AN INTRODUCTION TO

ECOLOGICAL DESIGN

WIDIASTUTI
 The Interpenetrating worlds
• The living world : (the natural
world)
• The world of roads and cities farms
and artifacts (the humanly
designed world)
• Unsustainability : lack of
integration between them
(philosophy, vision, understanding
of ecology)
 ECOLOGICAL DESIGN
• is a way of strengthening the weave that link nature
and culture
• any form of design that minimizes environmentally
destructive impact by integrating itself with living
process
• respect species diversity, minimizes resource
depletion, preserves nutrient and water cycles,
maintains habitat quality, and attend to all the other
precondition of human and ecosystem health
• provide a coherent frameworks for redesign our
landscape, buildings, cities, and systems of energy,
water, food, manufacturing, and waste
• The effective adaptation to and integration with
nature’s process
• Evolution is nature’s ongoing design
process
• Happening continuously throughout
the entire biosphere
• The diversity!!!!!
• Drawn to nature’s own design strategy
• Critical strategies: conservation,
regeneration, and stewardship
• Remind of the technical and personal
dimension of sustainability
 CONSERVATION
• Recycling materials
• Building denser communities to
preserve agricultural land
• Adding insulation
• Designing fuel-efficient cars
• Involve spending natural capital
more slowly
• Establish in the engineering and
resource-management profession
 REGENERATION
• Is the repair and renewal of living tissue
• Is an expansion of natural capital through
the active restoration of degraded
ecosystem and communities
• Restoring an eroded stream to biological
productivity, re-creating habitat, and
renewing soil
• Establish in restoration ecologist, organic
farmers
 Stewardship
• Care in our relation with other living
creatures and with the landscape
• Process of steady commitment informed
by constant feedback
• Maintains natural capital by spending
frugally and investing wisely
• All of us already have to some degree
ECOLOGICAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES
• Reduction in energy and material flows
• Re-create a symbiotic relationship
between nature and culture
• Letting nature do the work
• Occurs in the context of specific places
(soils, vegetations, animals, climate,
topography, water flows, people)
• Integrating human purpose with nature’s
own flows, cycles, and pattern