Module 1
Nathalia Del Moral Fleury:
Picture from Nora Bateson’s
Book Combining
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Reflections from Nathalia:
Questions that I am responding to:
Module 1: Design Activism
1.2 What does a Systems View of Life feel like?
1.3 How can we design with the Planet in mind?
Module 3: Collaborative Design
How can we listen to the system and visualise what we hear?
The relationship between this text and Nathalia:
Whenever I feel lost, I turn to nature and find my bearings again. This is an example of such an inspiration. Combining is a book I read late in my journey, and it was both fun and frustrating. It’s a puzzle of ideas, there is no right or wrong order to the content. You can open the book wherever and read from there. What I love most is the diversity of content: images, drawing, poetry, text… Reading is like travelling and it’s an exercise that is more experiential than intellectual, as if I was nourishing other parts of myself while reading it.
Why is this relevant?
Our interconnectedness can seem abstract, yet at other times it is vividly, almost viscerally real. The dominant Western worldview has often trained us to see ourselves as separate: from one another, from other species, from the living systems that sustain us. And yet I hold a deep conviction that if interconnectedness were understood not only in our minds but felt in our bodies, the way we relate would shift profoundly. This image offers a quiet lesson in nature’s wisdom, shaped through years of evolution. At first glance, the markings on the butterfly’s wings might appear to be a simple predator–prey survival strategy — a way to startle or confuse. But knowing that its predators are mostly lizards and small birds reveals something subtler: these markings function as a complex signal within a wider ecological conversation, communicating danger and influencing behaviour to other prey. What initially seems like a single adaptive trait opens into a web of relationships and interdependencies far richer than we might imagine. For me, this is a source of deep inspiration and awe — a reminder that life is always in dialogue, always entangled, always more intricate than our first glance allows.
Questions to the students:
- What is the impact of this visual on you?
- How could this inspire how humans relate to each other?
- How does this shift the perspective through which you look at a system?
- What inspirations can you draw from it?