pcplantdb

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

> What's exciting is the idea of creating information about the
> relationship(s) of two or more elements.

PC is a relational design system/practice, so this is key.  It's part of
all the fundamental principles, more or less.
And, we humans are good at this if we have the right experience and
(relationally relevant!) info. Providing that sort of info, not readily
available in any other books or DBs yet, will be an excellent start.

> Structurally in the program, this is a simple thing to do but it is
> also something that we don't have any information about currently and
> will depend on our authors to fill in over time.

There are lots of example in various PC and eco-design books that we can
draw on, for testing at the least.

> The remaining concern I have, which I've expressed before, is that
> permaculture systems are incredibly complex and I'm not sure we can
> build an interface that both records/displays a reasonable amount of
> that complexity without overwhelming the user.

Not without a 56" plasma display to present it on... ;-)

Vertical movement (between levels of detail is what I mean by that) will
be important for managing this, I think.
I would want to look at a whole guild, in which case I will have limited
information about all elements and relations, and also "zoom" to sections
of the guild, individual plants, and then the sub-guilds they are part of,
and so on.

There are definitely limits to what can be presented on a computer screen.
Again, with the right "pieces" at our disposal we humans are quite good at
dealing with significant levels of complexity.
We can't replace ourselves with this - we can design it to work well with
our existing human capabilities though.  That in itself would be a massive
advance in computer technology!

> In comparison think about the number of relationships a
> chicken has to a cabbage.... staggers the imagination eh?

And only some subset of those is likely to be relevant, or "useful" or
however we want to say it.  I think there will be some self-organizing and
self-selection in these complexities that will help them be manageable.


John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net