A diversity within its unity The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker diversity
The heat death of design Losing the design diversity means falling into a singular narrative of how design must be done, which grants unfair and self-reinforcing advantage to the mainstream while discouraging, stifling, or even punishing the idiosyncratic designers who bring unorthodox but remarkably innovative processes to the table. The true opportunity cost is the diverse future that humanity can no longer access. A future without diversity is fundamentally stagnant: imagine designs so standardized that you can’t tell them apart. While every design is guaranteed to be good, none will be great. New designs are marginally better than previous ones with the rate of improvement eventually approaching zero. We have reached the heat death of design. Chuánqí Sun, The vanishing designer diversity
Obsessed with absolute numbers Modernist planning was obsessed with absolute numbers, including the minimum dimensions of rooms, open space per capita, and the one-size-fits-all head counts of neighborhood units. This was often pegged at five to seven thousand and was used as a formula for determining the distribution of schools, shops, sports fields, and other facilities. The failure of such planning is not in its effort to be comprehensive or to equalize access to necessary facilities. It is, rather, the attempt to rationalize choice on the basis of a homogeneous set of subjects, a fixed grammar of opportunities, a remorseless segregation of uses, and a scientistic faith in technical analysis and organization that simply excludes diversity, eccentricity, nonconforming beauty, and choice. The utopian nightmare. Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan Desired qualities of lightPredicted Mean Vote planningmetricsdiversity
The number of ways in which things work The importance of diversity is not so much the number of elements in a system; rather it is the number of functional connections between these elements. It is not the number of things, but the number of ways in which things work. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture diversityconnectionnetworkssystems
Exuberant diversity in a city's streets To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities diversitystreets
Reading the landscape As we walk about a site and talk to people, we can note our observations. At this stage, we try to store the information we gain in some accurate way, carry a notebook, or a camera and tape-recorder, and make small sketches. The notes we end up with can later be used to devise design strategies. We do not just see and hear, smell and taste, but we sense heat and cold, pressure, stress from efforts of hill-climbing or prickly plants, and find compatible or incompatible sites in the landscape. We note good views, outlooks, soil colours and textures. In face, we use (consciously) all our many senses and become aware of our bodies and responses. Beyond this, we can sit for a time and notice patterns and processes: how some trees prefer to grow in rocks, some in valleys, others in grasslands or clumps. We see how water flows on the site, where fires have left scars, winds have bent branches or deformed the shape of trees, how the sun and shadows move, and where we find signs of animals resting, moving, or feeding. The site is full of information on every natural subject, and we must learn to read it well. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth ethnography