Daily pages - September 12, 2021

When we talk about creating a better world, we mean that we want to create a world with greater livingness. Livingness is the quality of life that a place, a thing, a person has. It’s a gradual quality, meaning that it can be described as being along a gradient ranging from very low livingness to very high livingness.

Livingness is not about whether we would describe something as biologically alive or not alive (e.g. a cat versus a rock), but it’s a quality that both a cat and a rock can possess. We’ve all known places or people that have a quality of vibrancy, or being alive. A river rock on the shore of Boulder Creek might be seen as having more livingness than the river rocks that try to suppress the weeds around my mailbox.

Livingness is a complex quality with many aspects, including complexity. The more complex something is, the more likely it will be sensed as having more livingness.

I assert that livingness is the ultimate change vector if you want to create a better world. A change vector is a quality or property that you want to move toward by creating a change. Change for change’s sake is largely random and not particularly helpful, but change intended to move something in a certain direction can be much more effective. In this case, we’re saying that we want to move things toward greater livingness.

And there are many sub-vectors that move us in that general direction as well. For example, a society that is more diverse is going to have greater livingness. So the sub-vector there is moving from less diversity toward greater diversity. That’s good to know because you can find people already working to increase diversity in society, and you can rest assured that if you help them achieve that, you have created greater livingness. In the same way, if you identify people trying to reduce diversity, you don’t want to waste your time helping them because you’ll be making the world worse.

Greater Livingness seems like the best and least interfering way that I can describe my imagined future. I’m not writing this book to tell you exactly what the future will or should look like. I don’t think my vision could ever capture in any detail what will actually come to be. But whatever the future holds, I hope it is a world with greater livingness.

Livingness is not a human quality. Moving toward greater livingness is not about making things better for humans at the expense of other life. Destroying or damaging other life results in less livingness. Livingness is comprehensive. For livingness to increase, the quality of life for all life must increase.

While livingness is not a uniquely human quality, we are adept at sensing it. As complex adaptive systems ourselves, we can compare ourselves or our ideal selves to the things around us and sense what has more livingness. Christopher Alexander found that he could show people two pictures as ask them “which of these objects feels more like it would make you whole.” (or something like that), and with consistency around 80%, people chose the same pictures. Like pornography, we know livingness when we see it.

In fact, that’s how many of us experience this sense of livingness. As a graphic designer, I would start with an idea that I would produce on the computer, but then I would go though a process of tweaking it that consisted of perhaps hundreds of one-on-one comparisons like Alexander used. I would make a change and ask myself is this new version better that the previous? If no, I would undo the change and try again. If yes, then I’d keep that change and keep going. In that way, I would slowly transform my design until I reached a place that I felt it accomplished what it was trying to do, and I would show it to my client.

Design is like that. We try out small changes and see what we think. Sometimes that trying out process takes place in our minds and sometimes it takes place in the physical world. We’ve likely all moved furniture around a room to better experience what that arrangement felt like. Design is the process of moving around the furniture of our mind to find solutions.

So, making the world better is about creating greater livingness. It turns out we’re uniquely suited (as far as we know) to doing just that. Some have gone as far as to say that it is our purpose as humans. Certainly, we can decide to make it our purpose.