Things that grow

Alan Watts said:

"Natural forms are not made but grown, and there is a radical difference between the organic and the mechanical. Things which are made, such as houses, furniture, and machines, are an assemblage of parts put together, or shaped, like sculpture, from the outside inwards. But things which grow shape themselves from within outwards - they are not assemblages of originally distinct parts; they partition themselves, elaborating their own structure from the whole to the parts, from the simple to the complex."

The scary thing about community organizing or collective action as the basis of a designed system is that you're forced to give up control. It's not like designing and constructing a mechanical object, or a piece of furniture, or any static thing. It's emergent. Instead of designing the thing itself, all you can do is design the conditions and watch what blooms inside.

In this way, gardeners, computer scientists, and educators are the same. The garden, algorithm, and classroom are all a series of conditions, a few simple rules that give way to complexity (and sometimes beauty).

"Things that grow shape themselves from within outwards."

I think this will be important for us to remember in this project.