“Ecological design is not so much an individual art practiced by individual designers as it is an ongoing negotiation between a community and the ecology of particular places.”
— David W. Orr
“Ecological awareness will arise only when we combine our rational knowledge with an intuition for the non-linear nature of our environment.”
— Fritjof Capra (The Turning Point)
“Rather than placing the human at the center of the work, it’s the systems that surround us—these systems we depend on—that take the appropriately center stage. They take the stage with complexity, mystery, and unpredictability.”
— Kevin Slavin, Design as Participation
“The designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated systems. These are designers that do not understand themselves to be in the center of the system. Rather, they understand themselves to be participants, shaping the systems that interact with other forces, ideas, events and other designers.”
— Kevin Slavin, Design as Participation
“Some contemporary work suggests that we are not only designing for participation, but that design is a fundamentally participatory act, engaging systems that extend further than the constraints of individual (or even human) activity and imagination”
— Kevin Slavin, Design as Participation
“design is not just a framework for participants, but something that is also, itself, participating.”
— Kevin Slavin, Design as Participation
“now we’ve got the notion of a machine with an underspecified goal, the system that evolves…”
— Gordon Pask (quoted in Design as Participation)
“When designers center around the user, where do the needs and desires of the other actors in the system go? The lens of the user obscures the view of the ecosystems it affects.”
— Kevin Slavin, Design as Participation
“We must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”
— Thomas Berry"
“The standard for ecological design is neither efficiency nor productivity but health, beginning with that of the soil and extending upward through plants, animals and people. It is impossible to impair health at any level without affecting it at other levels. The etymology of the word ‘health’ reveals its connection to other words such as healing, wholeness, and holy.”
— David W. Orr
“We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we have to shatter that plate glass, we have to reach in there. So the old world observer simply has to be crossed off the books and we must put in the new term: participator. In this way we have come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.”
— John Wheeler