Brainstorm

 Having had ideas floating around in my head & on various pieces of paper for a while I decided to brainstorm a design for the process using a mindmapping program that I had recently obtained. This process in itself had a multiple yield as I was learning how to use the program at the same time as producing my design with it. I chose the OBREDIM process for this part of the design as I'm particularly familiar with it & many of my initial ideas fell neatly into its different categories.

 After getting some valuable feedback from Steve Charter, I was able to create a more detailed Mindmap of the design process, which would be even harder for you to read on the screen! For this reason I have separated it into the different elements of OBREDIM & magnified them for you to be able to see them here. The full Mindmap is shown at the bottom of the page, but this can only give you an idea of its overall structure. To see it properly in its entirety, you will need to open the much bigger picture file in the 'Documents' folder.

Observations

 Having attended three accreditation events, the first of my observations was that 45 minutes is a totally inadequate amount of time for the student to present & do justice to several years of work. Clearly, this is why the student also has to produce a Portfolio of their work, but to what end? My experience has shown me that their full Portfolio may only ever get viewed by a few lucky people & then just find itself getting dusty on a shelf or lost in a filing cabinet, when it could be doing much more to benefit permaculture.

 These Portfolios are currently a seriously underused resource, which could be inspiring new students to do equally excellent work on their own Diploma pathways. The Best Design is an required element of the Portfolio for this very reason & yet even these are currently not easily accessed by anyone with an interest in reading them. I'm sure that I am not the only person who would love to read about the excellent work that's being done by Permaculturists at home & abroad.

 It was only when I was a peer for the third time that I had been able to look at the students Portfolio properly beforehand & that was because she lived locally to me & I was giving her some feedback a couple of weeks before her presentation. On the previous two occasions, four extensive Portfolios had been placed in front of me for a frustratingly short amount of time on the day of the accreditation itself. From my perspective as a peer, I knew how much better equipped I was to carry out my task, having seen the student's Portfolio in advance & so I decided this is what I wanted to design for myself. However the practicalities of producing a minimum of five Portfolios on paper was not a task I wished to take on, even without taking into account the cost of doing so. I could see why it hadn't been done before.

Boundaries

 Financial cost was certainly a boundary issue with producing a stack of paper Portfolios & one that would deter most people. This however came up against one of the other boundaries; which was good access to the Portfolio for the presiding Diplomat & peers before & even at the accreditation event.

 This of course leaves the student in a position where they have to work even harder to convey what they have been doing (& how they cover all the Assessment Criteria) in what is a very short time to make their presentation. This puts unnecessary pressure on students, on a day which is supposed to be a celebration for them, when they have already done a lot of hard work to get to that point. Those students who find it more difficult to communicate what they been doing verbally are then at a further disadvantage. Finally, there is the ecological cost of using all that paper, but this just takes me onto the need to do a proper Life Cycle Analysis of printing one (or several) Portfolios on paper against any other presenting options that I may come up with. This I do on the Life Cycle Analysis page.

Resources

 Looking at the resources that I had available, helped me to clarify the options that I had to design an alternative for myself. My first & most important resources are my ideas, without which I would be totally lost & none of this would be happening. The other resources effectively work as a Guild, each element on it's own cannot provide a solution to the problem, but bringing them together creates new possibilities. The resources that I have & that can only increase in their value through this process are my own skills. I already have the design skills that I have developed during my Action Learning Pathway & these will improve as a result of the experience I get from undertaking this process. I also have website designing & general computing skills from already having created four websites & a large number of web pages.

 These pages are also resources in themselves as I can use them as basic templates into which I can input my Portfolio content, avoiding lots of boring technical page setting up. The next elements within the design that will benefit from me utilising them are the services provided by the Post Office & by the web servers, as this is the reason that they exist in the first place. The third resource is the excellent work already done by other permaculturists producing Best designs & Action Learning Pathways during their own Diploma work. These I would love to have a chance to look at myself & there is an opportunity here to design into this process, good access for all to this inspiring work. I also feel that the Diplomats themselves can ultimately only benefit from this process as it could get them more permaculture work as a result. This is another element of the Guild that benefits from the presence of the others in the process.

 The only elements within the design, that do not gain from being used are my computer assets. Ultimately, the more they get used, the more they wear out. Having said that, they have been made to do a job & if I didn't use them properly I wouldn't be getting the most out of them. On my Life Path I am constantly making choices that weigh up long term benefits against short term negative environmental impacts & my computer is a perfect example of this. It can be a destructive tool or it can be used for great good & this process is another opportunity for me to do something really positive with it.

 As far as my Portfolio is concerned, a lot of the documents & photos that I am using were already in the digital domain as word documents or digital photos. I'd even already scanned in my design drawings. A Portfolio in digital format can be burned to blank CDs with my CD burner. Writing text is just as easy on the computer as on paper & more easily corrected & for those few other paper documents I can input them with my scanner. The only thing my printer will be needed for is to print the cover for the CDROM. As for my time.... that's going to fly past just as fast whether I use it to do this or not!

Evaluation

 Much of this evaluation I have already hinted at elsewhere, but there are more elements to be added. The reason that advance access to the Portfolio for peers & the presiding Diplomat would be an improvement is that they would be much better equipped to ask relevant questions & give useful advice when they get to the accreditation event. It would also enable them to feel less under pressure on the day as they would already be familiar with what the student had been doing.

 The student will also get a fairer evaluation of their work as a result of this process & will be less worried about missing anything out (something that is almost inevitable in such a short time slot). So, I've looked at the needs of the accrediting student & the peers & Diplomat, but there are other clients in this design to consider outside the accreditation event. There is also a potential yield here to fill the needs of both other permaculture students & the general public & they both involve education. The body of excellent work that already exists just needs to be made available in accessible formats to generate an even greater yield, that of inspiring new Diploma students & informing six billion people about how effective good permaculture design can be!

 That of course brings us to how & I suspect you've already worked that out by now as you're no doubt perusing it. Whereas paper copies are difficult to duplicate, post & afford (in more ways than just financial), a digital copy can be transferred as simply as via a telephone line & be made available to anyone with access to a computer. Although at one time this would have been a relatively small percentage of us, nowadays most of us have access either at home, at work, at school or college or at a local library or internet cafe.

 The time is right to go digital for the obvious benefits that await us there. A Portfolio in this format could be easily copied to several CDROMs & posted cheaply to the peers & presiding Diplomat a couple of weeks before an accreditation event. Portfolios can them be published either in part or completely on the World Wide Web, where they can be accessed from all over the World. As far as existing work is concerned, the Permaculture Association already has an excellent website; a resource that gets more extensive every day & the Diploma WorkNet has it's own pages within the site. We need look no further for somewhere for all this inspirational work to be made available. As far as environmental impact goes, that depends to a degree on the end user. While a known quantity of paper & ink is required to produce each paper Portfolio, a digital one may consume as little as a small amount of electricity or as much as all the elements within the Life Cycle of a CDROM & all the necessary computer equipment plus the paper that somebody may still print it all out on.

Design

 So, now onto the design. I am doing my Portfolio in website format, using web pages from other sites I have made to save time. The paper documents & photos that I have are being scanned in to the computer & put into a format that will work just as well on the World Wide Web as on a CDROM. The next part of the design uses the relative location principle. Whereas in a paper Portfolio, each element has to be ordered sequentially, in digital format, interlinking of pages is instant & unlimited.

 I will be sending out my Portfolio on CDROM to my peers & presiding Diplomat two weeks before my accreditation event (more details of this process are given under Implementation). I'll be making my Portfolio available to other students & anyone else who may be interested after the accreditation event, by placing a slimmed down version of it on my own website. The full version, complete with sound files & full resolution versions of all my documents & photos will still be available on CDROM, but until broadband access is much more common, few people are going to want to download files that big & neither do I want to upload them with just a dial up modem! Having it available on the WWW though, potentially gives a virtually unlimited output.

 With this design I am working at the Edge & suggesting a new way to produce a Diploma Portfolio, with extra yields. One of these yields would be the ease that such work could be uploaded for access via the WWW. Once the existing body of Diploma work has been transferred into the digital domain, it would make the process much easier if a Diploma or at least a Best Design was produced in the format as part of the Accreditation Criteria. An area in the Diploma WorkNet pages can be created to display Best designs, Action Learning Pathways & also provide links to full Portfolios on other sites. These Best designs could also be put on a CDROM for the Permaculture Association to send to potential funding bodies & to sell to raise funds directly. In time this may become a 'Yearbook' CDROM of all the Best designs from each successive year.

 My design has set out to attain four main objectives:

1. The presentation of my Portfolio in an attractive, informative & easily accessible form.
2. To provide me with one of my Ten designs.
3. To improve the dissemination of inspirational permaculture design work.
4. To do some Edge designing & push the existing boundaries out a bit further.

Implementation

 The implementation of my design starts here with my 'finished' CDROM (the CDROM Design page covers the process of structuring my Portfolio). I need to check whether it meets its objectives, so I am planning to send it out to a few friends first to give me feedback on its structure via a questionnaire that I will send with it. I will have one last Design Support Tutorial & use the feedback from that to make any last changes to the content. I will get in touch with my potential peers to discover if they have access to a computer with a CDROM drive & if so, invite them to be in my peer group & let them know that I will be sending the disc. Then I will be copying the final version of my Portfolio onto several CDROMs & sending them out to my peers, presiding Diplomat & Design Support Tutor, a couple of weeks before my accreditation event. I'll follow this up by checking that each peer & the presiding Diplomat have received their copies of the CDROM OK & that they work on their computer!

 After my accreditation I plan to trim the Portfolio of it's 'Documents' folder & sound files & upload the remainder to the web server that hosts my own website. This I plan to link to from the Diploma WorkNet pages, where I will be developing the webspace to hold the Best Designs & Action Learning Pathways of current & future Diplomats. I plan to transfer existing work into the digital domain for placement on the Diploma WorkNet pages & to afterwards be put onto CDROM. Newly accrediting students could provide their own Best designs in digital format or pay an extra fee to cover the cost of somebody else (it could be me) transferring them on their behalf. My own Portfolio CDROM I would continue to make available for a fee via my own website where I will have uploaded my slimmed down version. I will also be sending a CDROM to both the Permaculture Association & the Academy after my accreditation event as part of the process.

Maintenance

 The maintenance phase of this design starts near the beginning, with the continual observation & re-evaluation of how the elements are coming together. Most of these observations will be coming from me as I'll be the one who is testing it's structure as I go along.

 There are things though that I probably won't notice, so along the way I will also be seeking feedback from others with different needs to my own. I have already mentioned getting friends to peruse my CDROM to give me feedback about whether they found any links that weren't working properly or something was hard to find. This I will achieve using a questionnaire about how easy the CDROM was to use & I got Steve to fill in the first one when giving me my second Design Support Tutorial. The comments & suggestions from this first phase of feedback will be used to Tweak my CDROM to maximise it's usability.

 The CDROM will then go, in it's Tweaked form to my Design Support Tutor for his own feedback regarding my Portfolio content. This will once again give me an opportunity to make final changes before sending the CDROM out to my peers & presiding Diplomat. At my accreditation event I also plan to use the opportunity to hand around another questionnaire, slightly adapted from the earlier one, in order to get any more relevant feedback, but this time from people who are much more familiar with permaculture. I shall also be getting feedback after the accreditation event via the questionnaires on the CDROM & these will also be on my website. I shall include one short questionnaire for people without much time & a longer one for those who would like to give me more feedback. These will allow me to update the webpages & CDROM contents on an ongoing basis if needed... & yes, I would value your comments on your own experience with my Portfolio too. Thankyou for taking the time to read it!

 I plan to use a similar system for the Best Design pages on the Diploma WorkNet site. Feedback questionnaires will be included both within the webpages & on any CDROMs that are produced. A webcounter, which may already be in place on the Diploma WorkNet pages would give good feedback about how often these pages are being accessed & if we need to do a bit more promotion for them! Of course, there will also be a continuous stream of new Best Designs coming into the system to be uploaded to the Diploma WorkNet pages. No doubt, more ideas will emerge as the design evolves, but for now this is as far as this part of the process has taken me.

 So here it is, the Mindmap in full.... & if you can read the text at this scale, you certainly have better eyesight than I do! Just in case you don't & you'd like to view it in its entirety, I've included a full resolution copy in the 'Documents' folder on the CDROM.

 Now move on to the next stage of the process, which is the Life Cycle Analysis.