To the usual metaphor of the tree of knowledge, shouldn't we prefer the one of a complex and rich ecosystem such as a forest?
The Backpack
Practicing circular design takes some training, as a systemic discipline it requires a defined set of skills and a less-defined body of knowledge. If the Circular designer is the hiker ascending the mounts of the Circular Economy, the set of skills and knowledge he or she acquired constitute the hiking backpack.
Crafting one's backpack
There is something very powerful about using the backpack analogy, as for one's regular backpack we wouldn't think about going off to a hike without preparing it ourselves. Packing for a trip is very personal and could be seen as one of the first step of the trip itself.
The same goes for crafting one's skills and knowledge about Circular Design. We can be taught about it, but it is important to make it out own. More particularly, the skills of Circular Design are close from the ones of any industrial designer or engineer. The broader knowledge about Sustainability and the Circular Economy is proteiform. Each practitioner needs to wrestle with it by him or herself. To create his or her own picture of the field.
Backpack crafting can be overwhelming with no prior experience. Which materials to choose? What to pack, what to leave off? What will be enough and what is too much? The same overwhelm applied to learning Circular design and Sustainability in general: there is a lot. From Emotional design to Climate change, every bit of knowledge connects to a broader understanding of the field but the beginner is left off with indecision: where do I start? What is the most important right now?
We find here the primary aim of this website, welcoming Circular hikers and hearing them up for their first ascensions. The Circular Basecamp cuts the indecision and offers a place to start, it does that through visualization and crowdlearning.
The forest and the library - A knowledge metaphor
"To extend this reasoning, my friend Jack Hicks from English department and I were talking about the possibility to see the university as a natural system and we were wondering what the information flow would look like. We found ourselves, in this year of awareness of the forest, to remind us of the ancient links that schools had with groves.
In China too, schools like the Han-lin were called "groves". We were considering that the information network of the modern learning institution, to building habitats, has a flow of energy supplied through the accumulation of data from the first workers in the news channel - especially third-year students cycle and intellectuals. Some are green like grass, some basic photosynthesizers, grazing on very new materials.
Others get caught up in the cycle of rubbish and tunnel huge logs of old science, philosophies and literatures that have been left on the ground in the past, and the demolish through fungal networks to convert them to new in edible forms. These people who are on the ground of the information forest are among the largest workers and there is no doubt that they are sometimes scared by the hawkish shadows that sail above them.
The collected nutrients are stored in a place called the bibliotheque, "the place of the papyrus", or the library, "the place bark ”, because the Latin word for tree bark and book is the same, which refers to the first fiber used for write in this part of the Mediterranean.
If you allow me to continue this happy ecological analogy, we could say that the essays, the reports techniques and articles that early workers wrote are in a sense swallowed up by researchers and condensed into conclusions and theories - new studies, which in turn move along the information chain to thinkers at the top of it and which, after having digested them, derive unified theories or maybe a new paradigm.
These texts final, built from the assembled information concentrate further down the chain, will be seen as noble monarchs of the university forest. Such giants must sometimes succumb and regain contact with the forest floor.
To the question "What is above the chain of information? », We may be tempted to answer that these are artists and writers, because they are among the predators into the most effective and ruthless information. They are light and mobile and can melt off the top of any disciplines and run with what they think is the best of each of them to convert them into novels, mythologies, dense and esoteric essays, arts (visual or other), or in poems.
And who eat artists and writers? The answer is they have to be, ultimately, recycled by beginners, students. This is where artists and writers go, to be happily nibbled on and transferred. The library itself forms the heart of this ancient forest.
Gary Snyder , The forest in the Library (1990)