January 21, 2021

Flourishing

(Collapsing)

The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive. Fred Polak

“Flourishing is not something to do or to have. One can flourish only by being.” John Ehrenfeld  

“In our modern view of reality, the separation of mind from world hollows out the meaning of sustainability. To recover the full meaning of sustainability, a radical stance is critical. I begin with a new and distinctive definition of safe sustainability. The possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever. We must shift back to the flourishing fullness of “being” from its impoverished modern form of “having.” Immersion in the modernist cultural paradigm has disaffected human beings in three critical domains of living. 1) the human arising out of our lost sense of what it is to be a human being. 2) the natural arising out of our lost sense of our place in the natural world and 3) the ethical arising out of our loss sense of responsibility for our actions and our relationship to others. Evidence of these loss senses abound in the form of ever-increasing levels of unsatisfactory and wasteful consumption, family and personal breakdown (by Tisza’s desk?), and environmental degradation and in what many see as banality and shallowness in public and private life in general.” (Ehrenfeld) Sustainability by Design, author John Ehrenfeld makes a key distinction between “reducing unsustainability” and creating sustainability in the form of “flourishing”. Ehrenfeld cautions that reducing unsustainability is not radical enough. In addition to being uninspiring, reducing unsustainability does not lead to sustainability, let alone the more juicy and worthy goal of flourishing. Ehrenfeld and many other experts (McDonough, Fry) share the view that sustainable practices are not only insufficient but they perilously underestimate the depth and span of the environmental challenges we face.

The words “flourishing” and “thriving” adopted from positive psychology evoke this emerging spirit that seeks not just sustaining and surviving but unabashed thriving, flourishing and fecundity. Flourishing is a superordinate and sovereign goal that is more realistically aligned with the quantum shifts and ways of being and doing that would be required to achieves such a state. Flourishing is an expanded goal that includes but is not limited to lessening human impact on our planet. It’s not about minimums but about maximums. As in tackling and solving our food distribution channels in order to eliminate hunger. Creating unprecedented access to levels of health, education, and well-being. Flourishing taps into our adventure of being alive. Flourishing is the natural result of just, caring and wise structures. As the emergent superordinate value of our era, flourishing is a quantum shift in knowing and honoring of our human nature and our desires. The thriving society includes the egalitarian distribution of mind body spirit well-being. The vision is more ambitious, the cognitive and moral demand that it places on us is more complex and nuanced, and the motivation and compassion that it requires must be sourced from greater depths of our Being.

After reading Flourishing: A Frank Conversation About Sustainability, by John Ehrenfeld, I wondered how design can help cultivate the emergence of flourishing with the ease and inevitability of our current condition of unsustainability. After all, no one sets out is not to design for unsustainability. Yet our collective global behaviors and aggregate amount to conditions from which states of unsustainability and precarity emerge. This is why we say that states of unsustainability are intimately entangled with our ways of being and doing. How can we design in such a way that flourishing societies are not just envisioned but inevitable? Over the last several decades we can see that “design for sustainability” created tremendous awareness as well as concrete changes in education and practice. They readied us for the deeper challenge of getting to the root of our uneasy coexistence with other life on this planet. The lack of functional fit between our cultural evolution and our comprehension of our predicament creates the dissonance that designers feel as boredom with the mediocrity of sustainability design tactics. Most of what we call sustainable design is treating symptoms rather than digging deeper for root causes. Getting at the root causes always involves challenging best practices. Consciousness of our human impact on our designed and built environment has expanded a lot over the last thirty years —and there has been great progress. Yet there’s always a tendency to codify and regulate professional practices as new norms, making for systems that are resistant to change and innovation.

What will it take? Flourishing will require nothing less than the redesign of our very ways of Being. It’s often said that although we have the technologies and the know-how, it’s our emotional, energetic and relational sensitivity that is thwarting our efforts to produce flourishing. We have the technology, the data, the networks, the resources, the best practices. We need the alignment, the sharing, the teaming, the trust, the adaptability. The challenges we face are challenges to our ways of being human. Our beliefs, structures, behaviors, values and lifestyles are results of our ways of being human. Our ways of being human are themselves unsustainable. This is why the Being of the designer is of vital concern. The flourishing of life on earth depends on our capacity to expand and elaborate upon our repertoire of ways of co-participating with the present moment and the emerging future. Our challenge and our opportunity is more profound, and much closer to home. At the core it will take relearning what it is to truly relate to matter and to life. The remedy is fierce commitment to knowing oneself, and to continuous innovation, rather than application of tried-and-true formulas. Many designers are raising the bar by embracing this superordinate goal.

How can we design in such a way that flourishing societies are not just envisioned but inevitable? Due to the great gap between our current ways of designing and living and the goal of a flourishing future, modest, incremental changes to the status quo are better understood as emotionally palliative ways of beginning to participate. The challenge of creating the conditions necessary to leave a future for the next generations is fueling radical changes in professional practice. We need integral rather than partial responses — those that address either the mind or the body, or the emotions or the economy, rather than the whole human being as a complex emergent process taking mind, world, emotions and spirit into account. LEED certification for example, is a great way to establish shared benchmarks that quickly become minimum thresholds, and works well when coupled with other relational interventions.

Flourishing raises the bar on our future. Flourishing is the ultimate real-time trans-disciplinary collaboration. Design is integral to this process, and schools of art and design now find themselves at the forefront in developing new leaders for general education and all sectors of society. Ultimately the challenge-opportunity to flourish will drive untold new knowledge and research domains, business practices and specialties far beyond what is now delimited to the ‘green economy’. Cultivation of the conditions by which life can thrive is an extraordinary opportunity for leadership in design. Whether we come to view flourishing as a fearsome imperative, or a juicy creative challenge depends on our abilities to frame the best questions.  So what comes after sustainable design? The endless reusable shopping bags? The many variations on the worm composter? I trust some fierce design campaigns for flourishing futures, starting at the root level.

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