​The goal of this course is to empower you with a thinking framework which you can apply to any project you wish develop. It is hoped this course provides a platform for understanding how to develop a new era of ecologically-minded lifestyles, businesses, community initiatives, educational programmes and farms.

By the end of the course you will be empowered with a systems thinking and regenerative design framework to achieve healthy and resilient outcomes from a designed system. You would have explored the application of this strategy within a wide range of different systems from a healthy home to starting a small business or designing a backyard that will provide a nutrient dense organic diet. You will also have applied this strategy to the design of your own system, with topics within this course guiding you through that process and support provided through online coaching.

See below for an overview video, apply for a free introduction masterclass or apply for a free 20 minute consultation to discuss the course and your project idea.

Module 1: The Creative Process

The Creative Agent
  • Finding your Strengths: Investigating different self-analysis tools such as Clifton Strengths finder and Myers-Briggs personality type, to better conceptualise personal identity and strengths.
  • Identifying Your Values: Crafting a life of purpose guided by a clear vision that promote self-actualization through a state congruence.
  • The Creative process: Exploring useful frameworks for guiding creative work, structuring time, and prioritising creative output.
  • Forming habits: Identifying habits that add value to your life and understanding the mechanisms aligned to supporting habit formation.

Environmental Analysis
  • The environment: Identifying characteristics of the landscape, position of your system, supporting infrastructure, current demand and available support structure.
  • The culture: Identifying local cultural and community narratives and values that will influence the design of your system.
  • Where to play: Identifying potential niches created through an alignment of personal strengths and the environmental analysis for development of systems.
  • Playing to Win: How to consider and align with competitive forces that may impact production, maximise differentiation, and collaborate with rivals.

System Design
  • Adding value: How to identify characteristics of end users and ensure outputs of a system are aligned to adding value in ways that solve problems.
  • Rapid prototyping ideas: How to rapidly formulate proof of concept designs, acquire feedback from early adopters and utilise feedback to refine development of a system.
  • Building a community: How to create connection with others around a shared purpose and higher goal that your business is aligned to that can act as a valuable sounding board for development of your system and building connections in ways to support your endeavours.
  • Creating synergy: How to seek out beneficial collaborations that will create synergistic outcomes that will support the development of your system.

Module 2: Regenerative Design

Pattern Recognition
  • Rhythms of nature: An investigation into the motion of Earth and other influential planets that influence the rhythms of climate and weather and life on Earth.
  • Patterns in nature: Exploring the form and function of patterns expressed within natural systems and some of the underlying concepts in how they develop.
  • Designing with patterns: The recreation of natural patterns within designed systems aligned to producing natural functions and healthy outcomes.
  • Biomimicry: Investigating a range of applications of natural patterns to system design.

Principles of Design
  • Guidance from principles: What are principles and how they can be used to create a guidance framework for navigating life’s choices and reflecting upon outcomes.
  • Permaculture principles: Exploring the principles formulated by David Holmgren that underpin functional permaculture design.
  • Developing principles: Guidance for reflecting upon your own core values and identifying principles to guide your life, create a framework for group dynamics and guiding the design of systems.
  • Refining principles: The value of feedback, how to obtain it, process it and constructively use it to guide the development of robust principles.

Regenerative Systems
  • Resiliency and diversity: Delving into the characteristics of regenerative systems seen in nature and identifying underlying concepts that can guide the design of our own systems.
  • Creating regenerative systems: A practical analysis of the application of regenerative design to a number of illustrative systems.
  • Measuring regenerative outcomes: How to identify regenerative outcomes in different systems and measure them in ways that guide system design.
  • Positive feedback loops: Optimising the design of regenerative systems through positive feedback loops that utilise the complexity of that system to sustain itself.

Module 3: Support Structures

Relationships
  • Attachment theory: Explores some of the underlying psychology behind how we pre-disposed to relate to others and strategies to form secure attachments.
  • Finding your Tribe: Describes the evolutionary disposition we have to form secure attachment with small group of trusted people from which we derive a sense of connection, fulfil our esteem needs
  • Balance in Relationships: Explores the range of healthy relationships that can help facilitate growth and wellbeing and how to form healthy boundaries within relationships.
  • Building Community: Explores some of the strategies around forming intentional communities around a shared purpose and navigate some of the challenges to doing this.

Technology
  • Appropriate Technology: Investigates a range of low tech and durable solutions to enhance productivity on the farm.
  • Generating Electricity: Investigates the ways in which electricity can be generated and the most useful methods for particular sites.
  • Removing Redundancy: Explores new advances in how technology can be utilised to cut through laborious tasks and improve productivity.
  • Multiplying Value Output: Looking at how our creative output can be aligned with technology to multiple productivity.

​Finances
  • Understanding Capitalism: Explores the mechanism underpinning capitalism which support our economy.
  • Creating a Budget: Outlines practical advice on how to manage cash flow to ensure income generation results in a positive cash flow.
  • Investing: Introduces approaches to invest and grow financial assets to leverage wealth generation.
  • Alternative Currency: Explores alternatives to conventional economic systems through trade, local currency, removing expenses and online currencies.

Module 4: A Permaculture Design

​​Agroecology
  • Agricultural ecosystems: Investigates the form and function of natural ecosystems and how this can be replicated within the design of an agricultural ecosystem.
  • Placement of elements: Investigates the appropriate placements of elements (plants, animals, and infrastructure) in time and space and how to create synergy through managing these placements.
  • Building soil: Delves into the roles of different organisms within the soil, how their function contributes to soil building processes and how we can enhance these processes through farm management.
  • Controlling water: Explores techniques used to capture, store and spread soil within the landscape to support soil building processes and retain nutrients within a system.

Site Analysis
  • Mapping: Outlines the goals of mapping a property, some mapping conventions, creating keys and scales, and some tools and techniques to support mapping.
  • Topography: Investigates the impact of topography on a site and how to represent topography on a site map.
  • Sector analysis: How to represent the impact of different forces or energies on a site and the influence of different features of a site.
  • Zones: Explores how to divide a property into different types of production systems appropriate to features of a site and aligned with goals of production and capabilities of land owners.
 
Useful Frameworks
  • Aquaponics: Investigates the design of aquaponics systems that combining aquaculture systems (raising aquatic species) with hydroponic systems (for raising terrestrial plants) within symbiotic and self-sustaining systems.
  • Biodynamic farming: Explores the practices of biodynamic agriculture developed by Rudolf Steiner, that combine organic farming practices with an esoteric connection to the energies of nature.
  • Biointensive farming: How to develop organic agricultural system that focuses on achieving maximum yields from a minimum area of land, while simultaneously increasing biodiversity and sustaining the fertility of the soil.
  • Natural farming: Investigates the ecological approach to farming pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008), a Japanese farmer and philosopher, introduced in his 1975 book The One-Straw Revolution.

Module 5: Regenerative Foodscapes

The Annual Garden
  • Propagation: Techniques to propagate your own annual plants and improve genetic resilience appropriate to local conditions and desired trait characteristics.
  • Improving soil fertility: Techniques to manage fertility, using compost, foliar sprays and probiotic fertilisers.
  • Managing weeds: Understanding the characteristics of weeds and methods of control.
  • Managing pests: Utilising biological controls, organic sprays, companion planting and rotation of plants.

The Perennial Orchard
  • Propagation: Techniques used for propagation of your own perennial plants and selecting for desired genetic traits.
  • Plant guilds: Creating symbiotic associations of plants focused on supporting health of target productive species or creating a range of species that produce at similar times.
  • Incorporating animals: Ways to incorporate some common types of animals and benefit from some of the beneficial functions to create supplementary yields and improve the health of orchard plants.
  • Orchard design: Investigates some different approaches to the design of a perennial orchard and appropriate placement within different landscapes.

Holistic Grazing
  • Grazer Physiology: Explores the origin and physiology of common pastoral herbivores and requirements from a habitat to express their natural behaviours
  • Pasture Management: The development of mixed forage pastures, the incorporation of tree crops and management of grazers in time and space.
  • Habitat design: Explore potential design solution to provide optimal health for both grazers, soil and surrounding natural environments.
  • Infrastructure & technology: Explores some helpful technology to support management of grazers and optimise their health and wellbeing.