Red Threads are models, concepts, principles, processes and people, that run through our body of work much like in weaving where red threads are woven into the cloth in tiny proportions in order to bring out the vibrancy of the other colors.
We see red threading a useful metaphor in bringing various parts of human systems—such as communities, corporations, governments, etc.—into design together. At this time in our history, it seems many of these systems and systems-of-systems are dangerously out-of-sync, fragmented and unbalanced. Red threading benefits self- and world-awareness, begs more meaningful questions, and helps find greater fitness and effectiveness in decision making.
Sunday, June 7, 2009 at 07:30AM This is a radio series full of wonderful conversations about our changing world. Several of the programs provided inspiration and insights into our understanding for the unfolding of a new paradigm shift.
Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 11:25PM "An integrative theory to help us understand the source and role of change in systems- particularly kinds of changes that are transforming and take place in systems that are adaptive. Such changes comprise economic, ecological, and social systems, and they are evolutionary. They concern rapidly unfolding processes and slowly changing ones; gradual change and episodic change; and they take place and interact at many scales from local to global.
The cross-scale and dynamic nature of the theory led to the newly coined term - Panarchy. The term was created as an antethesis to the word hierarchy in its original meaning of a set of sacred rules. Panarchy is a framework of nature's rules, hinted at by the name of the Greek god of nature- Pan - whose persona also evokes an image of unpredictable change."
- from the Resilience Alliance website
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 01:46PM Among the archived journals, "Expanding time to compress time" is relevant to our current exploration of fast and slow. In this journal, Todd explores how design processes can facilitate a perceptual expansion of time, in order to accomplish a lot in a little amount of time.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 11:24AM The notion of how fast and slow design processes relate, influence, cohere and disrupt one another first captured my imagination in reading The Clock of the Long Now, a book by Stewart Brand about the project of the same name (now part of the Long Now Foundation). There is one particular passage that stood out, and has since been frequently referenced by Gail and me in our process design work:
In civilizations with long nows, says Brian Eno, "you feel a very strong but flexible structure . . . built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them." Once can imagine how such a process evolves: All civilizations suffer shocks, yet only those that absorb the shocks survive. This still does not explain the mechanism however. In recent years a few scientists (such as R.V. O'Neill and C.S. Holling) have been probing a similar issue in ecological systems: How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with the way the differently paced parts affect each other. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by consrtraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.
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