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This chapter analyzes a familiar aesthetic experience in our everyday life: appreciation of the distinctive characteristics of objects, environments, and temporal contexts. It ranges from the quintessential attributes of a natural object, the ambience created by harmoniously-united diverse elements, sense of place, and seasonableness, illustrated by a number of examples from 18th century British aesthetics, Japanese culture, including literature, gardening, the tea ceremony, food, and packaging, and the Arts and Crafts movement. This aesthetic sensibility nurtures a moral sensibility by promoting an open-minded and respectful attitude toward what the objects offer, an attitude underlying today's ecological design premised upon designing with nature. At the same time, certain limits to this kind of aesthetic sensibility also need to be observed for moral, social, and political reasons in order to avoid aestheticization of suffering and misery, as well as guarding against denying minority taste in favor of preserving a sense of place.

This chapter reviews research on human-tech. This book's author began his research career in the discipline of human factors engineering in the mid 1980s. This was an era of increasing disillusionment, especially among those with design orientations, with the received view that dominated the prevailing culture of his field: that human factors was both largely and essentially a branch of experimental psychology, one known as engineering psychology. The author was influenced by Jens Rasmussen who observed a variety of mismatches between both the theoretical and methodological tools available in the human factors marketplace and the pressing needs of cognitive engineering researchers and practitioners. A second, perhaps less direct but nevertheless highly influential influence on the author were James J. Gibson's theories of direct perception and affordances. Strongly inspired by both Rasmussen and Gibson, in his PhD dissertation the author had seemingly found a way to leverage the resources of both these theorists, resulting in an interface design framework called ecological interface design (EID).

In the 1960s and 70s an ad hoc collection of countercultural designers united to celebrate the partnership of made and born, science and craft, nature and culture working toward an early version of the sustainability ethic. They chronicled their achievements and fostered their networks through a series of influential publications including, Shelter, The Whole Earth Catalog, Sunspots, and the California Water Atlas. These efforts represent a creative cohort’s important effort to use their academic scientific training and technical expertise outside the confines of the university or corporations. This ecologically inclined group of countercultural bricoleurs worked to revive an earlier tradition of design science and eco-pragmatism to help expand environmental culture beyond politics, aid green design enthusiasms, and foster “natural capitalism.”

Whatever their particular causes, environmental problems all share one fundamental trait: with rare exceptions they are unintended, unforeseen, and sometimes ironic side effects of actions arising from other intentions. We intend one thing and sooner or later get something very different. We intended merely to be prosperous and healthy but have inadvertently triggered a mass extinction of other species, spread pollution throughout the world, and triggered climatic change–all of which undermines our prosperity and health. Environmental problems, then, are mostly the result of a miscalibration between human intentions and ecological results, which is to say that they are a kind of design failure. The possibility that ecological problems are design failures is perhaps bad news because it may signal inherent flaws in our perceptual and mental abilities. On the other hand, it may be good news. If our problems are, to a great extent, the result of design failures, the obvious solution is better design, by which I mean a closer fit between human intentions and the ecological systems where the results of our intentions are ultimately played out. The perennial problem of human ecology is how different cultures provision themselves with food, shelter, energy, and the means of livelihood by extracting energy and materials from their surroundings (Smil 1994). Ecological design describes the ensemble of technologies and strategies by which societies use the natural world to construct culture and meet their needs. Because the natural world is continually modified by human actions, culture and ecology are shifting parts of an equation that can never be solved. Nor can there be one correct design strategy. Hunter-gatherers lived on current solar income. Feudal barons extracted wealth from sunlight by exploiting serfs who farmed the land. We provision ourselves by mining ancient sunlight stored as fossil fuels. The choice is not whether or not human societies have a design strategy, but whether that strategy works ecologically and can be sustained within the regenerative capacity of the particular ecosystem. The problem of ecological design has become more difficult as the human population has grown and technology has multiplied. It is now the overriding problem of our time, affecting virtually all other issues on the human agenda.

This chapter presents the Japanese lifestyle brand Mujirushi Ryohin (known as Muji), which sells simple, starkly functional objects in natural colours while eschewing decorative values and unnecessary patterns and details. This company’s basic, plain, timeless products do not change with the seasons or from year to year. The products stress use value and functionality as an alternative to the logic of changing fashions – one of the pillars of late consumer culture, which renders products inherently obsolescent. Mujirushi Ryohin’s products are discussed as a part of the Anti-Branding and No-Logo movements that emerged in Europe and in the United States in the 1980s, in opposition to the ‘the society of the spectacle’ and the ideology and social power of late capitalism and consumer culture.

Some years ago a friend of mine, Stuart Mace, gave me a letter opener hand-carved from a piece of rosewood. Over his 70-some years Stuart had become an accomplished wood craftsman, photographer, dog trainer, gourmet cook, teacher, raconteur, skier, naturalist, and allaround legend in his home town of Aspen, Colorado. High above Aspen, Stuart and his wife, Isabel, operated a shop called Toklat, which in Eskimo means “alpine headwaters,” featuring an array of woodcrafts, Navajo rugs, jewelry, fish fossils, and photography. He would use his free time in summers to rebuild parts of a ghost town called Ashcroft for the U.S. Forest Service. He charged nothing for his time and labor. For groups venturing up the mountain from Aspen, he and Isabel would cook dinners featuring local foods cooked with style and simmered over great stories about the mountains, the town, and their lives. Stuart was seldom at a loss for words.His living, if that is an appropriate word for a how a Renaissance man earns his keep, was made as a woodworker. He and his sons crafted tables and cabinetwork with exquisite inlaid patterns using an assortment of woods from forests all over the world. A Mace table was like no other, and so was its price. Long before it was de rigueur to do so, Stuart bought his wood from forests managed for long-term ecological health. The calibration between ecological talk and do wasn’t a thing for Stuart. He paid attention to details. I first met Stuart in 1981. I was living in the Ozarks at the time and part of an educational organization that included, among other things, a farm and steam-powered sawmill. In the summer of 1981 one of our projects was to provide two tractor-trailer loads of oak beams for the Rocky Mountain Institute being built near Old Snowmass. Stuart advised us about cutting and handling large timber, about which we knew little. From that time forward Stuart and I would see each other several times a year either when he traveled through Arkansas or when I wandered into Aspen in search of relief from Arkansas summers. He taught me a great deal, not so much about wood per se as about the relation of ecology, economics, craftwork, generosity, and good-heartedness. I last saw Stuart in a hospital room shortly before he died of cancer in June 1993.

This chapter discusses how surprises and ignorance are related by evaluating different terms, concepts, and unknown aspects of knowledge, and describes some major debates related to the unknown territory of the human experience in an effort to understand how different fields of ecological design address surprising incidents. It suggests ways in which these uses and the meaning of the concepts can be combined, and examines the continually changing relationships between different types of unknown events, along with the changes that occur in such events over time. The investigations reveal emerging interpretations of the unknown result in more unintended consequences, as experimental creation of knowledge and inventions result in new ignorance. The relationship between ignorance and surprise is also dealt with in the real world perspective of human experience, enabling a framework to integrate these two concepts and to investigate different instances of ecological design and landscape development.

As commonly practiced, education has little to do with its specific setting or locality. The typical campus is regarded mostly as a place where learning occurs, but is, itself, believed to be the source of no useful learning. A campus is intended, rather, to be convenient, efficient, or aesthetically pleasing, but not instructional. It neither requires nor facilitates competence or mindfulness. By that standard, the same education could happen as well in California or in Kazakhstan, or on Mars, for that matter. The same could be said of the buildings and landscape that make up a college campus (Orr 1993). The design of buildings and landscape is thought to have little or nothing to do with the process of learning or the quality of scholarship that occurs in a particular place. But in fact, buildings and landscape reflect a hidden curriculum that powerfully influences the learning process. The curriculum embedded in any building instructs as fully and as powerfully as any course taught in it. Most of my classes, for example, were once taught in a building that I think Descartes would have liked. It is a building with lots of squareness and straight lines. There is nothing whatsoever that reflects its locality in northeast Ohio in what had once been a vast forested wetland (Sherman 1996). How it is cooled, heated, and lighted and at what true cost to the world is an utter mystery to its occupants. It offers no clue about the origins of the materials used to build it. It tells no story. With only minor modifications it could be converted to use as a factory or prison, and some students are inclined to believe that it so functions. When classes are over, students seldom linger for long. The building resonates with no part of our biology, evolutionary experience, or aesthetic sensibilities. It reflects no understanding of ecology or ecological processes. It is intended to be functional, efficient, minimally offensive, and little more. But what else does it do? First, it tells its users that locality, knowing where you are, is unimportant. To be sure, this is not said in so many words anywhere in this or any other building. Rather, it is said tacitly throughout the entire structure.

Environmentalists are often regarded as people wanting to stop one thing or another, and there are surely lots of things that ought to be stopped. The essays in this book, however, have to do with beginnings. How, for example, do we advance a long-delayed solar revolution? Or begin one in forest management? Or materials use? How do we reimagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul? Such questions are the heart of what theologian Thomas Berry (1999) calls “the Great Work” of our age. This endeavor is nothing less than the effort to harmonize the human enterprise with how the world works as a physical system and how it ought to work as a moral system. In the past two centuries the human footprint on earth has multiplied many times over. Our science and technology are powerful beyond anything imagined by the confident founders of the modern world. But our sense of proportion and depth of purpose have not kept pace with our merely technical abilities. Our institutions and organizations still reflect their origins in another time and in very different conditions. Incoherence, disorder, and violence are the hallmarks of the modern world. If we are to build a better world–one that can be sustained ecologically and one that sustains us spiritually–we must transcend the disorder and fragmentation of the industrial age. We need a perspective that joins the hardwon victories of civilization, such as human rights and democracy, with a larger view of our place in the cosmos–what Berry calls “the universe story.” By whatever name, that philosophy must connect us to life, to each other, and to generations to come. It must help us to rise above sectarianism of all kinds and the puffery that puts human interests at a particular time at the center of all value and meaning. When we get it right, that larger, ecologically informed enlightenment will upset comfortable philosophies that underlie the modern world in the same way that the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century upset medieval hierarchies of church and monarchy.

Relative to the problems we face, our politics are about the most miserable that can be imagined. Those who purport to represent us and who on rare occasions try to lead us have been unable to take even the smallest steps to promote energy efficiency to avoid possibly catastrophic climatic change a few decades from now. They have failed to stop the hemorrhaging of life and protect biological diversity, soils, and forests. They ignore problems of urban decay, suburban sprawl, the poisoning of our children by persistent toxins, the destruction of rural communities, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. They cannot find the wherewithal to defend the public interest in matters of global trade or even in the financing of public elections. Indeed, the more potentially catastrophic the issue, the less likely it is to receive serious and sustained attention from political leaders at any level. Our public priorities, in other words, are upside down. Issues that will seem trivial or even nonsensical to our progeny are given great attention, while problems crucial to their well-being are ignored and allowed to grow into global catastrophes. At best they will regard us with pity, at worst as derelict and perhaps criminally so. The situation was not always this way. The leadership of this country was once capable of responding to threats to our security and health with alacrity and sometimes with intelligence. In light of the dismal performance of the U.S. political system relative to the large environmental and social issues looming ahead, we have, broadly speaking, three possible courses of action (assuming that we choose to act). The first is to turn the management of our environmental affairs over to a kind of permanent technocracy–a priesthood of global managers. The idea that experts ought to manage public affairs is at least as old as Plato. In its current incarnation, some propose to turn the management of the earth over to a group of global experts. Stripped to its essentials, this means smarter exploitation of nature culminating in the global administration of the planet with lots of satellites, remote sensing, and geographic information systems experts mapping one thing or another.