E.F. Schumacher's 3 Purposes of Good Work

"How does work relate to the end and purpose of man's being? It has been recognized in all authentic teachings of mankind that every human being born into this world has to work not merely to keep himself alive but to strive toward perfection. To keep himself alive, he needs various goods and services which will not be forthcoming without human labour. To perfect himself, he needs purposeful activity in accordance with the injunction: 'Whichever gift each of you has received, use it in service to one another, like good stewards dispensing the grace of God in its varied forms.' From this, we may derive the three purposes of human work as follows:

First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services.
Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect out gifts like good stewards.
Third, to do so in service to, and in co-operation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.

This threefold function makes work so central to human life that it is truly impossible to conceive of life at the human level without work. 'Without work, all life goes rotten, ' said Albert Camus, 'but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.' "
- E.F. Schumacher, Good Work (1979)


"Permaculture is not about romanticising a golden age, but rather an attempt to re-define the way in which we work and to think of the importance of an integration of art and life. In industrial-consumer society, we have seen a tendency to separate beauty and function, art has become an elite occupation which is seen as an extra activity, not essential. Art is something the ordinary person goes to see in a gallery at the weekend, not an entity which has direct relevance to and importance in everyday life. Permaculture aims to create a society where work is seen as art, where beauty and function are intertwined, and people have a part in creating the objects with which they are surrounded. Beautiful surroundings and articles are important and the work which people do should be seen as artistic and creative."
- Joanne Tippet, A Pattern Language of Sustainability (1994), www.holocene.net/dissertation.htm#e

Javan K. Bernakevitch's Zones of Brilliance questions

 

Design: Sustainable Commute Survey Stage 2

Road route is marked by thin blue line, with approximate train route marked by red line followed by tube route in green.

According to: www.distance-calculator.co.uk/distances-for-south_woodham... The approx distance between South Woodham Ferrers and London (oxford Street) in a straight line is 33 miles (53.1km) - while the actual driving distance is 40.6 mi (65.3km) (taking about 1 hour 11 mins in normal conditions).

According to www.nationalrail.co.uk/ a train & tube journey between South Woodham Ferrers train station and London Tottenham Court Road tube station in the morning should take between 1hr 1 min and 1hr 10 min from a scheduled start time. According to www.travelfootprint.org/journey_emissions/ - the train journey between South Woodham Ferrers train station and London Stratford station is 30.2 miles (48.6km) plus a tube journey of 6.4 miles (10.3km) - so a total distance of 36.8 miles (58.9 km).

According to a Personal Travel Factsheet produced by the Department of Transport and based on data from the National Travel Survey (NTS) assets.dft.gov.uk/statistics/series/national-travel-surve... : "The average journey time to work has been steadily increasing; it takes 28 minutes, an increase of 18% on 1995/97 (24 minutes). The average journey to work for London residents takes just over 41 minutes, 48% longer than the national average." While: "On average, commuting trips by foot take 18 minutes, by cycling 22 minutes, by car 24 minutes, by bus 41 minutes, and by surface rail 69 minutes."

According to a 2003 RAC Foundation study reported on by the BBC, the average UK commuter's trip takes 45minutes, while the average distance travelled is 8.7 miles (these 2 facts don't seem to add up though!) news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3085647.stm The journey time was reportedly the longest in Europe.
A subsequent report by the RAC Foundation in 2007 indicated that the average distance travelled remained 8.7 miles, while the commuter travels for 54 minutes a day. One in ten commuters have a daily journey in excess of 2 hours. People working in London have average daily commutes of 86 minutes, almost double the commuting times of other regions. www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/files/theukcommute.pdf

Design: Sustainable Commute - Survey Stage 1

Definition of commuter:

(noun) a person who travels some distance to work on a regular basis

In May 2012 I began a new full-time job in central London, while living out in Essex. Not for the first time in my life, I became a commuter...

There are reasons and justifications for all the decisions that led to this situation, living in Essex - working in London. All of which are worthy of inquiry in their own right, but for now I'll just accept these as boundary conditions of a situation that requires design.

In fact when I began the job, I felt my options were limited and chose to repeat actions I had made before, which had largely worked. [this is a design process of a sort, of course, and one commonly used - what worked before? do that again - but a very limited one]. I bought a monthly season ticket for the local railway, which was expensive but affordable within my new salary and began a daily return journey to work using train and tube to get me to work.

I'm now in my fourth month of repeating that pattern and at the end of a 3 week hiatus after a week's leave followed by a fortnight of telecommuting during the Olympics. It seems to be a good moment to pause and reflect - to do a survey of how things stand as the initial stage of a design process.

I think a good place to start a survey/begin reflection might be with a client interview - a pre-determined list of questions that I can use to structure my reflections and guide me toward capturing valuable information that an informal account might miss.

There are a few pro-forma permaculture client interview sheets around, including:

1.  one put together by Joe Atkinson for the Permaculture Association's Introductory Course materials.
2. one put together by Aranya and provided as a download for purchasers of his book Permaculture Design - A Step by Step Guide.
3. A client interview checklist printed in Patrick Whitefield's book The Earth Care Manual.

These all share many common attributes, not the least of which is that they are all land based/site focused. This means that they are not immediately appropriate for a non-land based design.

I feel that Aranya's provides the most easily modifiable to my purposes, so I have adapted his Client Interview questions for a wider context. [It's a quick and dirty solution however, as thinking about the type of information the site questions are seeking to draw out and considering the non-site analogues for that type of information, quickly reveals that a non-land based based client interview sheet really needs its own design].