What is the Biosphere Research Institute (BIOSRI)?
The idea for the Biosphere Research Institute came from a frustrated academic, Dr Keith Skene, who felt that the specialized, isolated and reductionist world of much academic thinking was failing to explore adequately the challenges and solution space relating to the major issues facing our world today. BIOSRI attempts to create space to think, and encourage thinkers to explore beyond their immediate neighbourhoods. Systems thinking lies at the heart of our approach, since, fundamentally, the answer to all of the big questions facing us are centred around the processes and functionality, rather than the forms and structures that we attempt construct. This is because systems are emergent, not reductionist in nature.
The Biosphere Research Institute has several goals at it's heart:
The Biosphere
The Biosphere is the sum of all life on our planet. However, it is not just an addition process. The Biosphere represents an organizational unit of life, and is the largest organizational unit, the smallest being an organism (anything smaller does not constitute a life form).
In order to solve the significant problems facing us at present, our solutions must not be isolationist, focusing only on individuals, but must be understood at every level of organization (individual, population, ecosystem, biome and biosphere). Ultimately, it is the Biosphere that must be understood, in terms of its structure, functioning, and response, if we are to find solutions that have resonance with the systems we wish to sustain.
Sustainability, ultimately, doesn’t operate at the individual level, but at the Biosphere level. This is a dynamic, complex place, full of interactions and conversations, where emergence, non-linearity, self-organization and sub-optimality rule, and where real-time feedback is the lifeblood of any functioning system. These are concepts that you can build a sustainable future on, whether it is your business, your teaching and learning or your reflective practice. And BIOSRI is designed to mirror this reality, where conversations and interactions are enabled, allowing fresh ideas to emerge.
The Biosphere Research Institute aims to promote thinking that can fundamentally awaken us to the context of our lives, in terms of our relational identities, our activities and our responsibilities, allowing us to recognize the limitations we unconsciously exist within, and then to liberate us to think beyond these structures, freeing ourselves from what Francis Bacon referred to as the idols, or illusions, of the tribe, den, marketplace and theatre.
The Biosphere Research Institute is a place for thinkers to think and share ideas, a meeting place for many different schools of thought, where you can drop by and spend as long as you want. Whatever your individual context, be it student, artist, designer, planner, engineer or journalist, this is a place that you can step into, away from your usual daily grind, and find some inspiration for a particular problem, build new partnerships, share some new insight that you have gained or meet some other thinkers for a virtual coffee.
Why virtual?
BIOSRI is a virtual institute, deliberately designed without buildings, property, profit or any other symbol of power, authority or control. This greatly greatly reduces our footprint on the environment, in terms of habitat destruction, carbon budget, and exploitation of the material fabric of a traditional, built environment. It is a collaborative venture, open to everyone, allowing people to connect from across the world at no cost, to enable research collaborations out with the usual silos of academia and industry and to share resources in the forms of new thinking, expert consultancy, educational materials and seminars.
The idea for the Biosphere Research Institute came from a frustrated academic, Dr Keith Skene, who felt that the specialized, isolated and reductionist world of much academic thinking was failing to explore adequately the challenges and solution space relating to the major issues facing our world today. BIOSRI attempts to create space to think, and encourage thinkers to explore beyond their immediate neighbourhoods. Systems thinking lies at the heart of our approach, since, fundamentally, the answer to all of the big questions facing us are centred around the processes and functionality, rather than the forms and structures that we attempt construct. This is because systems are emergent, not reductionist in nature.
The Biosphere Research Institute has several goals at it's heart:
- To utilise all human thought and thinking to co-design solutions and co-produce outcomes
- To motivate us all to think differently, and to explore more of the knowledge landscape
- To provide free educational resources for all, whose purpose is to remove asymptotes and similar limitations to open and interdisciplinary thinking, and to enrich individual thinking
- To offer free space for the expansion of human thought
- To give access to some of the leading minds of our generation
- To generate bridge-building and bridge-utilization
- To facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and collective resolution of problems
- To communicate cutting edge concepts from across the intellectual and experiential world
- To contribute to policy-making bodies at local, national and international levels
- To catalyse new ideas by reducing the activation energy intrinsic to substrate-product transitions
The Biosphere
The Biosphere is the sum of all life on our planet. However, it is not just an addition process. The Biosphere represents an organizational unit of life, and is the largest organizational unit, the smallest being an organism (anything smaller does not constitute a life form).
In order to solve the significant problems facing us at present, our solutions must not be isolationist, focusing only on individuals, but must be understood at every level of organization (individual, population, ecosystem, biome and biosphere). Ultimately, it is the Biosphere that must be understood, in terms of its structure, functioning, and response, if we are to find solutions that have resonance with the systems we wish to sustain.
Sustainability, ultimately, doesn’t operate at the individual level, but at the Biosphere level. This is a dynamic, complex place, full of interactions and conversations, where emergence, non-linearity, self-organization and sub-optimality rule, and where real-time feedback is the lifeblood of any functioning system. These are concepts that you can build a sustainable future on, whether it is your business, your teaching and learning or your reflective practice. And BIOSRI is designed to mirror this reality, where conversations and interactions are enabled, allowing fresh ideas to emerge.
The Biosphere Research Institute aims to promote thinking that can fundamentally awaken us to the context of our lives, in terms of our relational identities, our activities and our responsibilities, allowing us to recognize the limitations we unconsciously exist within, and then to liberate us to think beyond these structures, freeing ourselves from what Francis Bacon referred to as the idols, or illusions, of the tribe, den, marketplace and theatre.
The Biosphere Research Institute is a place for thinkers to think and share ideas, a meeting place for many different schools of thought, where you can drop by and spend as long as you want. Whatever your individual context, be it student, artist, designer, planner, engineer or journalist, this is a place that you can step into, away from your usual daily grind, and find some inspiration for a particular problem, build new partnerships, share some new insight that you have gained or meet some other thinkers for a virtual coffee.
Why virtual?
BIOSRI is a virtual institute, deliberately designed without buildings, property, profit or any other symbol of power, authority or control. This greatly greatly reduces our footprint on the environment, in terms of habitat destruction, carbon budget, and exploitation of the material fabric of a traditional, built environment. It is a collaborative venture, open to everyone, allowing people to connect from across the world at no cost, to enable research collaborations out with the usual silos of academia and industry and to share resources in the forms of new thinking, expert consultancy, educational materials and seminars.