the imaginative possibilities of pataphysics, to be whole integrated living beings. This mental model recognizes the precessional effect of the emergence of life in the relationships of gravity and radiation that connect us with the Sun, Earth, and Moon. This model is inspired by the poetry of Buckminster Fuller: love is metaphysical gravity. The tensegrity of the inner and outer architecture of Universe is the creative force from which life emerges.

Synergetics 543.22 Love is the integral of gravity and radiation.

Inspired by the Jewish Torah, the Christian Bible, Buddhist philosophy, Indigenous cosmologies, gravitational theory, quantum physics, and Buckminster Fuller, this mental model for a living being integrates time, energy, and matter with heart, mind, and body to explore the interactions between inner experience and outer reality that create the dynamically emergent qualities of consciousness and life.

The subjective experience of perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body) form a tetrahedral structure that defines the relationships of tension and compression in a dynamic system. These six relationships can be defined as the inner essence (inner architecture):

• Body : Inspiration

• Senses : Interbeing

• Mind : Intention

• Spirit : Intuition

• Heart : Intimacy

• Soul : Integrity

And the outer expression (outer architecture):

• Action : Syntropy

• Time : Synchronicity

• Cognition : Synthesis

• Energy : Synergy

• Emotion : Synesthesia

• Matter : Synarchy

At the centre is the awareness and consciousness of perception, the stillness found in the void and in the unity of the whole.

This is a mental model of the interface of a living being. This mental model also maps to the orbit of the Earth around the solar system. There are also interesting relationships at the scale of a week. The model is spherical, cyclical and dynamic, avoiding problems we create when we think only in terms of separate parts in abstract, flat, linear, and static patterns.

Can this model also be applied to different scales from the micro to the macro? Buckminster Fuller referred to “the primitive unity of the tetrahedron—one quantum—the minimum structural system of Universe.”

In the subtitle of his book, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Buckminster Fuller seems to be suggesting that physics is inseparable from metaphysics. Perhaps, pataphysics is the creative possibility that emerges from the inner and outer structure of Universe. Therefore, life is the emergent property of the integration of mind, heart, and body with time, energy, and matter. Consciousness, then, is inseparable from the reality of a living Universe.

Zoom Meeting

Sign up for the event on Meetup to join the 52 Living Ideas community for the online conversation to be hosted as a Zoom meeting on Sunday, July 30, at 5pm Pacific Time.

An Interactive Model

Make your own

A model of our inner and outer architecture: mind, heart and body in time, energy, and matter creating synchronicity, synergy, and synarchy through interbeing, intuition, and integrity.

Make your own by printing these pages on four sheets of construction paper printed on both sides (side A and side B). Cut along the solid lines printed on side A of each of the four sheets (easiest using an exacto knife on a cutting matte). Insert the tabs into the slits to complete the assembly of the model.

Download

Black and White

Life Inner Outer Model Print

72.5KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Colour

Life Inner Outer Model Colour Print Dieline

86.3KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

The Seven Days of Co-Creation

When I was considering the possibility of redesigning the calendar as a way to shift my own perceptions and senses of the Earth, the idea that there are thirteen moons in a year was something that came from an exploration of Indigenous cultures.

Moons of the Anishinaabeg

The Anishinaabeg people live in a large area within what is now the United States and Canada. There are actually 13 moons each year, but most cycles follow the 12-month calendar.

The Anishinaabe designated the names of the moon to correspond with the seasonal influence within a given location. Because the region the Anishinaabe lived was so large, the moons may not be called the same thing for all areas.

For example, the Anishinaabeg in lower Michigan would not have the same activities as the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota.   

The Center for Native American Studies adopted this version of moon cycles.

This is where the calendar design began with twelve around one. Three hundred and sixty-five and one quarter days can be divided by thirteen twenty-eight-day months, leaving a remainder of one and one quarter days. Each month can be equally divided by four into seven-day weeks. Given an international standard of a seven-day week, this seemed like the place to start.

Depicting these cycles in circles seemed best. The cycles rotate in the direction of the orbits of planets around the Sun looking down from a northern perspective.

There is an interesting correlation between the week viewed as six days around one and the model of living being, which also corresponds to a view of the solar year.

I was in the mode of designing my own experience of daily meditation. Learning from the Buddhist tradition, there is a focus on the breath. I noticed a pattern in the orbits of the celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. There is a kind of breathing pattern, if one focuses on inner and outer orbits.

A weekly meditation practice as a form of breathing, in and out, as we travel through the inner and outer orbits (relative to the Earth) of the solar system. The weekly cycle aligns with the annual cycle, a weekly reminder of this holistic experience of being alive.

Years ago, I began with questions about the creation story, about the temple, about the third day, and about the Trinity. Over the decades, I was noticing patterns. Is there more to the Genesis story? Light, water, and earth are the pattern of the first three days. Light, water, and earth are the pattern of the second iteration of three days. Then, there is a rest that signals the completion of the cycle of creation. However, creation does not end there. It is a co-creation process, where there is an invitation to recognize the image of the divine and to reflect the same patterns. If God is love, is this the pattern of love?

Intention

On January 17 of this year, I stated my intention for this orbit around the Sun.

Invited to listen to ambient music in a private group, Design Science Studio Creative Practice, I responded,

I could feel the sounds spiralling around me, expanding my sense of presence beyond the inner experience of self. Sound immerses me in a much larger world, connected to the rhythm of ocean waves, and the radiation of the original impulse of love that fills the universe.

We look into the night sky and see the points of light that reach us from light years away. What we may not notice from this perspective are the waves of light growing like spheres throughout the cosmos over billions of years. Like an immersion in sound vibrations, our universe is immersed in an ocean of light. The care taken to bring this life into being feels like swimming in an ocean of love.

And I added,

If we could navigate consciousness and time, what would the interface look like? What would love look like? Probably not like this. But, this is where my intuition has led me so far. It is a way of seeing life in a glance, while needing eternity to explore it all. As a mental model, it is very low resolution. It is merely a symbolic reference to the whole of experience, so it does not replace experience. It merely points to it. For myself, it does begin to help make sense of it all. To see life as a unified whole, with many diverse, complex, and unique perspectives to explore time and space.

Ensoulment

I had a conversation with Veronica Anderson this week in our bi-weekly ensoulment session.

Veronica: Can we get more specific about the outcome you’re looking for with this embodiment of love?

Stephen: I guess that’s probably where it’s been really difficult to even think in that way. Trying to put it in specifics feels like becoming attached to something—to expectations that are are going to just crash and burn, because it’s just been another pattern that I’ve been going through of, “I’m gonna throw all my chips into this and then see what happens.” And then I’m doing it on my own, I guess, and it just doesn’t work. And so that tenderness, I think, is feeling like it is holding me back. It puts me in that fear—a fight, flight, or freeze response. I don’t want to put myself into that position of being disappointed again. But my recognition of what a full embodiment of love is means letting go of fear. So what I would love is this dream of being part of a creative collective of people who are fully embodying love together—that’s the ultimate goal. But I’m just not sure what the shape of that is.

And that’s part of the process that I’m going through is creating a model of what that might look like, first of all, and then feeling what that is like personally. And then wondering, “Is this a model that we can integrate into a collective?” So what I’m recognizing, as I’m modelling what a living being looks like, it’s this living, breathing entity. And the breathing is this cycle that’s going around and then in and then out again.

And because I’m seeing that resonance within myself, at the collective scale, at the universal scale, it feels like the journey I started a few years ago is becoming more and more clear as I go through this process. So it’s helping me let go of that fear. My soul knows where to go.

It’s grown into these senses for navigating metaphysical gravity. I’m seeing love as action, as process, as something that I’m doing intuitively.

So it’s not like this either/or. The fear is always going to be there. But that’s not the focus. The focus is always on, “How am I navigating—not the fear—but navigating love.

I keep hearing this idea that love needs to be a public policy, but the problem with that is love doesn’t have a clear definition. So, when I’m reading Bell Hooks, All About Love, that’s where she starts. If we have a clear definition of love, then that makes it a whole lot easier to actually live into it. And for me, if I’m doing anything—and in a kind of Bucky way—it’s, “There’s no point in fighting the existing model.” Because the model is fear. If you fight the fear, you just make more fear. So that’s what I’m doing. We have got to create the new model and we actually have to be able to articulate what love is. So this is as close as I can get to feeling what this is like. I’m going to show this model around to people and ask, “How does this feel to you? Can we do this together?” That’s where I’m going with it. “If I can embody this, can we do this together?”

Veronica: It feels like we really got somewhere with that. “A clear definition of love.” That feels like a specific outcome to lean into. Does that feel accurate?

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely.

Veronica: I don’t want to miss the chance to validate how that process went for you and to bring your attention to the way that you started by speaking into the shadow. Really, well done. Because you named the resistance. That was really powerful: “Because it’s actually just fear.” You named that. “There’s a resistance to being specific because it feels like I’m getting attached expectations.” And then, “These past experiences of failing because I’m doing it on my own, essentially.” And this activation—that’s trauma response around being disappointed again. So you very concisely named all of that, and that’s the landscape, right? That’s the shadow that you’re using to create this goal. You’re going into the shadows and then you’re using that to create light.

I feel honoured to have witnessed that. And then, right away you said, “A full embodiment of love means letting go of fear.” And so you already were aware that this is resistance: fear. “I’m in fear around this question of a specific outcome. I don’t like it. My body is reacting to it.” And I wanted to also share with you that today, the twelfth of July, there is a square happening between the Sun and Chiron. Chiron is the wounded healer. And right now this transit is asking us to reconcile with our failure, our past failures and move forward anyway. So there’s this really supportive energy right now for acknowledging that crumbling that has been part of the journey, and that excruciating pain of disappointment. And I love that you named attachment to expectations was such a limiting experience to have and it’s wonderful that you’re aware of it from this “liberation from suffering” standpoint, where we know that attachment creates suffering. And to really hold this specific outcome question lightly and to say, “I’m looking for a clear definition of love.” I don’t know what format it is going to take. It might be a book. It might be a book, a workshop, and a song. It could be many things. It could just be one thing. It could just be your life. But I think holding this as a specific outcome is… What do you think? Does it feel like this could support you on your goal setting?

Stephen: Yeah, I think it’s part of the whole thing, of articulating what I’m doing is the project. The way I was describing it in the Design Science Studio Creative Practice group is, “This feels like concrete poetry.” I’m trying to actually take something that feels very ephemeral, and taking my skills from design, put words to this, put colour to this. There are all these different layers of resonance that we can explore.

And the embodiment would be that full resonance that is hard to miss, that sense of, “Oh, yeah. I felt nourished. I felt cared for. I felt trust. I felt intimacy. I felt love.” All those things that feel so hard to put into words, but the actual experience of it is pretty hard to miss.

Affirmation

I reached out to a colleague about some of the work that I have been doing over the last few years and received this affirmation.

Thank you for sharing these! I’m glad to see you’re on Substack, and continuing to write and publish. Your robust ideas and frameworks deserve a home. I admit there is a great deal to take in and process and can’t attempt at this time to take it all in — yet I recognize these as the continuing evolution of your pattern-recognition, synthesis and blending towards a “unified field theory” of love and wholeness across all disciplines. It’s an Einsteinian pursuit, with so many gorgeous influences and beautiful outputs. I hope future readers and discoverers along the way will be able to recognize and benefit from the massive effort you are putting out here. Also, love that in addition to writing and theorizing, you’re continuing to prioritize healing, “ensoulment” and self-acceptance. I’m honoured to have been pointed towards your treasure-troves.

Life – Universal Principles – RGB Poster

256KB ∙ PDF file

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A vector-based PDF of a poster of the universal principles of life, including living systems, social systems, and earth systems, created by Stephen Bau.

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Another colleague offered this question regarding the above image.

Stephen Bau, do you make versions of these for your grandchild? I want versions for my children. I imagine my child studying a version of this that’s at his eye level as he learns to read and allowing it to naturally inform his cosmology as he makes sense of the world.

I replied,

This work I have been doing has not felt finished enough to put into a form that I felt ready to share as complete. It is always evolving. So, I have been sharing my process instead.

But it is helpful to receive the affirmation that what I have created would be valuable in its current form.

My heart is full this morning. I am honoured to receive such high praise for my art—to entrust these words to one’s children to help them grow their sense of the world.

I have been pondering what it is I am doing, and it has been an inner quest to answer the question, “What does love look like?”

So, I resorted to what I knew from my background in design—form, line, colour, and typography—to create a form of art in the medium I am familiar, a creative practice in concrete poetry, finding resonance between myself and the vibrations of energy all around me in the form of gravity waves that we sense as balance, along with pressure and heat (touch), taste, smell, sound, and light. In all these different senses, we are detecting waves of energy at different scales of proximity and amplitude. This constant stream of experience is a form of information and communication. It feels like I have been wondering what all of this overwhelming amount of information might be communicating, if there was any meaning and purpose to any of it. I have come to sense this information to be an ocean of love, and we are swimming in it. That shift in perception changes everything.

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

This statement humors and honors experience, journeying and expansion with presupposing any guilt on the doer.  Life is a learned (and therefore shared) experience.  How can you do wrong when you are always doing.  You are a bundle of experience.  Not guilt, shame or other wise.  Nature does not cast blame or shame.  It is just an effective, ongoing, eternal verb.  Sometimes moving glacially and other times at warp speed.  Again.  Kind of cool if you think about it.  Degrees of freedom. Nice statement.  Again, it is something that we already have.  Not wise to retreat from this, as all it would do is cause suffering and pain.  We are all the sum total of existence.  The sum totaling does not stop.  Ever.  Think about that.  So we are here.  Earning our wings in the best and most advantageous way as possible.  You can’t talk to people who won’t listen.  It behooves us to keep putting one foot in front of the other, learning in ways that make the good times better and the hard times softer.  Pain is built into the system.  Suffering isn’t.  Again, think about that.  You have options.  Solutions are available.  Whatever direction you go is good.  Just stay open.  Keep learning.  As long as you are in movement you're fine.  And everything that you’ve done has gotten you to this place where you are reading these words now.

A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.

Concrete Poetry

Love Letters to the Universe

Buckminster Fuller wrote Synergetics with the subtitle, Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking.

This week, I found myself iterating over the same ideas, trying to find the right words that felt in resonance with the rhythms and cycles of life that I have been trying to sense throughout the year. As I was contemplating the process, I was thinking about my art as a kind of concrete poetry, finding the right words that are more meaningful in their arrangement in space and geometric relationships as well as chromatic relationships (color and resonance). When I was invited into an art exhibition that involved a Love Letter Writing Workshop, that felt like a resonance with where this whole process started. These words began as a collection of ideas to help me define love in tangible, practical terms. Now, I find myself tuning into the resonances between the music of the spheres, the colour spectrum, and the rhythms of the heart. Buckminster Fuller began with the concept of waves when teaching children about Synergetics.

Reality and Inexactitude

Bucky described reality in this way:

543.01 Reality is the special case, episodic, high-frequency recall of like experiences within our individual scenario lives. Reality is nothing but highfrequency recurrence of the awareness of a dominant generalized principle remanifesting itself in our special case awareness sequences.

Generalized Principles

543.11 Metaphysical principles are absolutely exact, absolutely inelastic, and absolutely intolerant of error: these are the generalized principles.

Gravity and Radiation

543.20 Gravity and Love
543.21 The scientific word for the integral of all the special case realizations of gravity is love.
543.22 Love is the integral of gravity and radiation.

Physics and Metaphysics

The basic model of the universe is life, a tetrahedron that integrates physics and metaphysics into an experience of being alive.

Perceiving Truth

After finding resonance between a model of a living being and the calendar I had been working on to represent our place in the solar system, I felt like things were falling into place. The solar system is like an iris that gives us a view of ourselves as an integral of gravity and radiation, relationships of energy that create a synergy, a whole that is greater than the parts taken separately: life.

Quanta and Qualia

It started to make more sense when I pulled everything apart and put it back together as relationships between the essence, quality, and reality of the various elements of life, divided into qualia (metaphysical, abstract, subjective, experience) and quanta (physical, concrete, objective, reality). As a matrix, it is easier to see the relationships between the triads.

Elements of Life

The triads are distributed around a hexagonal colour wheel to form a holistic model of the experience of being alive. The periodic table of elements is a living model that helps us understand the cycles of life.

Generalized Principles

These patterns connect to the universal principles and the relationships between the patterns of life at the human scale, the social scale, and the planetary scale. In this model are the living systems of the human body as they relate to the social boundaries outlined in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and the basic pattern of living processes outlined in the Biblical six days of creation, represented as two iterations of three days in this structure: light, water, land.

This may just be my own contrivance, integrating Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, and Genesis, but for me, it is a beautiful way to perceive Universe as communicating with us in this very intimate manner through gravity waves and electromagnetic radiation that make up the very elements of the experience of being alive.

A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting

Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.

We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.

Read more

Hello Friends… I’d like to invite you to the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s community gathering I’ll be hosting Friday, July 28th at 11:00 AM Pacific Time

Zoom call https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2290248760

Looking for positive deviants in all the right places… 

In the late 1970’s I lived and worked with a friend who helped produce the 1976 World Game with Bucky. I soon became immersed in Buckyness and was inspired by how he shared his perspectives that deviated from the norms helping to make the invisible visible. 

Since then I have been on a path to find the positive deviants, those who are making a difference in the world because they know it’s their calling, the right thing to do with their life. 

This is why I have checked in with BFI since its inception over the last 40 years and find myself here now curious who are the positive deviants of our time and what are they up to.

Please come share your story, projects, and/or intentions with others whom you may find synchronicity and resonance. You will have the opportunity to share or listen in and join breakouts to further the depths of conversation.

We look forward to your presence and participation.

See you then,

Mark Smith 

You have to have courage to encourage.

If not, you are just spouting words.

Courage is another example of presence. It also can be imparted through action and silence. The word was always important to me for some reason. Even as a child. It ranked up there with terms like “liberty” and “freedom.” Uncool words that also seem to be slotted to a political ideology and rarely left to stand on their own.

So let’s take them off the scrap heap of existance and apply them in good ways.

Anyone that has left a system or environment to better his or her world has courage. Those who have had their unproveable experiences gaged by their own bodies (especially one’s heart) and imagination and extend these experiences to the world at large have courage. Those who have undergone pain and maintained their spirit have courage.

Courage to encourage.

Rolls off the tongue nicely.

Those of use who deal with the ineffable and unseen seems to have this in spades. Our worlds and perceptions are easily influenced and sometimes overwhelmed because we are open channels who effort to remain open. Courage. So we learn as we go. And when need be rely on others to keep our spirits and frequencies high and held.

It’s worth the feelings that we feel.

—

www.mauricekaehler.com

Pathway Guide (Roadmap)

Contributed by Stephen Bau, Wayfinder of Metaphysical Gravity on January 16, 2022

• Blog

• Podcast

• Magazine

• Book

• Human experience design

• Life-centered design

• Participatory design workshops

• Learning platform

• Resources archive

• Open source repository

• Publishing pipeline

• Onboarding process

• Guardian mentoring

• Minimalist journal

• Interbeing journeys

• Ecosystem restoration practices

• Ecovillages

Blog

Schedule a regular blog post to guide the conversation, collaboration, and learning process of the group, integrating course content into resources that can be shared to inspire, empower, and serve the community of artists around the world, which, as we know, includes every human being.

Podcast

Aggregating the voices of artists into a unified stream of consciousness to grow in connection through sound, music, and conversation.

Magazine

A print or digital publication that can serve as a tangible record of the activities, projects, bioregions, and communities that are involved in the work of the Design Science Studio and to grow our community to include those who have supported us with their presence, partnership, resources, projects, and ideas.

Book

A tangible artifact to reflect the diversity, complexity, and beauty of our community by honouring the work of artists as a collective project of creative collaboration, building a sense of unity, synergy, and synchronicity of our intentions, values, work, and play.

Human Experience Design

Transforming the language of design to invite the participation of every human being in the process of creating cultures that draw on the resilience and beauty of human creativity and collaboration and care to live in deep connection, relationship, and communion with the earth, nature, and community.

Life-Centered Design

Enlarging our imaginations and the scope of our work to embrace the universe of life as an interdependent and interconnected whole, recognizing the fragility, diversity, and complexity that gives life integrity, beauty, and vitality.

Participatory Design Workshops

Design with communities to increase connection, capacity, and agency to empower people to live in deep symbiosis and reciprocity with all of life.

Learning Platform

Build a learning platform that allows for the complexity of a multidisciplinary creative and collaborative practice while simplifying the process of finding resources that help people focus time and energy and attention on what really matters at each step in the journey to learn, to grow, and to create healthy, living cultures of care and empathy.

Resources Archive

Organize information and artefacts that enhance each person’s ability to integrate their actions into a community of care for earth, nature, community, and individual.

Open Source Repository

Build the capacity of the whole by creating a library of technologies, standards, practices, frameworks, tools, and code that enhance and enable synergies and connections and communication that are necessary for the well-being of living systems.

Publishing Pipeline

Design and engineer a process that integrates a Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) approach to content strategy that facilitates multiple forms of output or publication. The storage of data and the API should then enable the ability to retrieve, reuse, measure, and transform content into various media as required with the minimum effort by reducing or avoiding duplication and waste. Automate processes to reduce wasted effort.

Onboarding Process

Create an onboarding process for new members of the community to improve communication around expectations, responsibilities, and benefits of working together in a collaborative, empowering, and respectful social organization. Reduce levels of information overload and technology overwhelm by accommodating to different capacities, styles, and pace for learning, adaptation, and integration.

Guardian Mentoring

Provide opportunities to people based on demonstrated knowledge, experience, and skill in ethics, empathy, sensitivity, leadership, and conflict resolution to serve the community as guardians of pods. Prepare and build the capacity of those who desire to serve in leadership roles.

Minimalist Journal

Develop habits and rituals to form individual behaviours and a healthy organizational culture by co-creating tools to make incremental adjustments necessary to realize transformational changes in consciousness, motivations, behaviours, and synergies.

Interbeing Journeys

Develop pods and teams to work together on community building through opportunities for connection, organizing, project integration, design critiques, peer review, collaboration, play, and celebration, which can also involve rites of passage to signify and acknowledge individual and collective milestones and achievements.

Ecosystem Restoration Practices

Engage in individual and collective practices to unlearn old habits and learn new ways of being in deep relationship and reciprocity with the living earth.

Ecovillages

Create models for community life that builds connections with nature and with each other that is a participatory process of building knowledge, capacity, and experience to regenerate and grow living systems.

Resources

• Papa Mau: The Wayfinder

• From Commons to Catastrophe: The Destruction of the Forests

• In Korean DMZ, Wildlife Thrives. Some Conservationists Worry Peace Could Disrupt It

• Natural Energy and Water: The Work of Viktor Schauberger

• A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

• “racial apartheid and genocide through our intractable silence” — Stephen Bau

• Supreme Court of Canada on the Legitimacy of Crown Assertion of Sovereignty — Gib van Ert

During a session of the Design Science Studio featuring Javier Senosiain presenting on biophillic design + architecture, Session 39: Thursday, March 17, 2022, the chat discussion in the Zoom session included a reference to a multi-lingual learning environment, Polyglot Consciousness Immersion. Combined with the proposal for an Institute of Inner and Outer Architecture and a Storytelling Fellowship, this became the inspiration for the design of a social architecture for a Union of Consciousness, representing a model for a holistic human experience design community.

Union of Consciousness

• Learning: Institute of Inner and Outer Architecture (Heart)

• Community: Learning + Curriculum

• Translation: Polyglot Consciousness Immersion (Mind)

• Solidarity: MythOS + Storytelling

• Connection: Storytelling Fellowship (Body)

• Co-Creation: Relationships + pARTnerships

Institute of Inner and Outer Architecture

• Resourcing

• Learning

• Co-Regulation

Polyglot Consciousness Immersion

• Sensemaking

• Conscious Linguistics

• Translation

Storytelling Fellowship

• Shared Meals

• Dancing

• Worldbuilding

• Connection

• Prototyping

• Fireside Chats

• Communion

Human Experience Design

Shifting the narrative to the power of the collective and a unified consciousness that honours the unique contributions of each and every life as sacred. Decolonizing our information ecology by empowering creators to author their own stories and to build a world that loves itself.

Connecting heart + mind + body

Learning + Curriculum

Creating models and structures to help people see the connections between their individual practice, collective work, and global impact.

Connecting heart + mind

Relationships + pARTnerships

Holding space for conversations to listen, document, and process each person’s needs, skills, and aspirations to understand how they fit together into our collective vision and the syntropic whole of our living Earth.

Connecting heart + body

MythOS + Storytelling

Storytelling as community building to understand the rich library of experiences hidden behind each façade. Storytelling as a safe container for exploring imaginative possibilities while testing scenarios for unintended consequences to avoid and solve real-world problems.

Connecting mind + body

Organic Architecture by Javier Senosian

Javier Senosiain, a Mexican architect and author of the “Bio-Architecture” book. He is known for his colourful organic architecture inspired by Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The architectural style is a reflection of the colourful Mexican art. It remodels the aspects of the human form. Organic architecture is the harmonization of humans and the environment.

— Rethinking The Future: Javier Senosiain - 15 Iconic Projects

A surreal architecture in the form of a snake. Quetzalcoatl Nest consists of ten apartments. The vibrant colourful wall attracts the visitors which is contrasted with the soft colour of the wooden planes.

— Rethinking The Future: Javier Senosiain - 15 Iconic Projects

— dezeen: “Every work is very different” in organic architecture says Javier Senosiain