The 10 designs; what's involved?

These 10 designs do not all have to be separate projects. They can include overall designs for a large project and several smaller designs within each project for different parts of the project.

The 10 designs need to include some land-based designs but do not all have to be land-based. The land-based designs can all relate to the same plot of land if this is a major project or can include designs for various plots.

What is the Accreditation Event?

The accreditation event is the culmination of the course in which the student makes a 45 minute presentation of a selection of their design work to a peer group panel made up of Diploma holders and Design Course Certificate holders. This panel also inspects the students Portfolio and assesses the work against the accreditation criteria.

What are the Accreditation Criteria?

These can be broken into two groups: essential and complementary.

The essential criteria are: 'Theory in Action' - evidence that the student is living the theory of permaculture, and 'Design Practice' - how well a student can choose appropriate design processes and methods and apply them to a given situation.

The complementary criteria are about how the student's work relates to the wider body of permaculture design. They are 'Dissemination', 'Community Building', 'Symmetry' and 'Evaluation & Costings'.

  • Dissemination describes how the student shares their work, this may be in the form of writing magazine articles, teaching on permaculture courses, speaking to local community groups etc.
  • Community Building is achieved when a student demonstrates community development as part of their work. The community may be a local permaculture group or the wider community.
  • Symmetry in this context means contributing to the permaculture community in exchange for having benefited from it. For example, early permaculture pioneers contributed much to the body of knowledge that students can draw on. By making a similar contribution, students can achieve a symmetrical relationship with the permaculture community.
  • Evaluation and costing skills can help to demonstrate that a permaculture system can deliver yield improvements and economic efficiencies over a conventional approach.