The 3 Principles of Integrative Design
how to build better solutions
As a methodology rather than a technology, integrative design often gets left out of the conversation. It is a more nuanced story of “how” rather than “what,” which doesn’t lend itself to headlines. There is no product to hype or the promise of a could-be unicorn startup to open the wallets of investors.
Yet integrative design has a proven track record for dramatically improving bottom lines, and pretty much everything else along the way. It is the “more” in “more than the sum of its parts.”
Confoundingly, this approach often puts it at odds with conventional business wisdom that calculates return on investment (ROI) by parts rather than considering the whole. Integrative design looks at system dynamics to better understand how a change in one part of a system affects everything else, then strategically optimizes the possibilities.
There are three core principles:
Start with outcomes: What are the desired results?
Draw from an expanding, cross-pollinating assemblage of practices, technologies and business models. Integrative design is dynamic and transformative. It provides a roadmap for iterative improvement.
Evaluate each part of a system to make sure it performs at least two meaningful functions. The more functions, the better.
Amory Lovins, co-founder of pioneering energy consultancy RMI, has long been a champion of integrative design, using it to optimize buildings for efficiency. He has applied the three principles on projects as varied as the Empire State Building (slashing nearly 40% off the skyscraper’s energy bills) and the design of his own 4,000 sq ft home—the “Banana House”—in the Rocky Mountains near Aspen, Colorado.
For those projects, and countless others, Lovins combines high and low tech, delighting in turning conventional thinking on its ear. His self-styled mission: “The non-violent overthrow of bad engineering.”
In our home, for example, I didn’t start off by asking, as most engineers would, how much insulation I could add and still save enough money to pay for it. Because that’s methodologically wrong, even though it’s in all the textbooks: It leaves out the avoidable capital costs of the heating equipment.
Instead, I asked what integrated combination of insulation and many other technologies would save the occupants the most energy and capital costs—and discomfort and illness and dismay?
We ended up with a house that creates delight when entered, pleasure and health when occupied, and regret when departed. A house that takes nothing. Wastes nothing. Does no harm…” —Amory Lovins
By “tunneling through the cost barrier,” spending considerably more on insulation than would have been justified using conventional ROI calculations, Lovins was able to design a home that doesn’t need a conventional HVAC system, including pricey duct work. Instead, he spent money on better windows and ventilation and heat recovery systems.
Tallied up as a whole, the capital cost payback took less than a year. In the 1980s, the Banana House was 80% energy efficient. Today, with upgrades, Lovins routinely sells excess power back to the grid. That’s now four decades and counting of utility bill savings. And for the last several years, utility bill profits.
As for the eponymous bananas, they grow in abundance in the home’s atrium jungle, which also features a feng shui-tuned waterfall and a stream. The atrium provides thermoregulation services for the building, with snacks on the side.
Not surprisingly, since integrative design is about whole systems, Lovins also thew out the playbook on plumbing, trading out standard skinny pipes with 90° elbow joints for wider pipes bent at 45° angles. This dramatically reduced friction and was also more in line with nature’s design for moving fluids. Wider pumps and shallower angles made it possible to use smaller motors for pumping. And smaller motors use a fraction of the energy required in a traditional set up.
“In our house we save 97% of the pumping energy by properly laying out some pipes. Well, if everyone in the world did that to their pipes and ducts, you would save about a fifth of the world’s electricity, or half the coal-fired electricity. And you get your money back instantly in new-build or in under a year typically in retrofits in buildings and industry.” — Amory Lovins, The Guardian
Rearrange pipes and close power plants. Close power plants and cut emissions of:
greenhouse gases
poisonous particulates linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses
ozone-shredding nitrous oxide
acid rain-making sulphur dioxide
mercury that bio-accumulates in fish, then bio-accumulates in whatever or whoever eats fish.
That’s a lot of goodness from rethinking plumbing.
“The only obstacle is force of habit,” says Lovins. “We should bend minds. Not pipes.”
Beyond Buildings
Integrative design works because this is how nature does it. Everything is part of system. Everything is the product of a system. Systems are parts of systems, from micro (molecules, cells) to macro (Gaia, the cosmos).
Regenerative agriculture is a systems approach to farming, optimizing for soil health. Here’s how it looks through the lens of the three principles:
Desired Outcomes: abundant, healthy crops and livestock; food packed with micronutrients; soil rich in organic matter with a thriving soil microbiome; soil better able to absorb extreme rain events and store water to survive droughts; reduced water run-off; reduced topsoil loss; increased biodiversity; reduced or eliminated need for pricey chemical inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides)
Assemblage of Practices, Technologies and Business models: Cover crops, no till planting and complex crop rotations are the tent poles of regenerative agriculture. Some farmers include poultry and livestock in the mix, leveraging supplies of natural fertilizer and using rotational grazing to keep grasslands healthy. Regenerative practices can lower the cost of capital, while digital marketplaces have made it easier to identify buyers looking for sustainably grown crops. Online courses in soil health create networks of expertise.
Every Part of a System Serves at Least Two Functions: Cover crops reduce soil erosion and provide habitat for beneficial insects, birds and other wildlife. No-till planting reduces erosion and protects the soil microbiome. Rotating livestock across pastures helps keep grasslands healthier (less vulnerable to floods and droughts), while providing animals with more nutritious grazing.
There are also literal downstream benefits as well. Fewer petrochemical inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides) coupled with reduced farm field water run-off mean less pollution in local streams. Cleaner water translates to healthier fish and frogs, with benefits up and down the food chain.
At scale, these practices could even make a dent in the annual formation of massive marine “dead zones” caused by fertilizer-fattened algal blooms. The dead zone in Gulf of Mexico covers thousands of acres. When algae eventually die off, they are feasted upon by bacteria that suck up so much oxygen, fish and other marine life cannot survive. And then fisherman cannot survive, either.
Like pipes, pumps and power plants, the benefits of regenerative agriculture can have an amplifying ripple effect. Good leads to more good.
Chemists use the principles of integrative design to develop alternatives to toxic “forever chemicals.” Materials scientists use them to develop replacements for materials such as plastic, cardboard, concrete and steel, whose manufacture and disposal have left legacies of natural resource depletion and pollution.
The Green Chemistry / Clean Materials movement optimizes for health: human health, environmental health, climate health.
Did you ever ask yourself, “Why do we have hazardous materials?” Who in their right mind would synthesize a red dye that causes cancer? Who in their right mind would develop a plasticizer that causes birth defects?” — John Warner, founder, Green Chemistry
Those are the same sorts of questions Rachel Carson asked in 1962 when her book, Silent Spring, was first published as a series of articles in the The New Yorker. Her chilling description of a poisoned world, a world without birds—without the dawn chorus of spring—catalyzed a nascent environmental movement.
Yet it has taken decades for Green Chemistry to gain traction and Clean Materials to edge into the mainstream.
Today there are all sorts of cleaner, greener alternatives edging into the market:
• kinder, gentler cleaning products
• bags made from compostable seaweed instead of petrochemical plastic
• alternatives for styrofoam, leather and bacon grown from mushroom mycelia
• an alternative for palm oil brewed up a bioreactor
• bio-based alternatives to petrochemical fabric dyes
Integrative design provides blueprints for building resilient futures. The focus on outcomes expands the field of view to include those that are desired and—just as important—those that most definitely are not.
The conventional “solving for problem x” approach is patchwork. With a nod to Dear Liza, it’s Hole in the Bucket thinking.
Integrative design is a way to look at “problem x” in context, finding solutions that might be good for “y”and perhaps “z,” as well. It is a whole systems approach in which an ever-expanding mix of practices, technologies and business models opens the door for continual improvement.
Systems connect, overlap and nest within other systems, which means changes in any part of a system can cascade and amplify for good or bad. Integrative design brings a discipline and intentionality to optimizing for the former.
And that is what bouncing forward—resilience—is about. This is how good gets better.