My writing coach has suggested that I get out of the planetary pull that writing a book is and liberate my imagination with an occasional short essay. Better that writing it would be to put them out into the world where they might be seen and read. Of course I have my resistances to her suggestion even though I know (and have known for a long time) that she is right. In fact this won’t be the first (or the second or third) time that I’m giving it a go. I’ve thought this before and even occasionally acted on it so this blog is a trail of starts that haven’t gone anywhere nor made any ripples in the pond of ideas about design, design thinking or the all elusive design consciousness that I’m trying to bring to light.
So why write here now…again? Over the weekend I ran into a quote in Maria Popova’s Marginalian email that intrigued me as a delightful inversion of my standard design consciousness trope – that “design is how we give form to our intentions”. It was from a discussion of the work of N.J.Berril, a British marine biologist and science writer who was more or less contemporary with Rachel Carson and almost equally illuminating in his prose and insight into, well, the nature of things.
What drew me into an essay that I was going to gloss over because I’d never heard of N. J. Berril (nor his book You And The Universe from which it was taken) was the fact of him sharing his first two initials with me (mine are N. J. G.), and that his book was published in the year of my birth. But it wasn’t till I read the following that I properly engaged with who he was.
“Nature, in the intimate and in the vast, is not designed. It is designing. Our own nature confirms it.”
A large part of my writing has been to claim the word “design”, in its verb form, to what we humans do to adapt intelligently, imaginatively and consciously to our environment. Sure the world is full of all kinds of design (the noun form of the world) that are not human created but are, in the general sense of things, designs. Or, more correctly, we know them by their form and the patterning they lay on the world, which we can refer to as ‘a’ design. The pull of this quote for me, though, is that it points to life in all its forms as creative process, and creative process as an expression of life. We are a distinctive designer species – not as something separate from nature, but because we have learned to do what all of nature does constantly.
So how did this quote spur me to start writing here again? Well, I did a Google search on it. As expected the first link was to the Marginalian essay. What surprised me was that the next link was to my essay titled Nature, Nurture, Design that I wrote in 2017. The only reason I can figure for it to rate so high in the search algorithm, is because it too puts the words “nature” and “design” proximately – which suggests that there is way too little thought on this topic; this topic that to me is among the most important to consider on the non-adaptive path to creative destruction we are currently on.
In a couple of days I’m heading off on a road trip – to Wyoming, Grand Tetons and then coming back via Portland and Highway 1 down the coast. I’m sure there will be much evidence of “design consciousness” out there in America – whatever the nature of that consciousness might be. Maybe I’ll get to make some notes about what I find over here. Perhaps those little essays will contain the magic phrases to get them found, and perhaps that will get a conversation that is what I’m doing this for, going.
