Design is the conscious creation of and planning for or guiding the building or construction of a thing, an artefact, a process, system or just any idea. To design something, it must be “represented” in some way, as a drawing, a sketch, a computer programme or just in the mind of the creator and innovator. Innovation is when an invention can successfully be implemented in society, and this could include in the market, in a business or process, in an institution or just realised at home or in a real sense. We thus design to realise an invention and to bring it to an innovation that reorganises society in some way.
Before you design, particularly an urban farm, it is necessary to know what you are designing for. You could use design methods and methodologies to design a particular thing, if you know what you want. Or you could use design thinking and methods to design an all-round robust farm and robust processes on the farm.
The way one would design a farm would be to first of all collect information on what is already available. It would be important to collect this, as you want to start with what you have and not with what you really want. Once you have collected all the things that you already own you can start to group them together to see what works with each other and what you could realistically put together in the shortest possible time. You want to build systems where the working of one piece of technology interacts with the workings of another piece of technology. Anything can be a technology, including yourself or your animals. Cows, for instance, are a technology to gather biomass from the veldt and then deposit it as biological waste – manure – elsewhere. So, if you sequence your cows with your waste stream, they can for free bring you waste as they feed themselves. These kinds of savings are key to becoming profitable. Without these kinds of small savings, the big things will never come right…
When you know what you have, you should pause a bit and then think of where you want to go. It would be best to construct, on paper, or in your head, the best possible scenario for your farm. Think of where you would be if all goes exceedingly well in five years from now. Construct the ideal farm in your head and go out all the way to conceptualise what it would be when it is functioning optimally.
Now you know where you could be one day and where want to go. Then you can start to work and plan backwards from this ideal state back to the present where you are now, with only what you have. From this you can chart the paths to take to achieve your ideal state.
Do not get bogged down with what you do not have, of fantastical ideas of wealth and fortune. This is not realistic. If you focus only on the negatives, they will eat you up. Try to see where you could go with your present resources and see what you need to do to achieve the best end result for your farm and its development. If you can put this together, you would be able to simply continue and build and improve your farm as you go along.
When you start planning like this you will focus on the positive and you can see what to do to eliminate the negatives. Be realistic, but do not forget to also dream a bit. Inform yourself so you are able to think realistically, and do not engage in flights of fancy. Many will promise you the world but you will not achieve it, and everything that you want to achieve you need to work for. This is better than losing something that you have not earned.
Educate yourself on what is possible, you could use the internet and other sources of information to see what others can realistically achieve on a farm like yours. You can use this to develop your own realistic picture of where you could go to with your farm.
When doing this, keep the following design principles and dynamics in mind. These ideas should show you what is possible and how existing things may be more than what they appear to be.
The first principle for design is to design for “convergence”. This is when many technologies come together and start to interact. We are all familiar with cell phones and how many other devices have “converged” in a cell phone. A phone these days is a phone, a computer, a scanner, a radio, a television studio, an encyclopaedia etc etc. This kind of thinking and acting, is already evident in nature. In Nature everything converges. So, think of how you can converge the technologies on your farm. You can do this by sequencing them one after another and letting the wastes and features of one technology interact with another. The best is to think of your waste on the farm. The simplest would be to compost it. However, you could, in a more ideal sense, first soak the wastes in a liquid manure to prepare it to decompose. Then you could feed it to worms, and derive compost, casings and worms themselves from this. Before depositing the compost in the soil, mix it with additional waste and feed it to the Soldier Fly Farm, and only after this process, deposit in the soil. Now you have created 4 products from the same waste by letting the waste go through several processes. In each case the compost itself is enhanced and new products are created. This illustrates how things converge in nature and in real life. Agriculture is to manage this convergence and to let this create humanly valuable things.
Another example would be the actual design of the farm. The principles of permaculture can be applied to how you design the landscape. Place your chicken coop near your house as you need to visit them more than once a day. This simple example shows you how important the design of the farm is, as the design could reduce labour and other effort and create value just in itself. Look at the flows of especially water and energy on the farm, and let your designs enhance these and build upon this and find synergies. If for instance, your cattle have to walk a certain path, and if they deposit their dung here, do not collect it, as this is effort. You should rather, plant fruit trees here so they re automatically fertilised as the cattle do their thing. This effort and this synergy are in fact the productivity you want.
When we take a look at the design principles for permaculture, we see a system of arrangement of things emerging so that the arrangement of things itself creates value. These design principles are the following:
1. Observe and interact
2. Catch and store energy
3. Obtain a yield
4. Apply self-regulation and feedback
5. Use and value renewable resources and services
6. Produce no wate
7. Design from patterns to details
8. Integrate rather than segregate
9. Use small and slow systems
10. Use diversity and value it!
11. Use the edges and the marginal areas on the farm
12. Creatively use and respond to change.
Another good idea from permaculture is to see the problem itself as the solution. Often, we work against nature and the ordinary flow of things. The problem is often the solution, and we need to look carefully. Chickens often stand in their feed and foul it as they eat. The problem is not to clean this all the time, but rather to redesign the chicken feed trays so they do not foul in them. This can save you 40% of your feed costs. This is the way to go, and farmers need to see that they can do this and that they are able to DIY their own technological system. We looked at a few examples from chicken tractors to Soldier Fly farms in the presentation. If you can build one of these, you will do well the day when real help arrives.
This is also evident in social media. Social media is a means to regulate and design relationships, and they also work in circles. Hence, we need to use social media to maintain and create such circular relationships. These can be done by ordinary use of a messenger services, but one can also upgrade some of these to a business account so you can take a look at the analytics. This will tell you when people come on your site, who they are, sometimes where they live and how much time they spend on it. It will also tell you what posts are popular and what people like to see. From this you will start to understand your customer behaviour on social media and then you can react to this and adapt your ways to engage with them better.
Farmers need to build networks around their farms and maintain these as this itself will create value. It is in these networks where we can also converge people, technologies and opportunities. A farmer may have most luck with supplying a Spaza shop if more than one farmer participates in this supply chain. This will give the shop consistency of supply and build the professional reputation of the farmers. It is not enough to simply work together; we need to work together for smart objectives. Innovation is not an invention. Innovation is when we realise an invention in a context, and this means there needs to be bundles of people or coalitions of innovators around the farm to make a new invention work. This takes place amongst people and things, and this is how we should design our technological system: a system of interaction and synergies between people and things.
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