Methodology
The Venus Project’s design methodology consists of the following components.
Global Context
A general survey of global conditions, constraints, and capacities to discern a trajectory of risks and opportunities.
Local Constraints
Exact accounting of context-specific conditions to discern preexisting system structure and functions to be harnessed and accommodated.
Layered Design
Serves multiple levels of functionality through a complex integration of supply chains coexisting interoperable but not interdependent. This assures system stability despite fluctuations in energy and materials throughput, including backup and fallback capacities.
Parallel Development
Isolated lines of development are permitted to proceed in parallel and predicated on different assumptions.
Biomimicry, Ecomimicry
Studying the form and function of systems in nature reveals much about what can be innovated in other contexts.
Paradigms
The Venus Project owes its approach to the following paradigms.
Science
A methodology for managing the politics of knowledge and decision.
Engineering
Engineering demonstrates workability and the pragmatic criteria by which improvements can be measured.
Holistic Design
Predicated on a principle of integration, holistic design coincides with the law of requisite variety to improve the efficacy of adaptation.
Systems Thinking
Provides the habits of thought that promote the proper modeling of reality as systems of subsystems.
Complexity Thinking
Provides the habits of thought that coincide with evolutionary mechanisms to balance order and chaos.
Transdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity
Maintains methods whereby disciplinary boundaries are ignored to synthesize new context-sensitive boundaries.
Narrative
How humans make meaning of the world.
Fields
The following fields are of special influence on The Venus Project’s design approach.
Systems Science
Including complexity theory, chaos theory, game theory, evolutionary theory, information theory, network theory, hierarchy theory, control theory, systems dynamics, cybernetics, operations research, systems analysis, systems design, and systems engineering.
These fields reveal the formal structure of human activity and nature process interactions.
Biophysical Economics, Systems Ecology, Industrial Ecology
These fields emphasize the energetic, material, and ecological basis of system metabolism in nature of which humans are only a part.
