For nearly four billion years, life has been finding and creating new opportunities.
Transforming the environment—and being transformed in return.
Living things shape each other.
Life creates conditions conducive to life.
I could never have mapped a straight-line path to the life I have now.
Author. Innovation consultant. Dean of an international school for biocultural leadership.
Founding Director of an Institute in the desert.
But, nutty as it sounds, I’d imagined from the youngest age.
When they asked what I wanted to do when I grow up, I knew the answer.
Grow possibility on this beautiful planet, in our lives and the lives of other living things.
I also knew I wanted to write, create in wild places, and have my own creative institute, like Black Mountain College or Bauhaus, where we’d honor the creations of every living thing – the art of their lives – and create as equals among them.
It was just a matter of good design.
I’d need to start by studying living things. So I did that.
Botany. Social Evolution. Primatology. Evolutionary Biology.
But life has a way of happening, and after a decade running my husband’s business, I found myself suddenly single and unemployed, the mother of three wild little boys, upside down on our mortgage.
What could I do?
I used what was available, and kept developing the capacities and conditions that might open the next possibility.
Over time, impossible things came to life.
Living Design uses life’s proven patterns to design with intention,
to bring things we care about to life
and the nature of the places we care about
to help us align our work with our nature
to renew the sources of possibility for all life.
with Evolutionary Biologist, Biomimic, and Author
Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker
BILD Founder and Director
What’s your big vision?
In the years since Teeming, I’ve been trying to catch up with myself.
What is it I’m really trying to do?
My consulting jobs were a side effect, and the solutions were piecemeal from my larger work.
What would be required?
A system to apply the ideas, one which could not be piecemealed. It was all one thing.
So I started working with Geoversity and the School for Biocultural Leadership.
A 13000 hectare “campus” of old growth cloud forest, adjoining the semi-autonomous Indigenous territory of the Guna Yala.
A network of entrepreneurs, researchers, climate activists, and creatives, many of them Indigenous, all bound by a love of nature. Six species of primate, including the two legged ones. Jane Goodall had been there 5 times.
Perfect. I could develop my system, write my new book, and do what I like best.
But then COVID hit.
I couldn’t get to Panama, or give speaking engagements and workshops.
What could I do?
I applied evolutionary thinking.
what’s necessary? What’s possible?
I needed a place where life-minded people could come to pay attention to the miraculous creations of each living thing – the art of their lives – and create our own together.
What I needed was my own creative institute.
And here we are.
The BILD is sited on 86 acres of critical habitat for the endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep, at the confluence of four major canyons and a spring, held sacred by the Kumeyaay, Cupa, and Cahuilla made their seasonal camps here for 10,000 years or more. Their lifeways are still evident in the canyon’s diversity.
This is what lasts.
Four Ways to Experience Living Design
Living Design Lab
Bring your big vision to life through life’s proven patterns.
An 8-week intensive with a curated cohort.
You’ve got a vision. You can almost taste it. But the distance between what is and what could be is daunting.
This Lab helps you cross the distance by taking you through a structured evolutionary thinking process.
What’s possible? What’s necessary? And what’s in the way?
By the end of this lab you’ll have a map of the territory and a compass that points True North.
A project. organization. community.
a place. a practice.
A different future.
Living Design helps you, your organization, or a wider network of stakeholders to see what’s possible and what’s necessary, for possibility to bloom.
Living Design Capacity Builder
Grow the capacity to accomplish what the mission requires.
Sometimes the work reveals that the real unit of change is larger.
Your organization may need new relationships, new flows of information or resources, greater distributed capacity, different forms of participation, or a way for people across the system to see and work with the challenge together.
That's what the Living Design Capacity Builder is for.
BILD works with organizations, collaboratives, communities, and initiatives to grow the capacities the system needs to accomplish what its mission requires.
Visit the BILD
Come to the desert.
People come to think, work, learn, make, gather, experiment—and sometimes simply to have enough space to see differently.
Artists, writers, scientists, designers, researchers, builders, and practitioners can spend concentrated time here working on something alive.
Stay in the ranch house or camp under our International Dark Sky.
Gather under the stars. Share food and fire. See what emerges.
Groups can use BILD for their own retreats, or add Living Design facilitation and programming around your big vision
Your donation helps us grow, develop, and practice Living Design at the BILD and beyond.
