Symbiotic Design Fundamentals
Introduction to the Symbiotic Design Framework
Gonzalo Raineri
Designer and educator
About this course
Sustainability has become a word that means less every year. Most of what is sold under it is a material swapped, a list ticked, a certificate handed in. What is missing is a way to say, in plain terms, who gains and who pays for what we make.
Symbiotic Design starts from that question. It reads any piece of work as a set of relations: between the people who ask for it, the people who make it, the people who live with it, the materials, the money, and the years it will last. Each relation is judged with ethics first, so the practitioner sees where the work gives and where it takes.
This course presents the framework element by element: time as the one constant, the mottos that judge every decision, the components, the relations between them, and the first question of all, whether the problem in front of us holds still or keeps changing.
You leave able to read your own work through the framework and name what it does to everyone it touches.
What you will be able to do
- Name the elements of the Symbiotic Design Framework and what each one is for.
- Judge a decision with ethics first, before what it saves, whom it serves and what it costs.
- Read a piece of work as relations between the people, the materials, the money and the years it will last, and see where it gives and where it takes.
- Differentiate between a Tame Problem a method can solve and a Wicked Problem that keeps changing while you work on it.
- Know which course comes next for the problem on your desk.
Your instructor
Founder of the Academy, Bioclimatic Architect and expert in Symbiotic Design, the new frontier for sustainability