Co-operating Manual for Being Human
A project of the builders collective and the Design Science Studio
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If design is everything a human touches, we are all designers.
Vision
Connecting to ourselves
to connect to each other
to connect to the earth
so we can build a world that loves itself.
Design Science
Design science is shorthand for comprehensive anticipatory design science.
comprehensive
universal
whole
past
anticipatory
particular
local
future
design
metaphysical
creative
process
science
physical
empirical
analytical
Design Science Studio
Over the course of a year, the team fields applications to the Design Science Studio, and selects the cohort for integration into the collective project of the Design Science Decade.
We are working to fulfill Buckminster Fuller’s vision of retooling the world to work for 100% of life in 10 years. We have updated the original 1965–1975 Design Science Decade documents, starting with a new version of the original five two-year phases.
2020–2021 Reconciliation and Commitment
2022–2023 Restoration and Capital Transfer
2024–2025 Resilience and Coming-Together
2026–2027 Regeneration and Celebration
2028–2029 Re-enchantment and Circularity
The journey is the destination.
The community is the project.
Curiosity
Discover a group of artists and creatives who genuinely care about engaging in the work of making a world that works for 100% of life.
Connection
Join as a member of the Design Science Studio, a coheART of 144 people who are learning how integrate their knowledge, skills, and experience.
Care
Learn how to care for self, others, and for the earth by connecting with peers, visionaries, and mentors who are practicing the principles of regeneration.
Collaboration
Co-create ways of being together that nurture the intellectual, emotional, and embodied skills of caring and cooperation to find synergies in collaboration.
Community
Commit to building the culture, structures, and integrity to strengthen social bonds, practice mutual aid, and build a strong community of care.
Collaboration Principles
We are at a critical juncture in human evolution. We are nearing collapse in all of the systems we are a part of: environmental/ecosystems, economic systems, political systems, agriculture, industry, healthcare and education. We urgently need a new model or models that operate with new fundamental values around respect, interdependence, awareness, balance, biomimicry, regeneration, and communication.
To formulate these new models by calling on the wisest minds as resources, combining the best of ancient and modern wisdom. Building a blueprint as the foundation that is replicable. And then, with a rapid prototyping mindset, bringing together resources to regenerate the earth and begin to build the new model with intelligent design principles with some expediency.
Human Experience
As comprehensive anticipatory design scientists, we need to understand that materials that we are working with. We are nature. We are the evolution of the living systems of this planet that we inhabit. At the core of what it means to be human are the faculties to be able to navigate our reality in spacetime, which we understand through Einstein’s elegantly simple equation E = mc² to describe a universe composed of the interplay of time, energy, and matter.
To navigate this world of motion and vibration and the interaction of waves of energy and electro- magnetic radiation, human beings experience the universe through senses that perceive changes, through a mind that can process thoughts, through a heart that can make sense of emotions, and a body that can respond to our physical environment.
Experience Design
Jesse James Garrett on Design for Engagement
We have ways of navigating reality that involve the mind, heart, and body as well as six primary senses which provide the faculties of perception to see, hear, smell, balance, touch, and taste.
The mind helps us to map reality through cognition. We remember the past, but we also develop intentions for present awareness and actions that connect to our aspirations for the future.
The heart helps us to navigate reality through emotion. We might not be able to predict the future, but we can feel what is right or wrong.
The body connects the heart and mind to action in the flow of experience and our shared presence in physical reality on planet Earth.
Navigation Principles
Finding our way in the world
Buckminster Fuller wanted to understand the impact that one person could have in the world by using the concept of a trim tab.
“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all.”
“So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, ‘Call me Trimtab.’”
Instrumental Principles
Emotions are instruments for sensing reality
The people and the things that we care about are expressed through emotions. To be able to make sense of what we are feeling in our bodies, we use language to connect sensations in our body to thoughts in our mind so that we can interpret sensations as emotions.
If we are very sensitive to the subtle and gross changes in sensations, thoughts, and emotions, we will be more perceptive of what is going on within ourselves and with each other.
We understand that polarities and contrasts help us to know the difference between pleasure and pain and how to optimize our experience for equanimity.
Contrast: In order to make sense of our sensations, we are able to consider the qualities of our senses and place them on a scale from one extreme to another, such as hot and cold, for example.
Spacetime
Integrating the physical sciences with metaphysical experience through design
How do we make sense of the vast expanse of the universe and the microscopic world of quantum mechanics? The prevailing theories seem to be having some difficulty in finding how the universal and the particular are integrated through mathematical models that are apparently at odds with each other.
Then there is the hard problem of consciousness. How can we make sense of experience when much of what we think, feel, and sense are so difficult to measure and quantify?
Consciousness and experience have been the realm of art, philosophy, psychology, and spirituality. Can we integrate the quantitative and the qualitative, physics and metaphysics?
Inner Architecture
Collectively, human beings have been exploring what it means to alive, wondering who we are, how our bodies function, and what kind of world we inhabit.
The most mysterious world to explore is the inner landscape, since we tend to be able to describe these subjective sensations, thoughts, and emotions of the self and compare them with those of others through the limited vocabulary and metaphors of language.
When we synthesize the knowledge gained through spiritual traditions, geometry, art, architecture, psychology, cognitive science, and experience design, we can begin to see the patterns and connections.
The mind gives us a vision of what is and what could be. The heart gives us a will to intuit and to choose. The body gives us the ability to apply effort to effect change in ourselves and our world.
Intellectual Integrity
The integrity of intention, intuition, and interbeing create a sense of awareness of self, of others, and of the world that can focus vision, will, and effort on the people and things that really matter.
A strong mind, heart, and body provide the foundation for building a resilient structure:
Mind: vision supports learning
Heart: will supports caring
Body: effort supports making
Through the process of time applied to matter through the energy of a living system, we turn:
intention into purpose
intuition into meaning
interbeing into belonging
Emotional Integrity
A strong center of awareness supports a focused intention, an embodied intuition, and a connected sense of interbeing that is able to motivate the will to act on the vision through emotional integrity:
Curiosity connects learning with purpose
Empathy connects purpose with caring
Honesty connects caring with meaning
Creativity connects meaning with making
Generosity connects making with belonging
Intimacy connects belonging with learning
When all of these elements of our being are working together, we have an inner structure and resilience to support a freedom that is balanced with responsibility, affording the possibility of bringing into reality the kind of world we envision, a world that works for all of life.
Physical Integrity
The connections between the inner architecture and outer architecture of the human body are quite interesting, if this model holds up to reality.
mind ➔ learning ➔ nervous system
see ➔ curiosity ➔ sensory system
time ➔ purpose ➔ lymphatic system
hear ➔ empathy ➔ endocrine system
heart ➔ caring ➔ cardiovascular system
smell ➔ honesty ➔ respiratory system
matter ➔ meaning ➔ musculatory system
balance ➔ creativity ➔ integumentary system
body ➔ making ➔ skeletal system
touch ➔ generosity ➔ urinary system
energy ➔ belonging ➔ digestive system
taste ➔ intimacy ➔ reproductive system
Social Integrity
These categories of our social systems are borrowed from Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics with some regenerative language to replace the existing biases of the existing economic systems.
nervous ➔ learning and research
sensory ➔ network
lymphatic ➔ health
endocrine ➔ peace and justice
cardiovascular ➔ social equity
respiratory ➔ political voice
musculatory ➔ energy
integumentary ➔ home and belonging
skeletal ➔ creative co-creation
urinary ➔ water
digestive ➔ food
reproductive ➔ gender equality
Planetary Integrity
These categories of the Earth’s global systems are admittedly the most subjective, as they are drawn from the progression found in the first chapter of Genesis: light, water, land, which is repeated twice in the first six days of the creation narrative.
nervous ➔ learning and research ➔ light
sensory ➔ network ➔ physics
lymphatic ➔ health ➔ chemistry
endocrine ➔ peace and justice ➔ biology
cardiovascular ➔ social equity ➔ water
respiratory ➔ political voice ➔ psychology
musculatory ➔ energy ➔ sociology
integumentary ➔ home and belonging ➔ ecology
skeletal ➔ creative co-creation ➔ earth
urinary ➔ water ➔ water cycle
digestive ➔ food ➔ food chain
reproductive ➔ gender equality ➔ biodiversity
Universal Principles
Everything is connected. The universe is interdependent and interconnected in ways that we have not been able to perceive until now. We have learned from each other that we each have different perspectives that contribute to the understanding of the whole.
Each being is of immeasurable worth to the whole, because of the impact of one life to the being, the processes, and the transformations that occur through the interactions of each with the whole.
In this model of the human being and the way one life is connected to the social organism and the living being of the earth, we can begin to see the connections between the individual, the collective, and the global scales of our shared reality.
Radiation
The mind receives messages interpreted by the brain and processes sensations, thoughts, and emotions. The mind also projects intentions into reality through electro-magnetic radiation, the vibrations of the waves of energy that put matter into motion, turning intention into reality.
Connecting to the mind
Gravity
The emotions bring coherence to human experience by drawing hearts to each other through the bond of attraction and gravitation that allows individual particles to maintain individual identity while being connected to each other through the interplay of forces throughout the universe.
Connecting to the heart
Synergy
The body transforms cognition and emotion into action through the interface of thought and proprioception that allows mind and heart to interact with the physical world, building, maintaining, and holding together the many complex and diverse systems necessary to create the experience of life.
Connecting to the body
Learning + Research
Creating models and structures to help people see the connections between their individual practice, collective work, and global impact. We build connections of trust between the heart and mind to find the synergy to innovate, create, and collaborate—to turn possibilities into realities.
Connecting heart + mind
Imagination + 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
Relationships + Collaborations
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 within our collaboration as living beings on the Earth.
Connecting heart + body
Entropy Engines
Corporations and nation states are extensions of the colonial systems of global social exploitation, economic extraction, and political domination that, since the papal bull of 1493, have been staking their claims over the “discovery” of territories, the “exploration” of resources, and the “innovation” of products, services, architecture, and social systems. These are the processes, artifacts, and systems that have been produced by the exploitation of labour by a small group of managers and owners of capital who dominate hierarchical structures of authoritarian social, economic, and political control.
In the effort to maximize property, capital, and profit, the focus of human time, energy, and resources has been directed to serve the executive functions and energy consumption industries of corporate monopoly, destroying the living systems of the planet by manufacturing fear, scarcity, and violence.
Syntropy Organisms
The evolution of design is shifting from a focus on producing physical artifacts to creating social systems. This process of ephemeralization is rendering obsolete the systems that we have developed to create products and services to meet the needs of communities of consumption that are oriented around a media system that serves the corporate model of global exploitation through the design of brands that define the identities of homogenized populations of markets.
Corporations are realizing that to stay adaptive, competitive, and innovative, they must recognize the value of design. Designers are creative, collaborative, self-organizing learning communities that are necessary to keep an organization alive and thriving. Experience designers are helping the executive decision-making functions of corporations to engage in a process of participatory sensemaking—of listening, empathizing, understanding, analyzing and designing—to transform the unsustainable models of corporate industry and economic governance from the inside out.
BLDRS
building leaders to design a resilience society
imagine: creativity and innovation at the intersection of art and science
design: influenced by the past, shaping the future
build: building resilience, relationships and community
Exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.
imagine: imaginaxiom.com
design: designinfluences.com
build: builderscollective.com
social architecture: socialarc.com
BLDRS Collective Inc
builders collective
A gathering of people who are investing their collective time, energy, and resources in the challenge of reimagining our social architecture.