Creativity & Biodiversity: Towards a Synergy-of-Synergies

Abstract

The paper argues that, in order to curb the current acceleration of species losses,a massive systemic change is needed. However, we are unlikely to achieve this with current methods. Paradigm change includes the need to rethink the prevailing ‘realities’ and governances upon which the current paradigm depends.As designers are expressly trained to ‘think creatively’ this paper argues that their methods might usefully augment those used by scientists and politicians.However, as these design methodologies evolved as part of the old paradigm they,too, need to be re-designed. The paper explores some research into ‘metadesign’ - a non-hierarchical, self-organizing framework for practice that helps designers to re-design their own mission and working vernacular, when required. In work that began in 2002, instead of seeing design as the process of creating products and services, we sought to cultivate ‘synergy’ at many levels. However, synergies tend to operate outside familiar boundaries of language and custom, which means that metadesigners must develop a metadiscourse, with which to explore each new predicament. This process encourages the radical ‘relanguaging’ of purposes,roles and self-identities. Although, in the hierarchical sense, this makes these tasks ‘unmanageable’, politicians can facilitate local change by encouraging citizens to cultivate a ‘diversity-of-diversities’. This would act as an attractor to hitherto unforeseen orders, entities and configurations. It would offer an interoperable framework, within which communities could self-orchestrate a more complex, and emergent, ‘synergy-of-synergies’.