Reach and Depth

Re-rooting ourselves to build new collective growth

I often think of my work as an educator as a fractal. I guide students in a creative-critical process teaching them a variety of skills, then they go on to work in various places and the seeds I’ve planted in them influence and inspire others. Each semester I have a new growing period to watch students learning to emerge. My hope is that the collective result of my work is something far greater than myself. Each class and each generation of students advancing farther forward. Regenerative design is also often thought of as a fractal - propelling energy and ideas into multiples that rebirth energy into ourselves, our communities, our cultures. These are the questions I continue to ask as a designer and an educator - how do we reimagine design to restore our planet and rejuvenate a culture of living in balance with nature? While imagining a fractaling plant, blossoming above, equally as important are the roots growing beneath it.  

Teaching at a small liberal arts school, I love that I teach small classes. Getting to know my students well is one of my favorite aspects of my job. Sometimes though, the smallness can make me feel limited; I have something in me I want to share with wider audiences - more than 30 students per semester at a time. (This is part of what made me start this conversation on substack). I struggle with this tension of wanting the fractal of my work to be bigger - to be faster - to have a larger, more reaching impact; not because I think my voice is that important, but because I know we are in dire need of taking action in the climate crisis, and want to move the masses.  

Last summer as I was struggling with this question of creating a larger reach, I got a Facebook friend request from my high school Women’s Lit teacher. This was someone I hadn’t seen or talked to since I graduated some 20+ years ago, nor had I really thought about in a while. I was surprised that she remembered who I was as I wasn’t the most vocal of students back then. At the moment of seeing her friend request, I remembered her classroom perfectly. I still have several books from her class with my name and homeroom number written on the inside front cover. These books have zigzagged across the country with me between many moves. I couldn’t give them up because not only did they speak to me, but they also reminded me of the conversations they spurred. As an adult, I now think back to taking “Women’s Lit” at a Catholic high school in Milwaukee in the late 90s, reading black and Indigenous authors, discussing mental health, race, class, sexuality, divorce, reproductive rights, and realize this must have been both trailblazing and difficult to teach. Yet remembering the class as a student, it just seemed normal. I saw this teacher with such confidence, such power, such conviction, that I never second-guessed these subjects might be trying to expand a larger conversation. When I told my husband about my new Facebook friend, and his response was simple - “so it sounds like there was depth to what she taught, she made an impact on you… you keep talking about wanting more reach, but I know you connect with many of your students with this same depth that makes a lasting impact.”   

The reality of course is that we need both reach and depth to create lasting changes in restorative culture and regenerative design.

At the end of the summer, my family went to one of our absolute favorite places - Point Reyes Seashore. We’ve been to this area many times, we have our favorite spots, and also always discover something new. This time, we discovered a spot we’d likely driven by numerous times but never bothered to stop or look at what it was. Just off the windy road that leads out to the ocean, a Cypress Tree Tunnel lines a long driveway leading up to an old radio station. As we walked through these massive cypress trees arching over the path, I marveled at the massive trunks, the reaching branches, stretching and connecting with one another. I also wondered what wasn’t seen? Where were the roots? Did they grow deep? Did they grow out? Were they tangled? Wherever they were, they must be rooted with strength to support the vastness overhead. Like the branches weaving together overhead, I imagined the roots below forming their own support networks - gathering strength not just as individual trees, but also because of this connection to one another. Similar to my last post about weaving leverage points, these trees were weaving strength in both their depth and their reach.    

Thinking about how to design for reach, most people immediately think about design for the masses and how to reach the largest possible audience the most quickly. This is something that algorithms can now predict and implement in seconds as advertising has become engineered to hook us in when we're not looking. Manufactured smells, colors, textures, lights, ads, suggestions, words, icons, all designed to make us hungry, keep us longer, buy more, get things faster, and addict us to more routines of consumption. These show up in the many intentional design flaws behind fast fashion, fast food, planned obsolescence, single-use plastics, and more. While most people realize these things are not good for the planet or our society, it’s also hard for individuals to fight against them. In part, because it was all designed this way. Not just the design of individual objects for sale, but also the design of our socio-economic systems and structures that underlie this all. The reach, in this instance, is deeply rooted in capitalistic systems of oppression and inequality. So no matter how many followers, having a celebrity influencer tell us to buy local organic food, isn’t going to move us when that same filtered post isn’t helping to fix food subsidies, minimum wage, food deserts, and the web of other underlying issues.  

Instead of starting then with designing for reach, we can look at designing for depth. There’s plenty of academics who can frame sustainable design as design for durability (both physically and emotionally) slow design, local design, or values-based design connecting to meaning beyond materiality. Arguably there is more depth than the fast-paced consumer products described above, but more often than not these forms of design still create objects and items to be consumed in the same deeply rooted problematic systems - where those who can afford these often more costly items can, but the majority of consumers can not. This can perpetuate an idea that “sustainability” is a luxury. The depth in these areas does not tackle the problematic roots that support them.

How then can we think about design not in terms of creating stuff, but in creating moments, conversations, and experiences that will lead to growing entirely new systems to restore and regenerate? How do we design these conditions - tending the soil, the compost, the seeds, watering, weeding, and waiting. This work in many ways is dependent on personal growth as a shared experience.  

Design, in this case might be planting an entirely new kind of seed - developing new roots that will support a more sustainable and just reach to fulfill ourselves and our communities. There’s a handful of recent publications that all revolve around the idea of individual collective action. I do not mean this in the sense of “I’m doing my part by recycling my bottle” but rather, individuals spending the time to think deeply about values, connections, mindsets, and community building - re-rooting themselves. You matter more than you think, presents ideas on our individual collective capacity for social change. Saving Us, A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World teaches us how to build relationships and have conversations that help move the needle. All We Can Save, shares stories of leadership and community building in the climate crisis. (And the not as new, but I always find something new each time I read it) Emergent Strategy is described as “radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live.” All of this work is far slower than an Instagram post, not nearly as sexy as an ad for a hot product with a gradient behind it, and harder to do remembering to bring your own bag to the store. This work is re-rooting to build new systems and new ways of working. When planting a seed after all, it grows down, beneath the soil before emerging up. Taking the time to do this work is important, as reach, when not rooted, will likely fail. It’s slow, hard, and not always pretty - it’s the anti-design design work that is needed now more than ever. 

This past year I joined The Transition Leadership Lab. It was one of those things that popped up on my radar at just the right moment and I jumped in not knowing exactly where it would lead me. To my surprise, all of the other members were in Australia. At first, I found this odd, but I came to enjoy the dynamic. When we meet, the sun is setting here and I’m winding down from my day, while the others are finishing lunch and going full-on woking during the following day. At times throughout the past year I was living in shut down, while they moved about freely, and then more recently as California has opened up, they’ve shut down. We are a small but mighty group of thought partners tackling similar big questions of how to create regenerative culture, how to heal not only the planet but also individuals from climate catastrophe, and how to transition change. I long for the mass change to realize just climate transitions, but often it is these small intimate gatherings where depth and growth emerge. We too are seeds of regenerative fractalling wildflowers. To think again about the questions of depth and reach - I sometimes wonder how we can connect both rooted down to the core where we will find the roots from across the globe - and also reaching around the outside of the planet.  

Recently after one of my Sustainable Systems in Design classes, a student asked - “Everything we talk about in this class is so big and so important, how do we fit it in with our other design classes?” Their question of course is exactly the heart of this paradox. As designers, we’re taught to make stuff, make projects, and make it quickly! (In a semester or less if you are a student) We still need to function in the reality around us while also trying to transform a new way of living, working, and creating. I asked my class if they could think of an instance from their lifetime where they saw a mass cultural change. I expected what I thought was the obvious answer to any of the numerous outcomes from COVID. Instead, their answer was experiencing a greater acceptance of LGBTQIA+ communities. One student shared they remembered being called the “f word” in school but now doesn’t hear anyone use that word as it’s no longer socially acceptable. We talked about the many changes that have occurred - from the legalization of same-sex marriage, Hollywood’s inclusion of more LGBTQIA+ characters in TV shows and movies, social media making it easier for people to come out and share experiences - all of these things together helped move the needle. All of these things in some ways were seeds planted to for a new way of being to grow. All of the wicked problems we face right now - climate change, racism, gender rights, education, health care - is going to require many individual moments, leading to bigger moments, connected together to move the masses.  

These individual conversations, discussion circles, and communities sometimes feel small. They feel like the change isn’t happening. Not fast enough, not wide enough. This is the reach I struggle with wanting to make bigger. We need the world to change course on climate destruction and fast! But I’m reminded that without being rooted, we can’t make that reach. Years before my students witnessed a change in LGBTQIA+ perceptions, there was a high school English teacher in Milwaukee who dared to lead conversations others weren’t having. Those conversations in my high school Women's Lit class, both directly and indirectly, paved the way for my students to witness the change in perceptions they saw. And those conversations paved the way for me to have my own daughters who don’t blink an eye when asked their pronouns in 1st grade, read children's books that normalize ADHD, anxiety, autism, or dyslexia as just another way that makes people unique, and openly have discussions about the connections between racism, sexism and climate change. No, my high school English teacher did not single-handedly do all this, just like designers won’t single handedly design regenerative culture to transition us towards climate justice. But we must plant seeds to create new roots with new reach - to change mindsets in individuals, to change landscapes, to create cultural shifts.