Planning focuses on what you want
Design focuses on what the site will tolerate
“I want a food forest here.”
“I want to be off-grid.”
“I want to capture all rainfall.”
What is the maintenance load at this scale?
What happens if this system fails mid-season?
Who bears liability if this causes damage?
Design begins when constraints are acknowledged — not when ideas are generated.
At its core, permaculture design is the process of aligning human intent with ecological constraints while minimizing irreversible error.
A valid design answers three questions before it answers “what should I build?”:
What is the true scale of impact?
How difficult is this to undo if it fails?
What external systems does this interact with (law, neighbors, insurance, safety)?
If those questions are undefined, the design is incomplete — no matter how elegant it looks on paper.
A design is only valid if it survives the structural constraints imposed by the site, the scale of impact, and the permanence of the action. Most failed permaculture projects do not fail because the idea was bad — they fail because these constraints were never evaluated before implementation.
The purpose of this framework is not to restrict design, but to prevent irreversible error. Permaculture does not fail at the idea level — it fails at the decision level. By evaluating designs through deterministic constraints instead of assumptions, this system shifts permaculture from aspirational planning toward verifiable, site-specific accountability.
In permaculture, design ideas are not assumed valid by default. This diagram shows the required decision gates a design must pass—scale, reversibility, and governance—before it can be responsibly implemented.
Ignoring any one of them produces failure elsewhere.
Scale determines:
energy flows
maintenance burden
failure blast radius
A design that works at garden scale may collapse at homestead or community scale.
Good design reduces scale until stability is proven.
Every design choice has a reversal cost.
Fully reversible systems allow learning
Partially reversible systems require caution
Permanent systems require certainty
Design does not ask “can this be built?”
It asks “can this be safely undone?”
No design exists in isolation.
Design interacts with:
zoning and land-use law
HOAs and covenants
neighbors and shared infrastructure
insurance and liability
safety and emergency response
A design that ignores governance does not become independent — it becomes vulnerable.
accepted principles
common zone layouts
proven techniques
Common failure modes include:
underestimating maintenance energy
assuming future behavior will match intent
ignoring off-site consequences
treating permanence as neutral
Failure is not a moral issue.
It is a systems mismatch.
Design exists to surface mismatch before implementation.
Below are design concepts that only work after context is validated:
Zones describe frequency of interaction, not success.
They help place elements once scale and access are known.
Sectors model external forces (sun, wind, water, fire).
They matter most when permanence increases.
Guilds reduce inputs only when maintenance energy is accounted for.
Poorly designed guilds increase complexity without resilience.
Stacking works when functions are compatible over time, not just space.
These tools are powerful — but only inside defined boundaries.
That is not an omission.
It is a safeguard.
Design decisions made without verified context produce:
sunk costs
regulatory conflict
ecological damage
long-term maintenance traps
Before committing to a design, your site context must be classified.
Use the Decision Router to determine whether a project should:
proceed
pause
or be refused in its current form
This step protects both the site and the designer.
Permaculture Systems – understand interacting components
Permaculture Zones – spatial logic and limits
Use validated tools only after classification
Do not bypass governance or permanence constraints
Permaculture design is a responsibility, not a recommendation.
This site prioritizes decision validity over outcomes.