Synergy

Synergy is a technical term¹ used in discussing the performance and dynamics attained in systems, here with harmonodes, systems of human habitat.

Synergy compared to efficiency

Efficiency: upgrade a building's thermal systems to attain a 30% savings on the heating bill.

Synergy: optimize building's systems to eliminate the heating bill altogether.

Synergies like that have been demonstrated in these harmonodes.

Types of Synergy

• Quantitative — Buckminster Fuller's paper on Synergetics describes synergy as being more than the sum of its parts and this can be seen very literally in the alloying of metals as described here with chrome-nickel-steel:

  • iron 60,000 psi
  • chromium 70,000 psi
  • nickel 80,000 psi
  • carbon and the other minor constituents come to another 50,000 psi

  The total sum is 260,000 psi, but the actual tensile strength of chrome-nickel-steel runs to about 350,000 psi.

• Symbiotic Pairings — like:

  • letting sheep and chickens mingle and graze together — chickens grazing on the backs of the sheep preventing fly infestation
  • growing carrots and onions adjacent to each other — each deterring the common pests of the other

• Emergent Properties — attaining effects/properties like:

  • self-repairing in Todd's living machines.
  • self-heating in Solviva greenhouse and New Alchemy Arks and other bioshelter type things.

  ...which emerge from a broader optimization among the system's components (rather than among just two components in a symbiotic pair).

Synergies like these are hugely profound, thus the need for adding harmonode to our lexicon here.

We must explore this categorization of synergies, this pattern analysis, much more. These considerations pertaining to human habitat have never been made in our society, this is a catastrophically un-explored area.

See design for synergy: housing to explore some of what it can look like to achieve synergy in higher orders of magnitude.