Informally, one of my earliest memories as a child was a family trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and an experience of beautiful courtyards full of bougainvillea, water, sunlight, and beautifully colourful ornamental details of leaves and flowers. Ever since then I have been aware of something like this quality of nature as a powerful and important force in human environments. Reflecting on this, I named my design firm “Structura Naturalis.”

Later, I read E.O. Wilson’s book Biophilia, and after that, the one he did with Stephen Kellert, The Biophilia Hypothesis. That gave a name to what I had been experiencing, as well as an explanation of why it was so important. It is an innate part of our psyche, bequeathed to us through our evolutionary history. Unfortunately, this legacy has become rather smothered in modern design practice, with apparently negative consequences for our well-being.

It’s some version of the question “Isn’t biophilia just a nice amenity to add to good design?” My answer is that it’s far more important than that: It is not a deterministic element in design, like a wall that keeps us out, but a powerful influence that profoundly shapes all the other experiences we have, in ways that may not be obvious to us, but are nonetheless real and consequential. There is very interesting and important research showing these positive consequences, including medical research.

I would say it has become more articulated, into a comprehensive theory of the way human beings use space, and are affected by it. Biophilia is a big part of it, but so are network theory, pattern language theory, environmental psychology, urban morphology and morphogenesis, and the notable work of Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs. Because this theoretical picture concerns the structure of a spatial network, but one not of spaces in the abstract, but human-created and human-experienced places, we call it “Place Network Theory.”

It is remarkable and gratifying that people from diverse backgrounds and cultures understand and get excited by it. I just gave a talk at a conference in Portland that was very well received by the head planner there, who appeared with me in the closing plenary. I have had wonderful meetings with city leaders in Glasgow, transportation planners in Quito, urban morphologists in Vienna, health officials in Los Angeles, and many others. Our research coordination network includes computer scientists, ecologists, economists, urban morphologists, medical doctors, and many others. And of course, architects, urban designers and planners.

I would say the recovery planning of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I came to realise in a big way that too much design is focused on command-and-control methods that do not take into account the experiences of human beings and the development of their capacity for learning and adapting to their own environments. That was what made New Orleans a great city – the jazzy informality, the “roux” in the “gumbo.” It’s what makes all great cities great.

Yes, very much so. Design is at the heart of all that we do as human beings. It is at the heart of our technology, our structuring of the world. And yet it is a very primitive field in many respects, relying almost on potions and incantations, magical thinking and the imagery of sheer genius. That doesn’t happen in medical practice, in law, in any science. If it did those people would probably be put in jail! We need a much more rigorous, evidence-based foundation for the field, if we are going to meet the challenges of our historical era.

I always love to see a good completed project that I can experience and enjoy myself, while I watch others enjoying it too.

Biosemiotics; the recognition that we find meaning in our environment because of our evolutionary history and our relationships as creatures – as being-in-the-world.

I think it’s an understanding that the structures we experience in the world, as biological creatures, can become the elements of a very strong generative design – but they have to be “decoded” in a way that preserves their essential connective power. This is possible, but it requires finding the right places to “break the joints”. Chris Alexander has spent a lot of time working on this, really from the beginning of his career. That’s what patterns really are – the decoded bits of a design.

In one way or another, it is essential – we need to “decompose” the design problem into the “generative code” that will create a new design that has the power and capacity we want. I think all good designs do this, whether consciously or unconsciously.

I think it’s vital to understand that good design is not creation out of thin air, or magical inspiration, but a process, a craft. It is open-ended and unpredictable – an adventure – but it’s far from random, or novelty for novelty’s sake. It has to be anchored in human experience and in a base of evidence, knowledge and skill. It has to be anchored in the deep nature of things, if you will. And it has to be able to isolate the key elements of the design system – to “decode” them – so as to be able to recombine them in an endless number of expressions, just as language does with great poetry or literature.

Again, it is NOT creation out of thin air, or out of some mysterious force of genius. It is not endless novelty that leaves us with nothing but randomness. It builds over time, and gets richer – just as biological systems do. It is an evolutionary process, but one that creates unpredictable synergies and infinitely novel structures. It is exploration and adventure.

Anchor your work in an evidence-base, and in the well-being of the people for whom you are designing. Remember that you are creating a fabric in which they themselves must be able to maximize their own well-being. Be a good scientist as well as a good artist – like the best doctors or gardeners or cooks are.

I think it is at a crossroads. We are either going to continue making the same mistakes at ever larger scales, or we are going to recognize the need for a step-change in practice, to a more evidence-based approach.

I am passionate about the historic moment in which we find ourselves as human beings. The question of whether we are going to be successful as a global civilization and as a species is, to an extraordinary degree, in the hands of current generations. If we believe we have no power, then we don’t: we surrender it, and we will be doomed. But we do have the resources to succeed – I believe that. Our problems are comprehensible, and we can adapt and succeed.

If present trends do not dramatically reverse – and there’s no evidence they will – in the next fifty years we will create more urban fabric than we have in our entire human history. That is a staggering fact. And even more staggering is that we are simply not ready to meet this challenge.

I love Herbert Simon’s definition of design as the transformation “from existing states to preferred ones.” That definition raises more questions than answers – but they are the right questions! Who is doing the preferring? How do they (we) know what is existing? What methods do we use to make the transformations? How do we know if they are working? What do we do if they are not? What are the necessary social and political conditions of that process? These are all very important questions that usually get too little attention.

I suspect that moving to Italy would improve my quality of life! There are things you do better than we do here in the United States – slow food, a sense of culture and enjoyment – and biophilic cities, at least in the older parts. Our US society can be quite a rat race at times.

I often think of the phrase of the writer E.M. Forster, “Only connect.” Design must “only connect” human beings to each other, and to our resources, and to our nature – to our cosmos, to the divine, if you will. Of course, then the next question is: “What is the pattern of connection?” That is where the design always gets interesting.