Returning To Human Scale
Returning To Human Scale
It's time to re-synchronize with the human/nature scale
We’re using the wrong scales, people!
Fast food, billionaires, “open 24/7”, 9-to-5, instant gratification, a brainstorm, unicorn startups, trillion-dollar companies, gigafactories, short-form content (Tik…Tok), Gross Domestic Product, mass market, daylight saving time, SUVs, mansions….
…just a few examples and terms that hint at the dominant narratives in our cultures that rely on scales that aren’t “natural”.
These scales don’t serve us! They serve a system! And this system is increasingly destroying our planet, our societies, and ourselves.
What’s more, the growing detachment from “natural” scales inevitably leads to us feeling out of sync – out of sync with reality, with the present moment, with our body, with our mind, with the things around us, with other human beings and animals, and with ourselves.
What needs to happen, and what I believe will eventually have to happen, is a return to using the human/nature scale again as the guiding framework for designing things, places, buildings, processes, organizations, and relationships.
Here are a few thought-starters for you:
🏢 What does a business, brand, or organization look like in today’s world when we re-apply a human/nature scale?
"Where does the assumption that every business should grow to mega scale really come from? Well, it’s a relic of the industrial age. Back then, a business had to be as big as possible, to accomplish economies of scale. One factory — a hundred widgets. One factory — a million widgets. The second scenario wins — it pays off the fixed costs of the factory faster.
Only we’re not in the industrial age anymore. But our businesses, institutions, and organzations — in fact, our whole economies — are still run for, governed by, this obsolete, macho principle of achieving ultra huge mega scale."
"[...] That is why we need human scale organizations."
"Human scale institutions strive for optimum scale. Not mega scale. The point at which maximum quality can be attained. Their purpose is not to maximize profitability. It is to maximize well-being. Whose? Everyone’s. Customers, employees, managers, suppliers, etcetera.
To maximize well-being, just like that independent cafe or bookshop, they aren’t governed by command-and-control military style heirarchies, but by flexible networks of experts and creators. Nor do they simply approach the problem of improving human lives cynically and blindly, trying to flog the lowest common-denominator at the highest price, but try consistently, genuinely, and radically, to innovate, serve, create, build, dare, imagine."» Why We Need to Build Human-Scale Organizations by Umair Haque
🌇 What does a human/nature scale city in the 21st century look like?
“In the same way that monocropping corn creates weaker, less resilient land, monocropping our streets with cars creates cities that aren’t as vibrant as they ought to be. We often don’t notice it, because we’ve trained ourselves to think of streets as “almost exclusively for cars”. But if you think of all the things you could do with streets, you realize how weird it is that we have, for decades now, used them mostly only for vehicles.
If we can rewild the landscape, why not rewild city streets? Why not transform them so cars are only one part of what they’re used for?”
“So vernacular architecture results in regionally and culturally specific styles of building. It's why different countries and places... look different. And it's part of why we are so drawn to older places, and why tourists flock to every town with the slightest bit of history.
vernacular architecture results in regionally and culturally specific styles of building. It's why different countries and places... look different. And it's part of why we are so drawn to older places, and why tourists flock to every town with the slightest bit of history.”
“Human scale also can refer to how people perceive a city. We have known for a long time that architecture affects emotions, and vice versa (for a primer on this, check out Happy City or The Architecture of Happiness). And studies have shown that boring megastructures stress people out […]. An entire academic discipline, Environmental Psychology, is dedicated to exploring the interactions between humans and their physical surroundings. […]
We don’t like to define ourselves by what we are against. We aren’t against skyscrapers, development, luxury housing, or cars. We are for places. But in practice, that means that we do oppose projects that destroy or prevent the creation of quality spaces, and we challenge sweeping reforms that do not acknowledge or accommodate local contexts. There is no one human scale, but by engaging in a placemaking process, we can find the scale that works for every community.”
💼👨👩👦 What does a work & life schedule, designed according to a human/nature scale, look like?
“[...] We shouldn’t just work less because it makes us better workers. We should work less because it makes us better people. […]
The real benefit of working less isn’t that it gives us space to pick up a side grind or to ‘recharge’ for when we’re back on the clock. The real benefit is that it allows us to pick up our kids from school and have dinner more often as a family. Working less makes us better friends and neighbors. It allows us the space to exercise regularly and to read for pleasure, and to create art that no one has to see.”
“Learning about the lives of hunter-gatherers confirms a suspicion that our modern lives are fundamentally at odds with human nature, that we have lost some kind of primordial freedom. […]
‘A fair case can be made that hunters often work much less than we do, and rather than a grind the food quest is intermittent, leisure is abundant, and there is more sleep in the daytime per capita than in any other condition of society. [...] This was, when you come to think of it, the original affluent society.’ […]
Anthropologists have long emphasised the collective nature of foraging – of doing work – but we ought to consider as well how rest is a collective experience that has shaped our evolution. When ants do nothing, they really are just doing nothing. In contrast, leisure time in humans is not just an absence of work, but a form of socialising, organic if unpredictable, synchronised to the ebb and flow of the natural world. Rest is enjoyed in the company of others but is also the reward for work done in the service of others. [...] Rest allows the very things that make us special as a species: the capacity to listen and think and daydream. [...]
Today, many of us are doing the wrong kind of work, one that rejects sociality, craft and meaning, turning people into machines. In contrast, the physical, mental and social are inextricably linked in hunter-gatherer work.”
“If those in authority grasp the power of circadian science to improve our lives, we might expect to see changes in how we design buildings to encourage or block light at different times of day, or labor laws that mandate health-oriented benefits and appropriate compensation for valuable shift workers. [...]
Over 270 years ago the Swedish botanist Carl Linneas proposed a “flower clock” in which different species would be arranged according to the time of day at which they opened, closed and released their unique scents. Though the plan remains unrealized, various horticulturists have tried to revive it over the years, lured by the dream of ecological synchrony.
This fall Apple Watch users will see the number of hours they spend in daylight incorporated into their health app. Meanwhile, trends suggest that people of all ages are shifting social activities to earlier in the day. As with Linneas’s imagined garden, principles of chronodesign, chronotherapy and chronoethics applied in hospitals, schools, homes and workplaces could offer a universal baseline, more in tune with our biology, to help us orient ourselves.
It’s safe to assume that life will find ways to knock us off schedule — and there are plenty of worthwhile reasons to get a poor night’s sleep — but it will be far easier to get back on track when the built and natural world both know the time.”
🌐 What does a human/nature scale internet look like?
“There were 60 websites in 1992. 623 websites in 1993—including Bloomberg, Wired, and IMDB. It was possible to read everything on the internet. But then, there were 2,738 sites by mid-1994, over 10,000 by the end of the year. You’d have to read 27 full websites a day to keep up.
Yahoo! launched that year, as a human curated directory of everything worth reading on the internet. A mere four years later, AI neé machine learning took over, with Google using backlinks and the reputation they inferred to tame the internet.
WordPress came in 2003. Facebook the next year, Reddit the year after, Twitter the next. For a while, again, you could read every post from your favorite blogs, scroll through all of your friend’s social media posts. Then it became too much, and algorithmic feeds came to the rescue, only to isolate us into filter bubbles. Then came AI generated content. Then came everything.
You can’t keep up with it all today. Nobody can.
We thought we’d get an explosion of creativity, of expression, of freedom, if everyone joined the internet. And we did, with shared memes replacing the shared moments of seemingly everyone watching the same TV shows in decades past. With lovingly crafted sites you’d stumble upon, dreams and dreamers, and realize that someone else in the world had the same niche interests as you. That wasn’t so bad.
And then we completed the internet. Google’s full of answers to seemingly everything; YouTube’s optimized for retina-searing thumbnails; TikTok’s QVC for a new generation; Twitter went from what you had for lunch to what everyone’s angry about today.
Everything’s done; time to pack it up […].
Maybe the true problem is that we put everything and everyone in the same place, and the world’s a bigger place than a single internet. If so, scale’s the problem, and smaller’s better. […]
So communities. People. Single-topic communities with fans of one thing. Shared-interest communities with people who have common interests. Sites and newsletters and other ways to connect directly with people who are already interested so you don’t have to worry about Google and social and re-discovery.
[…] As much as tech is interesting for its own sake, as much as it’s made our current lives possible, it’s people who are actually interesting. And limitations. You meet people at a slow, local coffee shop or a conference in a way you never would in an airport or mall. We love an open-world game, the freedom to do anything, but maybe we need the boundaries of a path to guide us, a bit.”
» The internet turned into a crowded mall. Now you need a corner shop. by Matthew Guay
“The earliest online communication tools, chat rooms and small forums, try to imitate the way humans communicate in the real world. On these platforms, you communicate with people one-to-one, or with small groups of people for focused discussions. Because of the similarity to real-world interactions, I would describe these kinds of communication styles as human-scale.
A platform like twitter is fundamentally different, because it puts the emphasis on one-to-many dissemination of information. There are influencers, and there are followers. Users are more or less explicitly ranked by popularity, with a small minority of popular users having a much, much, much louder voice than everyone else, and less popular essentially existing in a different class where influencers hardly hear their voice. I would argue that this pattern, which functions almost like an online caste system, is fundamentally toxic.”
» Human-Scale vs. Asymmetric Social Media by Pointers Gone Wild
🤝 What does progress look like in a human/nature scale society?
“Over the last half-century, economics has infiltrated parts of the federal government where it has no business intruding. It can be a useful tool for policymaking, but it’s become the only tool. It’s time for economics to back the hell off. […]
Let me state before proceeding further that I harbor no ill will toward the economics profession [...]. In addressing matters of economic policy, it’s the best we have until something better comes along. I’ll even concede that Economism has notched some significant victories over the years. [...] When economic insights and/or market solutions achieve the desired policy result, I applaud them. […]
But Economism isn’t merely a governing tool; it’s become just about the only governing tool. For half a century, economists have had their finger in every conceivable pie. […]
Economists don’t get societies. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987, and (quite rightly) she caught hell for it. But economics is premised on the choices of individuals, not societies, and therefore tends to miss how individuals within a society affect one another. [...] The Economicist presumption that individuals operate in isolation lies at the heart of the problem known as the Tragedy of the Commons, first described in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. [...] Ironically, it took an economist, Indiana University’s Elinor Ostrom, to note the Economicist bias in biologist Hardin’s theory. In the nontheoretical world, Ostrom pointed out, societies had shared resources for hundreds of years, because people weren’t half so collectively dumb as Hardin supposed; they understood their livelihoods depended on preserving common resources and, under the proper conditions, would temper immediate private gain to protect public property shared by all.”
“The problem is in the system. The system – the mind that says I'm going to maximize profits for capital, at any cost, in any way that we can – that mind simply flows around any barriers we put in the way. Until we challenge that mind, until we admit it’s an archaic and illegitimate bias toward the few, our change efforts will fail. We can no longer operate a global economy to benefit a wealthy few. So that's the first error – that we can’t solve this at the level of the individual company or individual portfolio. The problem is in the paradigm, the mind out of which the system arises. […]
I call it a [capital] bias, because it's a way of thinking that’s largely unconscious, very much like gender bias or racial bias. It tells us who matters, what matters. And, by the way, who doesn't matter and what doesn't matter. What the system says is that capital matters, anything that benefits capital is good. Everything else is essentially irrelevant.”
» Marjorie Kelly On “Wealth Supremacy” And The Blueprint For A New Economy by Christopher Marquis
“Adam Smith was brilliant. He also remained a bachelor his entire life, and he lived with his mother for most of it. He obsessed incessantly over how goods were produced and men acted in the marketplace, and answering the questions he had launched the field of economics as we know it. But, he missed a key consideration in “the fundamental question of economics.”
‘Adam Smith only succeeded in answering half of the fundamental questions of economics. He didn’t get his dinner only because the tradesmen served their own self-interests through trade. Adam Smith got his dinner because his mother made sure it was on the table every evening.’ [Katrine Marçal]
Smith coined the term “the invisible hand” that has become so widespread in economics. But, it turns out the real invisible hand may have been the one that put the dinner on his table every night for his entire life — his mother’s, whose efforts and labor were uncounted in his equations and went uncompensated. Not until we take economic man off his pedestal, and add the feminist perspective to economics, will we be able to begin addressing some of the real underlying structural problems in our workplaces, economy, and society.”
» Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story of Women and Economics - Porchlight Books
🏡 What might a human/nature scale community in today’s world look like?
“Sometime during the pandemic lockdowns, I began to nurture a fantasy: What if I were neighbors with all of my friends? […] Wouldn’t it be great to have someone who could join me on a stroll at a moment’s notice? Or to be able to drop by to cook dinner for a friend and her baby? How good would it be to have more spontaneous hangs instead of ones that had to be planned, scheduled, and most likely rescheduled weeks in advance? […]
This doesn’t have to be just a dream. Friends who already live in the same city could decide to move within walking distance of one another—the same neighborhood, block, or even apartment building—and campaign for others to do the same. Doing so would likely involve a lot of effort on the front end, but the resulting community could pay emotional dividends for years. Meeting up would be a breeze if you didn’t have to travel as far to see one another. More than that, the proximity would make it easier to support one another materially and emotionally. Even just knowing that someone you cherish is near could be reassuring. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve become convinced: We should all live close to our friends. […]
Yet young adults are conventionally expected to focus on their career, getting married, and starting a family. […] Many people are prepared to move for a new job, to be with a romantic partner, or even just for an adventure. Moving to be closer to buddies should be no different. Friends are not incidental to a good life; they’re essential to one. So why not shorten the distance between you and them?”
🗳️ What could democracy on a human/nature scale look like in the 21st century?
“The problem, as Naidu writes, is that ‘a basic constraint on democracy ... is that many of us are just too tired and busy to participate.’ […] What if every citizen received a part-time wage from the government to participate in the political process? Instead of a work week filled with whatever employment labor markets have to offer — however meaningless or grueling it might be — citizens could reallocate some of their labor time toward the work of politics.”
“Toffler is thinking of a suite of institutions that would equip us to approach the future with more intent. A system of governance that would enable us to anticipate the future, as best we can, and reflect on whether we like where we’re headed, and course-correct if we don’t. [...]
This again all starts to sound pretty head-in-the-clouds but in a sense it’s quite a practical project of democratic reform. Toffler refers to jury service as a model, suggesting a system in which we call people up periodically to engage in deliberations about the kind of future we’re building and the kind of future we want. The goal being to fill a gap: ‘Nowhere in politics is there an institution through which an ordinary person can express their ideas about what the distant future ought to look, feel, or taste like.’”
“Democracy is not a uniquely human institution. […]
Human beings make up less than one percent of the planet’s biomass, Keats notes, while plants and nonhuman animals together make up more than 80%. They’re spread across the world’s many biomes — including places human beings can barely access, like microbes and crabs living on thermal vents in the ocean bottom. ‘In other words,” Keats wrote in a primer explaining his vision of multi-species governance, ‘they’re deeply informed, and have much to tell us.’”
🤸♂️ What could a human/nature scale relationship with oneself (body & mind) look like in today’s world?
“Here’s an alternative view, which should be obvious but apparently is not: playing is learning. At play, children learn the most important of life’s lessons, the ones that cannot be taught in school. To learn these lessons well, children need lots of play — lots and lots of it, without interference from adults. […]
We think of play as childish, but to the child, play is the experience of being like an adult: being self-controlled and responsible. To the degree that we take away play, we deprive children of the ability to practise adulthood, and we create people who will go through life with a sense of dependence and victimisation, a sense that there is some authority out there who is supposed to tell them what to do and solve their problems. That is not a healthy way to live.”
“The fact that many of the sensory modalities that we use, and other creatures use, are being cut and fragmented now is a crisis on the same level as the crises of chemistry, of pollution, and of species loss. In fact, to speak of them as separate things is a lie, because climate change and species loss and the loss of sensory connection between creatures and sensory diversity are intersecting and tangled with one another. […]
If we’re not paying attention through our own senses, we have disengaged from the primary mode in which every creature since the origin of life has connected to its environment.”
» Listening And The Crisis Of Inattention by David G Haskell
“This vision of humankind as an expansive and potentially mindful world-embracing layer provides more than a spatial description of how humans have spread around much of the Earth’s surface. It also offers a poetic background for a specific kind of “planetary identity,” a way of seeing ourselves as participants in the planet’s harmonies, one sphere among the others. […]
The prospects of a planetary identity in a planetary age may depend in part on whether concepts like the noosphere, Anthropocene and Gaia can offer a resonant symbolic dimension, giving us the myths and metaphors through which we re-articulate our relationships to each other, the living world and the Earth.”
“For thousands of years, most human societies have accepted and moved in harmony with the irregular rhythms of nature, using the sun, moon and stars to understand the passage of time. […] But since the 14th century, we’ve gradually been turning our backs on nature and calculating our sense of time via manmade devices.”
That’s it for this week’s Friday issue!
As always, I hope this inspires some new thoughts and ideas! Enjoy your weekend, and see you next week on Wednesday for the weekly Rabbit Holes issue!
Do leave a like and share this with a friend, if you enjoyed reading it! 😁
Cheers,
Thomas