SEATTLE – Supply chain and agricultural issues have been central to policy discussions and media interest in the past year, and experts are coming together to explore problems and generate solutions.

As researchers, designers and policymakers work to understand these systems’ capacity for resiliency, the need for a structured analysis and design approach is increasingly apparent.

The Tech Policy Lab’s newest release, Resilience Grammar: A Value Sensitive Design Method for Resilience Thinking, provides a practical approach that can be used for just these circumstances.

Resilience Grammar presents a set of statement types – resilience for / not for , resilience to ensure , among others – that support examination of resilience pathways in the context of the real world. Each statement type includes a connecting phrase and an element, in the form of “resilience connecting-phrase .” The types encourage consideration of interactions among elements such as stakeholders, values, stressors and assets.

Informed by value sensitive design, Resilience Grammar prioritizes human and planetary flourishing, now and for the long term.

The technical report has multiple sections:
A close look at the “resilience grammar” method;
Example use cases;
Suggestions for use; and
Future work.

This method can support comparative policy analysis, qualitative data analysis and public education. While Resilience Grammar was developed for the domain of agriculture, there is potential for use in a diversity of sectors including community-driven planning and innovation; energy; security; and transportation.

Read the full publication here.