Permaculture design process

From How To Live Wiki

This article was originally written for a workshop on kitchen permaculture I presented.

“By resourceful design, we keep the number and scope of our actions to a minimum required to meet human needs, provide a quality life, protect and (if necessary) heal the ambient ecosystem, all living things that our actions might touch. The less we change to achieve those goals, the better we have designed. Good design is not gaudy, it is efficient, humane, and above all restrained.” (Dan Hemenway, Elfin Permaculture, "Appropriate Scale Considerations,” July 2009)

The Four Steps of Permaculture Design

★ Observe
+ Needs and yields.
+ Zones
+ Sectors

★ Evaluate
★ Design
★ Implement

Through design, we are looking at the past, the present and the future of a particular place and the people who live there.

Observe.

First we observe the site of the design, its place, and all that that can mean and encompass. Observation is not a casual glance. It doesn’t happen in a hurry. It is intentional. It sees the home place in all of its contexts, visible (physical features, resources, structures, etc) and invisible (community, laws and regulations, cultural mores, etc.). Don't think that there is anything predetermined about the home place. It might be in a high rise apartment building in a large city. It might be an acreage in a rural area. It might be a house in a suburb. It could be a boat on the ocean. It is a place where one or more persons live.

The place could be invisible, if the design process is for some kind of a human cultural construct like a system, organization, revolution, etc.

If there is a geographic location involved with this place, observation includes climate records and weather observations. Here we are mostly interested in minimums and maximums, average figures aren’t of any particular use in permaculture design. We need to know the extremes, so our design can handle them. The average temperature in January in Oklahoma might be 45 degrees, but if it regularly dips down to 10 or 15 degrees (Farenheit), then our design had better take that into account, otherwise we will be cold more often than will be comfortable.

To be of practical use, the observations must be recorded, in both a narrative and in the form of one or more maps of the area to be designed, in its context. You will learn a lot about your situation by writing a narrative about it and making maps. The written observations should include a list of the resources available, the resources needed, any particular problems, challenges or hazards, the skills, knowledge, and abilities of the residents, their desires and goals for the future, the amount of resources presently needed, the amount expected to be needed in the future, the impact of the invisible structures of government and community, etc. The goal is a holistic observation.

★ Needs and Yields.
One important aspect of observation is understanding the needs and the benefits of everything presently on the home place. This is a list of the various elements of your home place, in table form, with a column for “needs” and a column for “benefits”. You could do this in a spread sheet. For example:

Element: fruit trees
Needs: water, fertility/nutrition, space, human work
Benefits: shade, fruit, beauty, habitat

You could make this more elaborate, by adding additional columns for benefits (one benefit per column). This would enable you to sort your list and find connections in both benefits and needs.

Don’t forget inanimate objects, like “Kitchen Equipment”. It needs use, storage, cleaning and offers benefits – food preparation and maybe even decoration.

★ Zones
You should also observe the zones of the home place, which is permaculture-speak for understanding the patterns of human household interactions with the other elements of the home place. Diagram or list the zones on your home place and what happens in each zone.

★ Sectors.
List the energy and resources flowing in to the home place. Where does the electricity, natural gas, propane, wood, wind, rain, gasoline, food, etc. come from? How do these flows change over time (days, weeks, months, years,). Are there cycles? Where do energy and resources leave the home place? What patterns presently exist at the home place that capture or use or redirect these flows of energy and resources? Document as much of this as you can. Try making a “sector diagram” showing the resources and energy flowing onto and away from the home place. You may find it helpful to make a list or table of the sectors and what they are doing. At minimum, you should look at sun, wind, and rain. You can also consider fire, if your area is subject to periodic wild fires. Soil is often considered to be another sector.

Evaluate.

Evaluation is the process of looking at your observations and understanding them.

★ Evaluate the zones of the home place. Use the analysis you made of your interactions with the various elements of your home place in the Household Food Systems Inventory as the basis of your evaluation.

★ Evaluate the sectors. Is anything working together? Are sectors/forces clashing? Is there erosion? How can these energies be redirected for more beneficial uses? What work can they do for you and other elements of the home place?

★ What problems were discovered during the observation phase? What are the potential solutions, appropriate to the scale of the home place, to those problems? What would be involved in harnessing the energy and resources that entropy is sending through the home place before they are entirely dissipated? Since it is pretty hard to do just one thing, if not impossible, what other impacts/consequences (intended or unintended) will there be on my design and work?

★ Evaluate your needs and benefits table. Look for connections, synergies, elements that can benefit each other, or whose yields can satisfy the needs of other elements.

There's rational work here, and also intuition. The goal is a holistic evaluation of the entire situation so that design recommendations can be determined and implemented. Don’t be afraid to use your intuition and follow hunches. It’s OK to trust yourself. Facts and details must be examined carefully, but your inner vision is of equal importance. If it doesn’t “feel” right, keep looking and designing until it does.

Design.

Design proceeds, in the context of the observation and evaluation, by the application of permaculture ethics, principles, strategies, and tactics to achieve the desired results.

Over and over, we ask ourselves –

Where do we put this item?
How can it be placed for maximum benefit?

In more detail. . . What functions does it serve?
How are those functions connected with other elements of the design?
Can additional functions be stacked here?

Design is about taking all these seemingly disparate elements and working with them to create a beneficial system that cares for the planet, cares for the people, and cares for the future.

Areas of design to be considered:

★ Food
★ Water
★ Resource cycling
★ Energy
★ Shelter
★ Invisible structures (government, social and economic systems, culture)
★ Natural systems
★ Hazards

For example, designing for water – we observe you have rain falling on the roof. You want to use it to water your vegetable garden and fruit trees. What permaculture strategies and tactics are helpful in resolving the situation? What systems/techniques will you need to get the rain from the sky into your garden? How does your rainwater system interact with other systems on your property? What connections does it have to other functions on the home place? (More connections = more resilience = more conservation of energy and work.) Does it do just one thing, or can additional functions be stacked on it? If it is an important function, is it safe to have only one system to do that, whatever it may be? Or is there some redundancy that should be designed into the system?

★ Since cooking food is an essential function, you need more than one way to cook so that “many elements will support essential functions.” This could mean – a regular kitchen stove, a solar oven, an outdoor bread oven, a propane camp stove, a wood burning stove, etc., all of which can be used for cooking.

★ Are there other functions that these five cooking elements can provide? E.g., in the winter, the indoor cooking elements can also provide heat to keep the interior comfortable. A wood-burning stove provides heat, can be used to cook, and the end product is wood ash, which is a useful garden fertilizer. The garden produces food which may be cooked on the wood stove, creating more ash, that creates (within reasonable limits anyway, no room for a full discussion of using wood ash as fertilizer) more vegetables, and so on and so forth.

★ Are there any particular problems associated with these five cooking elements? Do any of these problems contain their own solution? The heat created by the indoor cooking elements may be welcome in the winter, but won’t be so useful in the summer. In fact, cooking inside will cause you to spend more BTUs which cost money and deplete resources to remove the extra heat and humidity created by the indoor cooking elements. Do you want to move the cooking outside during the hot months? And/or eat less cooked foods, more salads, sandwiches, etc? The outdoor bread oven is a great summer cooking element, and also produces ash which can be used as fertilizer.

At the beginning of the design, you may not have all the details you will eventually need. But you don’t need to know the exact size of a water tank to know that you need something to catch the rain falling on your roof, divert it to storage, so you can use it to water your garden and maybe even take a shower. It is enough to know that getting the rain from the roof to the garden and the shower is an issue that requires a system to resolve it.

But the analysis doesn’t stop there. You take a shower in the water, getting a little use (yield) out of it, and then you observe the water flowing into the drain -- which includes nutrients from the soaps and bits and pieces of dried skin, hair, etc. -- and you see entropy draining all that energy and resource into the sink of the city’s sewer system, so you know that you need another "something" to do "something" with the grey water.

Et cetera and so on and so forth, down the line, your design analysis proceeds, all the way until the very last drop has soaked into the ground and into the realm of the micro flora and micro fauna and worms or evaporated into the air, or whatever the uses are at the end of the chain of events that begins with a drop of rainfall hitting your roof..

★ Always look for connections between systems that reinforce the system, make it more efficient, resilient, and conservative of resources and energy.
★ Always look for multiple elements to support essential functions.
★ Always look for opportunities to stack functions.
★ Always look for biological solutions.
★ Always examine a problem and seek the solution that may lurk within the problem itself.
★ Always conserve energy and resources.
★ Always work at a scale appropriate to your home place.

As your design progresses, so does the level of detail. At the beginning, all you needed to know was that you needed a rainwater harvesting system to provide water for your garden. But before you are finished, you will need to know how many gallons you plan to store in how many tanks located at specific places on your property. You will need to know how they are connected to each other and what happens if it rains when the tanks are full.

Staging.
Staging is an part of the active design phase, which is why I don’t list it as a separate part of the design process, but it always comes at the end of your design work. You have worked through your observation and evaluation and created a list of suggested recommendations for the home place so that you can achieve your goals. Now you take that list of recommendations, and put them in some kind of rational order. First things first, second things second, third things third, and so on and so forth, on down the line, to the very end of your list.

Some things can be done right away, or without any preparation. Other have pre-requisites. You may recommend an outdoor bread oven at a particular place, but the wood storage is in the way. So you have two recommendations – “build an outdoor bread oven” and “move the wood storage”. You can’t build the bread oven until you move the wood storage, so schedule “moving the wood storage” before you try to “build an outdoor bread oven”.

Staging proceeds in small, incremental steps, not in sudden, drastic changes. Don’t think that you can do all of this work in one year. You spent your entire life getting to the place you are now. You aren’t going to get yourself into a more permacultural situation is just a few months. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to “bite off more than you can chew”. This is a great danger, since failure is dispiriting. A better idea is to be realistic about your abilities, time, and resources, and plan a gradual transition over a period of several years to wherever it is you want to be in a more permacultural future.

Implementation.

The final stage of this process is to do the work of implementation, according to the schedule you develop during your design work, and reap the benefits of your effort for yourself, your household, your community, and all of the planet. There is less to be said about this than the other phases because the focus of this workshop is on design. By definition, implementation involves work, but the end result is quite tasty, and the rewards come quickly. This reinforces the process, which is good, because otherwise, we miss out on opportunities because they come disguised as work.