No solution moves forward in isolation
Design standards for generative systems
Sustainable solutions exist, and emerging or underused techniques may already meet the most forward-looking criteria.
For the most part, innovative practices and technologies are considered individually and treated as one-off ideas. By not offering fully livable alternatives to the status quo, innovative work remains piecemeal. Make in Place considers how sustainable practices could work together in regenerative, circular systems.
Elegant solutions are possible when they come from a place of design — by considering all constraints and essentials at once. The eighteen standards below describe an uncompromising design approach to support human life with finite resources.
1. Cohesive
For a working system, human needs and resource-sustainability issues are not addressed one by one but evaluated simultaneously. No solution moves forward in isolation. Integrative systems provide comprehensive assets to support life at a local level. All processes work together and add up to more than what a series of disconnected solutions could offer.
2. Needs-driven
A comprehensive design anticipates what’s essential, addressing human needs as a complete experience. This approach regards vital assets as birthrights rather than luxuries. Small-scale systems meet material needs by prioritizing direct utility over other assigned values. This immediacy in need-satisfaction reduces disruption, vulnerability, and insufficiency to achieve stable, all-inclusive livelihoods.
3. Simple
Long-term sustainability will thrive on simplicity and immediacy over complexity, redundancy, and disconnect. The less complex a process is, the fewer opportunities it has to fail. To reliably generate essential assets in all conditions and climates, elegant designs distill solutions to what is indispensable, seeking the most straightforward routes available to solve problems effectively within given constraints. This approach adds complexity or distance only when there is a proven need for it — and adds redundancy only in the form of strategic backups to prevent cascading failure. Minimizing redundancy across solutions reduces the time, labor, and resources required to satisfy each problem, enabling efficiency and replicability.
4. Small scale
Small-scale systems produce and maintain assets for local use. While coordination can occur at a macro scale and information exchanged globally, production is geographically distributed — with essential assets generated only for the number of people present at a given site. Distributed production is independent of large-scale, industrial manufacturing. Through anticipation of local needs, it circumvents reliance on globalized production industries or fluctuating markets. Mass production is made obsolete by fair, comprehensive, and well-designed micro-production.
5. Looping
In controlled loops, generative systems are all-but-closed material economies within a designated area. Looping systems rely on minimal trade and external input beyond the substances regularly exchanged through natural ecosystem services. All resource input is sourced regionally and sustained onsite. Unlike open-ended, linear patterns of resource extraction and waste, material output recirculates to become input for mechanical and biological processes. Controlled loops simultaneously imitate and support local ecology. As ecomimetic systems, they prevent output sinks, transform waste streams, and maintain resource value.
6. Static
A static material economy does not rely on expansion or ongoing, imbalanced resource extraction to provide essential assets. Its stocks of input-output resources remain constant, circulating without net gain or loss in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Without reliance on economic expansion, there is no need to limit sustainable innovation to what is profitable. Material security — designed with only biological and physical constraints — does not need to drive (or depend on) resource scarcity and inequity.
7. Informed
Designing cohesive systems calls for robust data. An informed development process takes a cooperative, interdisciplinary approach to evaluate each practice based on clear, unbiased information. While critical systems should not depend on digital tools to function, systems monitoring is fundamental in verifying that everything made is justified, effective, efficient, reliable, and fair. Open-ended design evolves and expands with the sciences, responding to current research and continuous feedback.
8. Impermanent
Designing for impermanence calls for material reformation and innovation. To maintain input-output equilibrium, the materials used across controlled-loop systems must recirculate within usable timeframes — over days, weeks, months, years, or decades rather than millennia. With each use (or loop), non-living materials weaken or fragment into simpler substances, while biological processes tend to grow more complex and self-organizing. When materials can no longer recirculate as usable components in a controlled loop, microorganisms break down what remains into chemical compounds and minerals, assimilating these into ecosystems to cycle at a larger scale.
Designing for biodegradation can take multiple routes, such as (1) by choosing materials that will compost under specific conditions, (2) by timing materials that will decompose under any conditions within a usable timeframe, or (3) by developing longer-use materials to biodegrade on-command at the application of a catalyst substance. Making objects entirely from biodegradable materials opens up designs to take any form. Bio-based materials from last month’s food casings, educational supplies, or protective gear may cycle back into the pool of local resources to form next month’s decorations, toys, or expressive apparel. As long as the labor tradeoff is low, designs can evolve as single-use articles and continuous ephemera.
9. Nontoxic
Designing out toxicity means preventing new pollution and contamination in immediate human surroundings and the wider environment. This approach uses material composition and production techniques free from unsafe chemicals, gases, pollutants, particulates, heavy metals, and persistent synthetic polymers. Nontoxic input-output practices prevent hazardous levels of what is otherwise considered benign, including carbon dioxide and radiation. The choice of materials is critical in designing circular systems, which depend on the integrity and harmlessness of the output created to reuse as input for the following cycles. As an inherently benign approach, controlled-loop systems are antithetical to industrial waste streams and other volatile effluents.
10. Non-destructive
Meeting material needs should come without health risks or environmental costs. No human activity should lead to habitat destruction, deforestation, contamination, topsoil loss, erosion, or damage to the earth’s surface and subsurface. People must be able to occupy an area and utilize onsite resources without creating a lasting footprint. Non-destructive resourcing is lightweight, responsive, and interconnected with surrounding landscapes. Any self-contained structures, multi-use spaces, or other components not woven in with local ecology must be fully removable — leaving an area as if in a pre-human state.
11. Place-specific
No single approach will work (in the same way) across all locations. Although a core set of input-output practices may prove widely replicable, generative systems must adapt to regional resources and conditions. Place-based design is geographically appropriate and informed by an area’s climate, ecology, and landscape characteristics. It fits in and works with local vegetation, species composition and dynamics, precipitation and temperature patterns, soil content, water salinity, watershed drainage, geology, and elevation.
12. Rich in perspectives
Generative systems are not vehicles for a specific culture, identity, or worldview. Design implementation is not an act of uniformity or homogeneity. Although a core set of input-output practices may prove widely replicable, small-scale systems are culturally appropriate and informed by local perspectives. Place-based designs protect cultural rights, affirm identities, and benefit from pluralism. Rather than building toward monoculture, this approach builds on the strengths of multiculturalism — incorporating ideas without loss or pressure to assimilate. Designs adapt to and represent regional needs and values, flourishing with the people they support.
13. Restorative
Restorative design appreciates human health as an extension of environmental health. In addition to preventing new contamination, ecologically beneficial systems process existing pollutants. Cleanup, treatment, and resource recovery are inherent and ongoing functions. With this approach, place-based systems that support human livelihoods double as ecosystem rehabilitation services. While generating essential material assets in overexploited areas and degraded landscapes, controlled-loop systems contribute to the removal and remediation of hazardous substances from air, water, soil, and food. Self-organizing biological processes act as direct interventions to remove contaminants, improve soils, facilitate revegetation, increase biodiversity, and rebuild ecological functionality. Restorative socio-ecological techniques reverse negative societal impacts to recover and conserve native ecosystems.
14. Biodiverse
In support of biodiversity, generative designs do not drive monocultural landscapes, such as single-species croplands. They do not introduce species that diminish native populations or skew the balance of ecological communities. Systems designed for biodiversity do not deteriorate or destroy the terrestrial or marine areas that native species depend on. This approach recognizes the resilience of diverse species populations in maintaining equilibrium and works with this strength rather than against it. As signs of ecological health, a functionally diverse ecosystem continues to provide fresh water, clean air, food sources, carbon storage, temperature regulation, biodegradation, stormwater management, and other ecosystem services while buffering against disease transmission and climate extremes.
15. Abundant
Post-scarcity designs select resources based on their regional availability and onsite replicability. This approach connects with local substances and output stocks before justifying the long-distance transportation of goods. Fabrication techniques can utilize readily available living materials, such as those based on algae, fungi, or beneficial bacteria. Living processes that depend on microorganisms and local life forms will organize and regulate themselves as representative samples of larger ecosystems. These bio-based techniques may provide carbon capture and remediation services while generating and regenerating essential material assets.
Replicable organisms exist across all human-inhabited continents and may be cultivated indefinitely without depletion. The nuance is in working with these natural systems rather than against them — in embedded, interactive, and responsive ways — to support life rather than exploit it. This mutually beneficial practice leads to an experience of resource security and abundance.
16. Nonexploitative
Human-centered production accounts for the experience of labor. This approach values the limited time of contributors. It considers time and effort as primary input resources and views their integrity as synonymous with the final output. The design of equitable systems rules out exploitative and predatory practices. Fair systems do not place any person above others or exercise dominance over people, animals, or natural resources. Their dynamics do not feed on vulnerabilities, depend on (or profit by) undervaluation, reenact a colonization mindset, or perpetuate transgenerational trauma. Ongoing evaluation ensures that practices remain fair and do not deliberately or inadvertently result in social stratification or abuse of power. A nonexploitative approach assumes dignity and incalculable worth in designing for mutual support.
17. Physiologically beneficial
Regenerative material assets may require minimal ongoing labor or mechanical drivers after establishment, meaning participation in shared livelihoods is not necessarily labor- or energy-intensive. The more passive a working system is, the more manageable, accessible, and possible to sustain.
What physical human input is needed should provide myriad benefits. Frequent and ongoing exercise is necessary for physiological health and fitness — to lower the risk of chronic diseases, slow aging, and support mental health. Material livelihoods offer both direct and indirect opportunities to fulfill exercise needs. Direct, hands-on maintenance may, in itself, provide beneficial levels of strengthening full-body movement and aerobic activity. Alternately, technology may convert kinetic energy from human movement (such as walking, lifting, or cycling) into clean electricity, powering otherwise labor-intensive or impossible processes.
In either approach, physical human input should be medically informed: designed to function as light- to moderate-intensity exercise (appropriate to age and ability) and to accommodate physical therapy where needed. The unending need for physical activity represents a naturally renewable energy source — as long as a given approach avoids injury or exploitation. Integrating safe and effective movement into daily sustainment can close a circuit on energy input-output needs. It can reduce or eliminate the redundancy of prescribing physical activity as a supplemental task.
18. Coordinated
Generating material assets is not an exercise in individualism. An individual will require more input stock to meet basic material needs when compared to each member of a group sharing assets. Individual ownership results in material redundancy, inequality, and excess — while reinforcing social isolation. Many commodities exist as substitutions for human-to-human care and do not represent the most direct ways of meeting those needs. The push for each person to own all vital assets takes up storage space and hinders free movement from one place to another.
Efficiency in design assumes the presence of other people and includes partnership, planning, and ongoing feedback among the resources in every location. In addition to avoiding waste, fair design, skilled management, and peer-to-peer coordination will likely increase the comfort level of each contributor. Systems that focus, where possible, on access over ownership may further reduce material redundancy and promote equitable livelihoods. Opening mutual-support networks of on-the-ground contributors can serve as a living infrastructure — enabling micro-production and mass collaboration. Along with the psychological benefits of community-building, each contributor in a coordinated, access-based system may experience a material lightness made possible by the support of others.
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