Ecological Design and Education 311examples of the under-degreed or academic failures include Albert Einstein, Win-
ston Churchill, Frank Lloyd Wright and Amory Lovins. One should not conclude,
however, that formal schooling is useless, but that its effectiveness, for all of the
puffery that adorns college catalogues and educational magazines, is considerably
less than advertised. And there are those as lawyer John Berry once noted who have
been ‘educated beyond their comprehension’, people made more errant by the
belief that their ignorance has been erased by the possession of facts, theories and
the adornment of weighty learnedness.
Nor does the outlook for intelligence necessarily brighten when we consider
the limitations of large organizations. These, too, are infected with our debilities.
Most of us live out our professional lives in organizations or work for them as cli-
ents and often discover to our dismay that the collective intelligence of organiza-
tions and bureaucracies is often considerably less than that of any one of its
individual employees. We are baffled by the discrepancy between smart people
within organizations exhibiting a collective IQ less than, say, kitty litter. We under-
stand human stupidity and dysfunction because we encounter it at a scale com-
mensurate with our own. But confronted with large-scale organizations whether
corporations, governments or colleges and universities we tend to equate scale,
prestige and power with perspicacity and infallibility. Nothing could be farther
from the truth. The intelligence of a large-scale organization (if that is not alto-
gether oxymoronic) is limited by the obligation to earn a profit, enlarge its domain,
preserve entitlements or maintain a suitable stockpile of prestige.
Our human frailties infect the design professions as well. Buildings and bridges
sometimes fall down (Levy and Salvadori, 1992). Clever designs can induce an
astonishing level of illness and destruction. Beyond some scale and limits design
becomes guesswork. British engineer, A. R. Dykes puts it this way: ‘Engineering is
the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot
precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way
that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance’ (www.ukciv
ilengineering.co.uk/quotes.html). In various ways the same is true in other design
professions and virtually every other field of human endeavour.
The point is simply to say that human limitations will be evident in every
design, project and system however otherwise clever. From this there are, I think,
two conclusions to be drawn. The first is simply that design, whether of bridges,
buildings, communities, factories, or farms and food systems, ought to maximize
the capacity of a system to withstand disturbance without impairment, which is to
say resilience. Ecological design does not assume the improbable: human infallibil-
ity, technological perfection or some deus ex machina that magically rescues us
from folly. Rather ecological designers aim to work at a manageable scale, achiev-
ing flexibility, redundancy and multiple checks and balances while avoiding the
thresholds of the irreversible and irrevocable (Lovins and Lovins, 1982, ch 13;
Lovins, 2002).
Forewarned about human limitations, we might further conclude that a prin-
cipal goal of designers ought to be the improvement of our collective intelligence