Illuminated by science, biophilic design patterns inform, guide and assist in the design process. They can become another tool in the designer’s toolkit.  They can help clarify to articulate connections between aspects of the built and natural environments.

Design Instinct Learning is inspired by mentors Cheryl D. Miller, Larry Myatt, Lella Gandini and Rhoda Kellogg, positing a call for students to design based on their own understanding through marks, words, sounds, and images. This is their unique construction with origin from their own culture of life before, in and out of school time.  When a student explores content, they read though their own sense perception presenting a hypothesis of meaning through demonstration. It is a reimagining of school with students at the center by school renewal pioneer Larry Myatt. A system of writing the world based on learning from the core of the student’s story. Their vision. Their truth. Their history.

In 2020, Cheryl D Miller shared her seminal talk, Color as a DNA of Organizing Visual Vocabulary the patterns of influence that surfaced over time from her childhood home influences a space integrating Ghanaian, Dansk, Bauhaus and African American. The shape, line, color and image patterns each distinct. Color and grid systems distinct to Cheryl based on her influences in the environment.

In 1980 while pursuing a thesis at Smith College, Lella Gandini posited a learning theory called The Emergence of Style by designing an instrument to observe a 3-year-olds natural patterns of marks made in school and collected at home. I see Gandini’s work as an extension of Kellogg’s pattern matrix. Lella finds distinctions of meaning when she as the adult given free space to students to make their marks and simply observe. 

Rhoda Kellogg (1898-1987) oversaw, systematically collected, and published an archive of over 8000 children’s drawings from around the world.  Kellogg’s understandings led her to recognize a child’s innate ability to discover their voice and build confidence in their abilities to create. She watched the process of moving from scribbles to uncovering shapes within networks of seemingly random lines and scribbles, to repeatedly witnessing the development of a complex visual written and spatial language. She referred to this ability as ‘the child as designer.”