Introduction
At the Centre for Conscious Design (CCD), we believe the built environment profoundly influences our collective well-being. This shared recognition has brought together a collective of forward-thinking innovators dedicated to reshaping our physical world. If we came together as a think-tank, could we outline meaningful ways to address specific challenges with conscious design? This question has guided the creation of our new event series, “The Greenhouse.”
The Greenhouse aims to elevate pressing societal problems and impactful solutions by providing a platform where issues and the voices striving to overcome them become visible. It’s a space where our community can collectively envision nascent ideas with the potential to make a significant impact—because every great plant grows from a single sprout.
Each session features a guest speaker who brings a thought-provoking challenge designed to stimulate discussion and inspire actionable change. Topics are announced in advance to interest participants who are passionate about addressing it. Our speakers do more than just highlight problems; they issue a call to action, inviting collaboration on projects or initiatives they lead beyond the confines of the event.
Participants are not only given the opportunity to brainstorm solutions during the event but are also encouraged to build connections with the speaker and fellow attendees, laying the groundwork for ongoing collaborations. We envisioned the Greenhouse as a fertile environment where the seeds of future articles, events, and partnerships are planted.
Session Overview
On July 3, 2024, the Centre for Conscious Design launched the inaugural event of “The Greenhouse” series with a session titled “Fostering Resilience: Lessons from Life at Sea.” This event focused on the broad concept of resilience, particularly as it relates to social challenges—such as scarcity, housing, and social connection—that are deeply intertwined with the structure of our built environment.
Our guest speaker, Luca Tausel, presented a compelling proposal on how lessons learned from living on boats could inform and support the development of resilient land-based settlements. This unique translation of water into earth made it the most fitting choice to kick off a creative brainstorming process. The Greenhouse is designed for this exact purpose: the innovation that happens when diverse minds and ingredients come together. Luca’s extensive experience—spanning five years of sailing, crossing oceans, and living within tight-knit maritime communities—offered profound insights into how the strategies used by sailors to navigate and survive the challenges of the sea can be applied to urban contexts.
Beyond the event, Luca is embarking on a research project exploring these parallels between maritime and urban resilience. His creative approach seeks to not only document the findings but to engage a broader audience by translating these strategies into an experiential format. If you are interested in supporting or collaborating with his efforts, do not hesitate to contact him.
The event explored three key ingredients of resilience drawn from life at sea: social cohesion, preparedness, and coordination. These elements were beautifully explained and exemplified through Luca’s experiences.
In the second half of the event, participants got to know one another in small groups and explored the resilience issues faced by their respective communities. Each group then brainstormed, documented, and presented a design solution aimed at fostering broader resilience for a collectively chosen challenge. The results were everything we could ask for: creative, multi-solving ideas that showcased a unique breeding of sailing strategies and built elements that promoted social transformation. In this article, their innovative outcomes are presented.
Key Insights
Luca started by reflecting on how sailing has offered him a return to a simpler existence, continuing his development as human across multiple dimensions.
Firstly, sailing taught him the importance of sharing space and collaborating, both on a boat and among a fleet of vessels. He learned to thrive in participatory systems where sacrificing some privacy and comfort leads to a deeper sense of belonging and personal growth.
Sailing also became a school of self-reliance for him, where understanding and maintaining the social and technical systems that support life at sea is crucial. This experience fostered a continuous practice of simplification and adaptability, essential skills in an environment where resources are limited, and conditions are ever-changing.
Moreover, Luca gained a profound appreciation for the complexity of the ecosystems we inhabit. He experienced firsthand how weather conditions, seasonal patterns, and the overall state of nature directly influence what we can or cannot do. Some decisions might force you to battle against the current, while others allow you to move in harmony with the natural world.
Over the past five years, Luca has spent half of his time at sea, sailing on approximately 30 different boats of various types and sizes. His journeys have taken him across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, where he has assumed roles ranging from boat hitchhiker to captain. Through these experiences, he developed “sea legs” and gained intimate insights into the lives of those who consider an ocean-going sailboat their primary residence. He entered the private spaces of families and groups in ways that are harder to achieve on land.
While Luca doesn’t foresee millions of people living on boats, he believes that sailing offers valuable lessons for scalable solutions to global challenges. Sailing serves as a sandbox, a testing ground for experimenting with specific contexts and attributes. It is society in miniature, where human dynamics are accelerated, exposure to the elements is intense, and radical self-reliance is essential. At the same time, it teaches the importance of mutual support systems.
Luca’s hope is to identify some of the unusual ingredients of life at sea and frame them in a way that can be extracted from their context and applied to land based solutions either at a home or neighborhood level to build more resilient communities.
In Luca’s exploration of resilience, a concept traditionally rooted in mechanical properties, he extends the metaphor to encompass the capacity of individuals, communities, and systems to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from challenging situations.
Drawing from life at sea, The CCD identified three key elements essential to resilience: social cohesion, which involves creating systems of care; preparedness, which pertains to infrastructure and resources; and coordination, which focuses on mutual support systems. These dimensions were brought to life through three stories from Luca’s maritime experience: anchoring, preparation, and passage.
1. Anchoring
Luca shared in detail the dynamics of anchoring, the search for your spot in the blue neighborhood, a transient landscape of floating shared flats of all sorts. This choice is based on safety concerns, access to resources and proximity to social needs, like choosing your neighbors.
He then encouraged us to reflect on his anchoring story through the lens of land-based innovations: How can we design spaces that accommodate flexible spatial configurations, adapting to our evolving needs? How can we foster the same spirit of unconditional mutualism on land that drives people at sea to instinctively come to each other’s rescue?
2. Preparation
Luca invited us to reflect together: As we are more and more forced to change our habits on land due to unstable weather and changing seasonal patterns, what can we learn from sailors? How could we develop ways to nudge citizens to relate to their resources and infrastructure with the same awareness that we have on a boat far offshore?
3. Passage
Luca shared how sailing has profoundly changed the way he views maps. The blue expanses of water that once seemed ordinary now hold deep significance, as he has learned some of the intricate skills required to navigate them. He spoke about how each ocean demands careful consideration—safe passage is only possible under certain conditions and within specific seasons, making it crucial to exercise patience in selecting the right weather window before setting sail.
Having grown up in Europe, Luca was already familiar with the impact of seasons on daily life, but sailing took this awareness to a whole new level. It required him to develop a much more nuanced understanding and interpretation of complex environmental data to live in harmony with the ecosystem and avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He also discussed how sailing brings a tangible awareness of the resources that sustain one’s lifestyle. There’s a unique pride in finding clever ways to reduce needs and meet them reliably. The value of community becomes apparent, as neighboring sailors, despite differences in age, origins, social status, or the flags their vessels fly, often show remarkable generosity and mutual support.
Luca reflected on this sense of shared mission, asking if we could bring a similar spirit of collaboration and mutual aid to our lives on land. Do we need to engineer it, invent it, or is it an innate human instinct that simply needs to be nurtured? Could we educate ourselves to develop a natural inclination to help each other, much like a crew at sea?
Collaboration
Luca invites anyone intrigued by these ideas to connect with him and collaborate on developing scalable solutions inspired by life at sea. He is eager to partner with individuals and organizations to gather insights and stories from sailors that can inform the translation of maritime practices into strategies for building resilient land-based communities. With access to a vast network of sailors, Luca seeks collaborators who bring expertise and methodology to help shape this project into something impactful—whether it becomes a research paper, an exhibition, a placemaking activation, or a documentary.
Design Challenge
Building on these examples and stories, we transitioned into the workshop phase led by Marta, guided by her Design Challenge Framework. The goal was to identify opportunities to translate these maritime insights into land-based solutions. We divided into two groups and outlined our session objectives:
- Identify a place, a community and a specific resilience challenge within it.
- Address this challenge by leveraging insights from the presenter’s experiences.
- Collaboratively develop an idea for an environmental, physical, or digital intervention that enhances a key aspect of resilience in the chosen community, focusing on social cohesion, preparedness, or coordination.
Group 1
After introductions, the group shared reflections on the presentation. Itai expressed fascination with the unspoken social contracts in the sailing world, where mutual aid is a respected norm. Silvia was struck by the importance of collaboration on boats, where each person must commit to a specific role but also rotate tasks, such as during night watches. Safiya observed the clear, shared understanding and respect among individuals on board.
The discussion then shifted to various scenarios of interest. For example, the concept of docking was explored as a metaphor for finding safe spaces, and the conversation touched on societal segments often left behind, like the elderly, who struggle to find roles and purpose. Emphasis was placed on the importance of gathering stories and wisdom from elders, much like sailors sharing tips and tales in a harbor.
Inspired by Silvia’s community experiences, the group chose the elderly population of an 80-family apartment complex in Hamburg, Germany, as the community of focus. Brainstorming centered on creating a space where these elders could be recognized and valued by the rest of the population. Inspiration was drawn from the “Library of People” initiative, where individuals share their life stories, highlighting interconnectedness.
The group imagined a physical environment where elders could host a safe space for transient individuals, such as students and travelers, drawing on the idea of docking a boat as arriving in a safe harbor. After the event, the conversation continued among CCD fellows and members. Safiya shared insights about the situation of elders in Trinidad and Tobago, where elders either remain within the family home, cared for by relatives, or are relegated to nursing homes due to the demands of modern work life.
She suggested that the thought experiment might fall short by addressing symptoms rather than the root cause. The issue isn’t just elders needing purpose and support, but rather the breakdown of supportive community structures due to work-life pressures. This led to a crucial question: How can supportive community structures be reestablished as the new (or perhaps old) normal?
Group 2
Shravani, along with Marta, Michael, and Azuka, focused on the challenges posed by accelerated climate change—particularly sea level rise, inundation, wildfires, and extreme temperatures—and their impact on community resilience. Drawing inspiration from examples of water the discussion centered on the rural farming community in Assam, which is increasingly vulnerable to severe flooding.
Just as sailors must be mentally and emotionally prepared for the unpredictability of the ocean, the group emphasized the importance of cognitive and emotional preparedness within this community, along with maintaining social cohesion in the face of these challenges.
To enhance resilience, the group proposed integrating preparedness discussions into family and village gatherings before the monsoon season, particularly during cultural events like “Bihu” in April. These conversations, led by family and village heads, would mirror the communal spirit of seafaring communities, ensuring that the group is mentally and emotionally ready for the coming challenges.
When considering resilient design inspired by the adaptability of seafaring, options like movable houses and stilts were explored, but their diminishing effectiveness against extreme flooding was recognized. Azuka proposed floating houses or platforms as a more versatile solution, akin to how sailors depend on their vessels as both homes and lifelines. These structures could serve as hubs for rescue, relief, and social support during floods, and could also function as public schools year-round, drawing inspiration from the Makoko Floating School by Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi. This innovative approach offers a sustainable and adaptable solution, much like a boat anchored in a safe harbor, meeting the evolving needs of the community.
Closing & Next Steps
The event illuminated the vast potential of drawing inspiration from unconventional sources—such as life at sea—to tackle global challenges. Luca’s insights, combined with the collaborative efforts of participants, underscored the critical importance of education, adaptability, and community support in crafting stronger, more resilient urban environments.
This journey has only just begun. If you’re touched by these discussions and eager to contribute to the development of these concepts, join Luca. Your insights and creativity can help inspire the resilient urban landscapes of tomorrow.
As we continue to explore the strength of community and learning, we invite you to join us for the next session of The Greenhouse series. Together, let’s discover how our built environment can not only shelter us but also help us grow and thrive as a society. We look forward to continuing this journey with you.
