DANCING WITH DISORDER:
SYNERGIZING SYNERGIES WITHIN METADESIGN

This paper describes ongoing research funded by the UK’s AHRC and EPSRC. Citing the work of some of the project’s 14 co-researchers, it argues that the discourse of ‘environmental sustainability’ is logically inconsistent and semantically confused. This helps to explain why it failed to deliver actions that were strong or coherent enough to defeat the monetary forces behind the growth economy. Where the design of ‘total living styles’ might solve the problem, successive phases of ‘green design’, ‘eco-design’, ‘design for sustainability’ were too uncoordinated, localised, or over-specialised to deliver a more ‘joined-up’ society. The most promising approach derives from theories of sustainable business (Fuller, 1975; Hawken, Lovins and Lovins, 2000; Murray, 2002; MacDonagh, 2002), although this is still not broad enough. In seeking a shareable approach for a wider cross-section of society, the paper calls for government-sponsored ‘metadesign’ industries. Metadesign would replace the idea of design as a discrete, predictive task, with design as a consensual seeding process for integrating economics, food production, transportation, and governance, etc. Different modes of ‘synergy’ could be identified for use as performance indicators. Buckminster Fuller’s notion of a ‘synergy of synergies’ (Fuller, 1975) is useful, although real systems are highly complex and chaotic, therefore difficult to manage. (Fuller, 1975; Corning, 2003). They might range from the management of energy systems to the cultivation of ‘luck’ (Wiseman, 2003) or ‘happiness’ (Cziksentmihalyi, 1991). In order to plan the task the author offers 4 ‘orders’ of synergy that could become the basis for a coherent organisational whole.