Design

Design is more than creating interventions and solutions to address a need or a problem. Its practice entails envisioning, planning and prototyping, iteration (repetition), and sense checking to create artifacts (products), services, experiences, communication, or visions of the future. To do this well we need to learn to let life, place and culture speak to us in ways that ensure that our designs are place sourced and in alignment with life’s regenerative impulse in the places where the design ‘goes on designing’. This holds not just for products and services but for the intricate connections between buildings, landscapes, regional economies, (adhoc) communities, supply chains, and others.

Systemic design integrates systems thinking and design, with the intention to better cope with complexity. Systemic design intents to develop methodologies and approaches that help to integrate systems thinking (e.g. causality, interconnectedness, circularity, synthesis) with design (e.g. ideation, prototyping, iteration) at ecological, social, technical and economic levels. It is a pluralistic initiative where many different approaches are encouraged to thrive and where dialogue and organic development of new practices are central.

This trans-scalar spiral design graphically expresses the autopoietic relationships between governance scales and their circularities of nested systems. This spiral feedback logic captures cyclical growth and emergence across nested scales as a recursive process, while highlighting the continuous reciprocity of flows within scales. Autopoietic systems are capable of reproducing and maintaining themselves, producing more of their own complexity than the one produced by their environment.

In designing regenerative communities and economies, the regional scale is of the ideal size and diversity to generate the highest impact by leveraging interscalar interaction through maximized resource access and optimized space-harvest. The eight-scaled autopoietic spiral embodies a conceptually and visually simple, yet rigorously complex understanding of how a resilient regenerative economy and society-nature system would naturally evolve – guiding the discourse on how we should plan, design and govern in the future.

A common functional pattern occurring throughout nature, the Fibonacci spiral's intrinsic expansion and compression qualities present parallels in understanding regenerative systems. In physics, spirals emerge at lowest-energy configurations that self-organize in dynamic systems; in chemistry, spirals evolve as reaction-diffusion processes that promote activation and inhibition; in biology, spirals optimize spatial usage and resource access; in cultures world-wide, spirals symbolize creative growth, power of life and spiritual awareness.

Products

I design and build skis since 2008, winning three leading industry awards at ISPO Munich. I teach ski and knife building.

Grown hemp ski design movie trailer

Wood basalt fibre composite skis / ISPO industry eco design award 2008

Hemp fibre composite skis / two ISPO industry awards for eco design and ski innovation 2018

Arctic change skis, using e.g. Arctic coal for illustrating human influence on Arctic change

Circular knives, made from recycled saw blades

A knife handle from upcycled Mahagoni wood

A knife sheath from chrome free leather, sewn with self-grown raw hemp fibers, and glued with fish protein glue

Food design boards, light composites with protein-tanin glues

Hand-sewn leather sandals with recycled neoprene cushioning and adjustable straps

Climbing chalk bag from leather

Knife sheaths from leather, hand-sewn, various

Interior & furniture design

I have been designing and building furniture since my study times at University.

Organic spiral stair case from onsite grown hardwood types at Il Doppio, MonViso Institute

Room separating hempcrete wall

LED lights with organic materials such as roots

Water saving shower design with local stone and wood, and low tech automated ventilation design

Bathroom sink table with onsite grown Laburnum alpinum and regional granite stone sink (sink made by a local stone artist)

Dry walls, clay render, sliding doors

Bamboo root bed with bamboo from ZERI Expo 2000, Columbia, and recycled copper and brass

First Nation carving arts in a wooden trunk with wood joinery, birch, cherry, hand carving

Water buffalo leather bamboo chair, leather plant died, hand twist tension mechanism

Tables, various. Here mahagoni plate from ZERO Expo 2000 pavilion, and plum tree legs

Foldable chairs with fabric from Peru

Buildings

I grew up being involved in building houses, learning all practical handcraft from my father. Later I was trained in passive house design and studied material life cycles and energy systems in architecture.

Il Doppio - a passive net-positive wooden house, MonViso Institute, Italy. I co-designed this building and its materials, functions, systems. I built many of the systems myself.

Swall Institute, High Sierra of California. I helped owner Eric L. Berlow in the systemic design of the buildings.

Private family homes

Sports center

I practice Design.

I advocate a holistic understanding of design. It goes way beyond aesthetics, form, function, and graphics, or design thinking.

Design is expressed intention through interactions and relationships.

Design for me is Systemic.

Systemic Design is science-based creative dealing with complexity for advancing pathways towards regenerative systems.

I attempt to learn to Design as Nature.

Nature has 3.8 billion years of design experience. Here we find the best of inspiration, illustration, pathways.

Guided by Systemic Design principles.

Principles guide design processes. Questions activate cooperation.

Design with carbon. Use low tech & high brain. Design across scales. Circularity. (...)

I teach Systemic Design for Regeneration.

Future Design skills and cultures include the capacities to design across nested governance scales, alongside multiple types of circular flows, science based, and towards regenerative systems.

I Design for circularities within nested systems.

The didactic of trans-scalar spiral autopoietic complexity provides guidance for design towards regeneration.

Portfolio of selected Design artifacts

I practice design. Intention, Envisioning, Ideation, Prototyping, Iteration. Handcrafting, Building, Practice. Informed by science, guided by intuition. Trans-scalar. Towards resilience and regeneration.

Green Chemistry

Here shown is the annual growth ring wood cell structure of locally grown Laburnum alpinum, a very dense and tannin-rich wood I like to design with. The second photo shows a comparison of fish protein glue with and without tannin powder

(reddish color), and its dissolving time in water.

Protection through natural waxes, oils and tannins

Protein based natural adhesives

Embedded carbon equivalents, assessed by life cycle analysis (lca)

Materials

Shown to the right is a hemp shive geopolymer composite sample, part of an ETH industry research project I manage.

Properties of organic materials inform design

Wood types and naturally fit usage

Hemp composites development

Natural fibre textiles

Stone

Products

I design and build skis since 2008, winning three leading industry awards at ISPO Munich. I teach ski and knife building.

Grown hemp ski design movie trailer

Wood basalt fibre composite skis / ISPO industry eco design award 2008

Hemp fibre composite skis / two ISPO industry awards for eco design and ski innovation 2018

Arctic change skis, using e.g. Arctic coal for illustrating human influence on Arctic change

Circular knives, made from recycled saw blades

A knife handle from upcycled Mahagoni wood

A knife sheath from chrome free leather, sewn with self-grown raw hemp fibers, and glued with fish protein glue

Food design boards, light composites with protein-tanin glues

Hand-sewn leather sandals with recycled neoprene cushioning and adjustable straps

Climbing chalk bag from leather

Knife sheaths from leather, hand-sewn, various

Interior & furniture design

I have been designing and building furniture since my study times at University.

Organic spiral stair case from onsite grown hardwood types at Il Doppio, MonViso Institute

Room separating hempcrete wall

LED lights with organic materials such as roots

Water saving shower design with local stone and wood, and low tech automated ventilation design

Bathroom sink table with onsite grown Laburnum alpinum and regional granite stone sink (sink made by a local stone artist)

Dry walls, clay render, sliding doors

Bamboo root bed with bamboo from ZERI Expo 2000, Columbia, and recycled copper and brass

First Nation carving arts in a wooden trunk with wood joinery, birch, cherry, hand carving

Water buffalo leather bamboo chair, leather plant died, hand twist tension mechanism

Tables, various. Here mahagoni plate from ZERO Expo 2000 pavilion, and plum tree legs

Foldable chairs with fabric from Peru

Buildings

I grew up being involved in building houses, learning all practical handcraft from my father. Later I was trained in passive house design and studied material life cycles and energy systems in architecture.

Il Doppio - a passive net-positive wooden house, MonViso Institute, Italy. I co-designed this building and its materials, functions, systems. I built many of the systems myself.

Swall Institute, High Sierra of California. I helped owner Eric L. Berlow in the systemic design of the buildings.

Private family homes

Sports center

Communities & Services

The MonViso Institute community project / winning 3 Italian Legambiente awards for local-global, real-digital sustainability communication and illustration

Design thinking events for future visions

Collaborative support for circular flows through synthesis maps through teaching / Ostana IT and Hemsedal NO

Landscape scale

Upcycled Spinnaker sails roof

Theater stage

Pathways

Staircases

Boundaries

Meeting places

Agri-forestry hemp paulownia

A building water system with four water cycles, preparing for a plant-based black water depuration

Bio-regional scale

Regional circular supply systems with 5 types of circular flows

Teaching MSc courses ETHZ, POLITO IT and AHO NO, Piedmont and Hallingdal regions

Conceptual synthesis maps as designerly communication interventions

Experiences