Balance Within

Connected networks

Last Friday, I was at the annual meeting of the University of Minnesota’s interdisciplinary Institute on the Environment listening to the keynote speaker, sociologist Damon Centola, talk about the design of the structure of social networks and their influence on collective intelligence. In his new book, Goodthink, he describes four ‘grand challenges’ of collective intelligence: choosing, creativity, coordination, and cooperation and he argues for the need to understand these together. 

He was brought in as a keynote speaker because the Institute seeks to address all of those grand challenges of collective intelligence through their structures of exchange. I have seen this work for myself and others. My own career paths, collaborators, and successes owe a great deal to the designed social network structures at the Institute and other interdisciplinary programs at the University. 

For interdisciplinary collaboration to yield innovative emergent work, a common interest is a good starting point. But it is not enough to just know about another person with common interests in a different field and look up their work. Designed social network interaction creates the sparks and the fuel to form innovative initiatives. At the Institute, these designed interactions have included things as simple as a hosted lunch, an annual meeting with designed idea exchanges, and funding structured to require or incentivize interdisciplinary collaboration. These structures have led me to have the opportunity to collaborate outside my College of Design and architecture peers with engineers, game designers, energy specialists, education researchers, diversity and inclusion professionals, artists, a variety of environmental scientists, and a legal anthropologist – something I never would have heard of had it not been for the designed exchanges at the Institute. 

And it is important, argues Centola, that these exchanges are more than digital. The informal and emergent conversations that come from physical proximity are more than transactional. Physical proximity encourages open-ended exposure and curiosity.  And I would argue, it also encourages genuine affection that comes from friendly conversation and sharing food.  Over the course of these interactions, members of the Institute grow their sense of “we,” with their common interests and common interpersonal experiences. 

These designed social networks extend outward from the University to include community partners because the grand challenges we face are only solvable in wider partnership. This grows the circle larger to a broader sense of “we” and taps more collective wisdom and cooperation.

An even larger circle

It is in our common interest as humans to care for the environment on which we depend and this common interest can create strength in our inter-human cooperative work. But it is easy to fall into the false duality of ‘humans and nature’, that keeps us in more transactional than reciprocal relationships with our environment if we are not also intentional about strengthening human-nature relationships. The environment – or what I like to call ‘the rest of nature’ -- is the larger circle to which we all belong as members within larger ecological relationships. How might we design engagement within our eco-social networks to encourage mutual learning and cooperation with the rest of life on earth? How might we increase our eco-social collective intelligence?

This orientation to engaging humans-within-a-larger nature is the focus of much of my art and environmental education practice. I design experiences aimed at blurring the boundaries between perceptions of what is human and what is nature toward a goal of ‘experiential integration.’ Centola’s talk about the structure of our social networks and its impact on behavior, reminded me of a post I’d made from my art studio blog over a decade ago titled “Water and Balance.” While the post is more evocative than scientific, it reinforces the importance of considering the structure of how we connect to each other. 

Water and balance

Excerpted by permission from Full Spring Studio, LLC.

Last January [in 2013], I was asked to be one of a group of artists speaking about our views on art-making and the theme of "balance." I recently reviewed my notes for the talk which included comments about specific environmental art projects that connect people to water like the Downstream/Upstream project. The third part of the talk was a more general reflection on how my work relates to the theme of balance, and rereading this, it still seems to represent something essential to me, so I am posting it here. It helps remind me, as I plan new projects with water, of the underlying goal of my work.

About Balance

After being invited to speak on the topic of balance in my work, I was concerned. I just didn’t feel connected to the idea of balance. It reminds me of the difficult work of balance in tenuous relationships between two separate forces. But through reflection on balancing water, I’ve made peace with the idea.   

Let’s say you have two buckets of water, and one is filled above its maximum fill point, and the other is filled below its minimum fill point. You could say they have an imbalance in their use of water. One has more than its share, and one has less. 

If you measure and scoop water from one bucket and put it into the other, you can balance out their portions so that they are even. This is what I would call balance between. It is negotiated, it is measured. It may come from stewardship, or war, pity or compassion. It is a relationship between two.

On the other hand, if you interconnect the buckets at their bases by a tube, something happens. Water flows. Boundaries are blurred. The two buckets function as a single water body.  They find equilibrium easily, both responding to the weight of the water. This is balance within a single whole – a system of water. This is what I call balance within. It is emergent, coming from an interconnection between two that creates a whole that includes both. 

This is what I am trying to do with my work. To create relationships – to make interconnections that reveal a larger whole, blurring the boundaries between our lives and our surroundings, so that we might naturally come to equilibrium within an earth that we love. 

Resources Referenced

Image: Downstream Water Release, 2011-2012
From Downstream/Upstream: A Journey
Through the Urban Water Cycle
Jonee Kulman Brigham, Full Spring Studio
© Full Spring Studio 2012, used by permission

Brigham, Jonee Kulman. (2013, December 23). Full Spring Flow: Water and Balance. Full Spring Flow. https://fullspringflow.blogspot.com/2013/12/water-and-balance.html

Centola, D. (2026). Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence. MIT Press.

Institute on the Environment. https://environment.umn.edu