Submersion

 

Overview

 

Walking in the earlier part of the morning is a time when I often get lost in my thoughts whilst listening to a podcast or interview. One such morning I was contemplating the complexity of some of the permaculture frameworks along with the unpronounceable acronyms they come with and decided I’d create my own.

This is the story of why I came up with the forage framework.

    

Permaculture Frameworks and Dyslexia

 

A permaculture design framework is what it says in the tin, a framework to help keep a permaculture design on track.   

SADIMET, and OBREDIMET are two popular frameworks that both roll off the tongue, I’m sure you will agree.  When it comes to permaculture design frameworks complexity is high on the agender followed by unpronounceable acronyms.

There are countless design frameworks out there, many of which blow my mind in how complicated they appear to somebody like myself who though undiagnosed would guess I qualify for the grand title of being somewhat dyslexic.

To highlight this point before starting my diploma I had several incarnations of websites and blogs. The tipping point for my websites arrived during one post where I mistakenly spelt gentle with the word genital. Hilarious for some but only so much mocking can be taken, and this resulted in me deleting all my websites and blogs. Of course, this was not just a one-off typo but more a culmination of seeing words that appeared to be correct whilst at the same time making no sense to anybody else other than myself. It was starting the diploma a few years later that pushed me to start again with websites. My time at school was also 11 years’ worth of this same treatment, the embarrassment of not being able to spell or read very well takes its toll even now as I head towards 50 years of age but as a child, they were not good times.

Starting the diploma in applied permaculture design was always going to be challenging on many different levels and people will always be people and laugh at you for your failings so now I just drop these people into the dickhead box and move on. 

It was not until completing five designs whilst working on my diploma that I started to get to grips with the importance of using a framework. The first half of my diploma was more of a box-ticking exercise than anything else. In the second half with growing confidence I was able to understand how to use a framework in a way that added value to the design process.

A design framework is what provides the structure to the overall design process. Often a framework is made up of several design phases which flow from one to the next building upon the previous. Throughout each design phase, decisions will be made that influence the outcome of the design.

Throughout my diploma many of the commonly used frameworks I was unable to get to grips with, they just did not make any sense to me. The first framework that broke through this blockage was PRIME, Problem, Research, Ideas, Make, Evaluate. I was drawn to this framework because it was one that I could say. I found PRIME excellent for tweaking elements of an existing design, yet I struggled when I tried to use it on more complex designs. An example of this was a mental health design I had been trying to build a design around since starting my diploma six years ago.

I had put a lot of research into a mental health design but in 2022 I very nearly let this slip away due to being unable to find a framework that I felt I could use to build a design around.

This was when out walking at 5 am already serval miles into my walk I chose the word forage to see if I could create a framework using the letters in this word. A few miles later I had come up with a word for all 6 letters and the FORAGE framework was walked into existence.

The whole point of creating a framework was that I struggled so much to understand the meanings other people had put on the various permaculture frameworks.

In the past when I have been at permaculture gatherings people would throw out all these acronyms one after another and other people would then reply also using acronyms. I once found myself at an ecology conference in France listening to a lecture in French and saying to myself “How the heck have I ended up here, I don’t even know French.” This is how I feel when I’m surrounded by permaculture folks riffing on permaculture frameworks, my mind goes blank, and I start thinking about what I’m going to have for my dinner once I get back home.

Today I’m still confused about how I ended up at a French ecology conference, but the food was amazing and I stayed at an Ayurvedic retreat centre with a great Indian chef.  

 

FORAGE Framework

 

What I’m not going to do is explain to you how to use the forage framework, by doing so I would also be creating another framework to confuse the already confused.

I will give the simplest of points to get anybody started

Focus - A permaculture design starts with a problem, here all you need to do is just take some time and just focus on what this problem is.

Observe - Now you know what your problem is, just observe the problem and let your mind wander, remember the spirit of the design is to forage, so forage through your thoughts.

Research - So, you have your problem, you have observed it, now do some research on it.

Apply - This is simply the section to apply the permaculture ethics and principles. Apply some or all of them, it’s your design.

Gather - You are at the point now where you gather everything together and create your designs, it’s always good to have a few different designs and then select the one that fits best for your problem.

Evaluate - With your design created, spend a little time evaluating it, for my kitchen garden design I’m already on my third redesign of it, not everything works so it’s well to evaluate a design.

 

Conclusion

 

What helped me break out of my self-induced permaculture conditioning was when I figured out permaculture is all made up, just like everything else in this world. Permaculture is just something thought into existence.

A final tip is just to use this framework however you want, the words are just pointers to help hold a design together. You can make the words mean anything you want, but best of all to all the dyslexic folks out there here is a framework you can say and one that allows you to forage around in your minds to choose the meanings that resonate with you for each section of the framework.   

 

A personal message

 

During my diploma, the only way that helped me understand the frameworks was to read and reread other people's designs to see how they had used the different frameworks. In the FORAGE section of this website, I’ve added the designs I’ve used the forage framework with, hopefully, these may help those struggling with frameworks to experience how I have used it.

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions.

Thank you

Stephen