Aaron Louie - Blog

My wife and I are in the process of re-designing our yard, since we need to take care of some urgent drainage and landscaping issues. Last night, we spent the entire evening poring over garden design books, most notably Ann Lovejoy’s Organic Garden Design School and Jacke & Toensmeier’s Edible Forest Gardens.

I was struck by how similar - and educational - the garden design process is to the user experience design process. While reading these books, I’d often just substitute “garden” and “landscape” with “web site”, transforming the text into a comprehensive guide to creating sustainable and useful information systems.

The garden design process all starts with the vision and goals. Our goals for our garden include:

• low-maintenance structure
• self-sustaining, bootstrapping, balanced micro-ecosystem
• layout optimized for access & use (socializing, entertaining, harvesting)
• long-term, sustainable source of food

After that comes a site assessment that analyzes the specific space and context from many different perspectives: climate, microclimate, seasonal factors, flow, access, use, aesthetics, materials, soil, organisms, etc. A design can’t simply be copied from one site to another - the topology, wind, water, sunlight, and so on are extremely site and context-specific. For each perspective, the designer maps out the healthy and high-yield areas, the sick and risky areas, confounding factors, and so on. An overlay of all of these perspectives simultaneously shows which areas will support which types of features and which areas will need to be built up or re-designed.

From there, the designer brainstorms different approaches, blocking out on a conceptual bubble diagram how the new design will address the factors identified in the site assessment while still fitting within the vision. They then choose from a pattern library of well-tested, sustainable feature configurations, using some features to protect and support, while using others to add aesthetic and nutritional value. Again, not every pattern will work for every site. The designer must intelligently select the right pattern for the constraints and factors inherent to the context for which they’re designing.

The design is iteratively refined, considering all of the perspectives from the site assessment, until enough details have been resolved to begin selecting and placing individual plants. At the same time, the site can be prepped for installing the new design. As the new components are inserted into the landscape, the designer must consider how these will change over time. An edible forest garden must be able to sustainably evolve over decades, so the designer needs to take into account short-term factors as well as the long-term plan for their design.

Once the design is reasonably certain, implementation can begin. However, it doesn’t end when the last plant is placed or the last paving stone is installed. The design must be refined and the site tended over the months and years. Iteration and optimization are key to the long-term success of any design.

There are so many complex and competing factors to consider in a garden. As with a social networking web site, the community can’t really be controlled directly. The garden designer must attract beneficial organisms with certain layouts, features, and plants, while considering how the requirements and products of one organism might affect other organisms. If the structure is well-designed and plants well-selected, different organisms will nourish, protect, and police each other.

Sounds a lot like the user-centered design process, right? Well, it’s no mystery. Landscape architecture and garden design have histories that extend to the beginning of human civilization. There is deep wisdom to be gained from examining the process of creating and cultivating of healthy, sustainable forest gardens.

In web sites, the pathways in, out, and through the site determine how people use, gain value from, and give value to the site and the other people linked to it. The site will constantly evolve, powered by a constant influx and outflow of information, money, time, and so on. Like a yard gone to seed and overgrown with weeds, an unattended, poorly designed web site will stagnate and collect spammers and trolls. The web site designer must consider how to attract the right audiences, provide them with value, allow them to be productive, and make use of the products of their input to further improve the structure and value of the site.