Design System Component Inputs, Outputs, Characteristics, and Connections Worksheet TPS-0097

I'm making an announcement about another tool that I've launched on my website under the tools section.

It is a desktop based tool where you can now actually fulfill one of the most important aspects of doing a permaculture design, which is to do an inventory and analysis of the different system components or elements or features.

In the Permaculture Designers Manual, the section talking about this refers to the design components and how there are certain fundamental lists that should be made for every component of a system design. Some things we may just glaze over because they are no-brainers but it's always advisable to go through this process because it reveals things that you may not have already known, or reveals emergent properties that you would not have assumed or arrived at without doing this process.

So what you list about each component, let's say it's a livestock animal that you wanna integrate into the design or it's a variety of fruit tree or a type of building material, it is a discrete distinct component and obviously you could break this down as far as you want to with sub species or the nuances of different materials. Either a larger group category or an individual unit that's very fine grained, you can choose what scale, how far you wanna zoom into what you're doing.

If it is a fruit tree, then obviously identify it. Let's say it's an apple tree, where you will want to be thinking from a so called systems thinking kind of perspective, inputs and outputs. What is it? What does it need and what does it produce?

If it's something that has the possibility to behave, what types of behaviors does it engage in?

With plants, there are all kinds of behavior happening at the root zone and interactions with, with even the moisture in the sky.

You're splitting hairs to say that behavior is only something that animals engage in.

Because it's biological, because we're designing with life, inanimate and animate biotic and antibiotic elements, it's behooves us to think beyond just mechanical engineering and say, okay, this is a part, and it needs this form of maintenance, and maybe this kind of energy to run and then its outputs for the system is that it transmits force in this direction, moving another gear, or something. There are mechanical engineering aspects of inputs and outputs in a system.

But the biological value of a permaculture design, or the value of each component...it's going to have all kinds of more nuanced both inputs and outputs.

So listing inputs, obviously, fertilizer, irrigation, water, you could even say inputs that don't necessarily go directly into the cells of the organism, an input or need being protection from the elements.

It's used sort of interchangeably, inputs and needs but that helps to understand that it's multi dimensional. It could be something that you actually directly pour onto or into something, but it could also be more peripheral, something that it would need to survive or to function or to perform.

It's a great practice in ecological thinking, systems thinking and permaculture design to be thinking about not getting too far into it being mechanical, but also not getting too far into it being biological, finding that balance.

So that's the way this is laid out. It's a worksheet, basically, and you can name your component in a form field, and then add up to 50 listings, adding up to 50 inputs or needs, and then listing up to 50 products or outputs or behaviors.

Then the next category is it's intrinsic characteristics, which help to understand how it differs from other possibly similar components.

If it's poultry, what are its breed characteristics? Does it have a certain pattern of color or a certain height, or any of those more descriptive aspects?

Certainly, the ones that are distinguishing from others are important to list, because when you do the next list, which is its potential connections, and you consider its relationship to other system components, whether they're living or non living, you may determine that there are clashes or synergies between different components that you're gonna discover.

Hopefully, before you spend a lot of money and a lot of effort trying to smash them together in a system that they're not gonna be happy together in, and they're gonna create problems.

Don't build a chicken coop and have it be guarded by the fox kind of thing.

There are certain breeds of dogs that are bred to be livestock guardian dogs.

I've also heard stories of people who are able to raise predators of poultry alongside them in such a way that that you could call it friendship.

You could call it their protective instinct. But they end up becoming the sort of guardians of their prey species, the way they would be guardians of their own offspring.

I didn't grow up on a farm, I've had some experience with raising chickens but buying them already laying and then caring for them but my livestock experience is limited so I don't have the sort of colloquial folk knowledge of growing up in that environment, I wish I did. I haven't lived on really fully functionally livestock integrated permaculture farms. I've done a lot of urban work and some rural work and some farm scale work.

But there are people out there who have far more direct experience firsthand and even more book knowledge of the types of interactions that you get when you integrate different types of livestock systems.

This is so useful for scaling into more of those types of interactions, not just throwing things together, but actually doing this exercise of understanding the needs, the inputs, the outputs, the products, the behaviors, the intrinsic characteristics...

The last list that's available to fill out is the connections, which I'll probably end up figuring out ways to design the information architecture so that the connections are comparable in a way, in an interface that's more intuitive.

You can upload a photo to the page, and then you can fill out the sheets, and if you wanted to, you could print it. The photo being there is mainly so that you can kind of meditate with it and look at it and be brainstorming and thinking as you make the lists.

Then after you've entered all the list items that you want for each category, you can export it to what's called it Common Separated Value or CSV file, which will open in any spreadsheet platform that you use, whether it's an open source or a closed source.

You could fill this out an export to a spreadsheet. And so the the that begs the question, well, why not just do this in a spreadsheet to begin with?

The idea is that you're in the environment of the website, and you're maybe getting assigned this process, and the ability to save it and export it to a spreadsheet that's sort of secondary to the value of the process of doing the worksheet.

Also now that I'm building these sort of one off tools, the ultimate next level would be to integrate them into a continual educational experience or workflow, part of a more integrated process and that continues to evolve over time,

I was, was excited to for myself, embark on that journey of learning how to code so that form fields on a web page can be exported out to the CSV file, because, to me, that's very powerful. I will be using that for a lot of different applications moving forward.

I was glad, to be able to personally get that merit badge and have that sort of template of a code base in place.

Everything that I have learned to do using spreadsheets has been a blessing and a gift and really a life changing game changing skill set.

There's tasks of writing hundreds of lines of code where you have to change one value or you have to change a few values out of each line of code.

If you had to do that manually, like surgically going into each line of code to change something...it's not as simple as just "find and replace". There is always nuance when you're writing code. So using the spreadsheet technology wisely has given me the power to optimize the work flow.

No one ever told me don't even bother writing any code unless you have a spreadsheet platform on a separate monitor because you're gonna want to automate tasks and do the code surgery en masse by using rapid fire tools within the spreadsheet.

So if if I'm helping to get people to understand and to use and to evolve their productivity, to involve spreadsheets and then also make it so whatever you enter into the web pages or the web apps that I'm creating, it's not just all lost when you close the tab, you have the ability to export it and then do with it what you please afterwards.

Working with clients, the whole point of having a worksheet, questionnaires and stuff like that is that you can assign tasks to people.

If it doesn't have sort of guard rails and guides and step by step, if it's not presented in the form of almost like an app then just giving someone an assignment, if they're not comfortable using a spreadsheet, it can be very nerve wracking unless you get used to it.

It's also a way to make it simpler and more intuitive and more of a application environment that people are used to or can fill out a web form and then you end up with the ability to export that work that you did to a CSV.

This worksheet tool and the exported spreadsheet can be useful for shopping at the nursery for example.

I've done this a million times. You go to the nursery, you check out with all kinds of impulse buys. You end up with loads and loads of great stuff you want to plant.

You can enter in all of the information on the tags into this worksheet.

Then I can list what connections can be made. Oh, it's ground cover. It can be in a guild with these other plantings, and it can go in this area and just basically build a profile out.

This prototype is gonna be useful for me and get me doing things that I know I should have been doing more thoroughly.