Consultancy

While we use the word consultancy, this service is better described as educational resourcing. Dan Palmer and colleagues from around the world are available to resource your own living process. This is a custom offering that can happen online, offline, or in a combination. 

While Living Design Process (LDP) applies to working with and creating anything, when applied to working with landscape, at the highest level, here are the key facets of applying LDP to developing or retrofitting a landscape, regardless of location or scale:

1. Immerse in people: With the people we work to articulate a deep, compelling and beautiful intention for the property and your lives in relation to it. This work results in both what we call the Project DNA and a refined Wishlist comprising desired areas and activities.
2. Immerse in place: Here we listen quietly and deeply enough to let the site tell us its secrets. We work to bring the unique character and wholeness of your place into presence using an approach called reading landscape. We pay close attention to hard realities including soil, slope, water, flora, fauna, sun and wind and to how we feel as we move through the site’s different areas. In a sense we are asking the land both who it is and what it really wants – and then listening, deeply, to the response.
3. Hone in on spots that are creating tension, or need work, or have latent potential or beauty. Here we carefully and systematically move from the place as a whole to areas where something needs to happen.
4. Having honed in on these areas, we let possible best next steps arise. Here we ask what is the single best thing we could do next to improve this place and come closer to honouring our Project DNA / intentions for the space as a whole?
5. We now model, mock up, and thoroughly winnow or crash test these possible next best steps, seeking evidence we are wrong (rather than the more standard practice of assuming we are right and rushing to act)
6. When all but certain about what to do next, we act – and actively transform the situation before merging back into phase one and so on.

In this fashion LDP is authentically generative, where the plan is never the master, the real work is done on the ground, and drawn plans are simply after-the fact snapshots for clarification and communication purposes.

Please contact us using the form below to find out more and if you’d like to organise a free goodness-of-fit call.