Permaculture Design resources

During our courses we may introduce the following digital applications. We favour cloud solutions as these usually work across multiple devices making the material is easy to share. We also support opensource software where possible. While they may lack some of the functionality of the proprietary software they are more than adequate for the task.

Please consider becoming familiar with the software before you start the course by downloading the app to your device and signing up where appropriate.

Please do not be put off by this list. Its only a suggestion, and if you already use a different application (or pen and paper) and wish to continue to do so then that is perfectly okay.

Interviewing requires noting down what has been said and structuring it afterwards.  The free versions of the following tools have sufficient capacity for the design project.

Otter makes interviews and meetings more productive and collaborative with automated note and transcription. Simply sign up for a free account on the website download the app from the Google Play or App Store, log in on the app and off you go. Otter uses the latest AI technology to make sense out of what it hears and convert that into text which you can review and save. The free version only allows for 30min recordings and 600mins per month.

XMind is a full-featured mind mapping and brainstorming app. Like a Swiss Army Knife for your brain, spark creativity and improve thinking skills. XMind enables you to make sense of an interviews and meetings by allowing you to easily group things together in a “parent-child”  relationship. Supports all platforms.

If you already have an Android mobile device, then if it’s not already installed then download Google Keyboard from the Google Play store and you’ll have an instant speech-to-text app. Although it’s primarily designed as a keyboard for physical input, it also has a speech input option which is directly available. And because all the power of Google’s hardware is behind it, it’s a powerful and responsive tool. For interviews simply open Notes on your phone and record away. You can expect to edit the text afterwards.

We will use planning tools to record what design tasks need to be done, in what order, and by whom. The tools recommended here support different methodologies and the free plan is sufficient for the Design Project.

Taiga takes a Kanban approach to planning with each task represented by a card. These cards are organised in boards. Cards can be assigned to members, given a due date, a status, and a priority. This is a very visual approach to planning and well suited to managing the Permaculture Design task.

Google has an entire suite of cloud based software tools. All that is required is a Google account to access these. Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBITNezSmLY for a brief introduction and explanation.

If you prefer to use the Apple of Microsoft cloud suite then this is fine, only we will use the Google suite.

The Google tools we will use are:

• Google Drive to store documents
• Google Docs – MS-word style word processor for collaborative document creation and maintenance.
• Google Sheets – Google’s cloud based spreadsheet similar to Excel
• Google Slides – for presentations, similar to Powerpoint
• Google Draw is a simple drawing tool integrated in most Google applications
• Google Earth – There is a web version and a standalone version. It is an expanded version of Google Maps. After installation it can be used to accurately map out any location on the planet. The historical image function is especially useful to show land use over time.
• Google Groups – Google’s cloud based discussion forum. We will use it instead of a Facebook page as it offers more features and is more suited to our needs

Another product is Google Meet. This is an online platform suitable for online meetings and webinars. It is an alternative to ZOOM and MS-teams. It has few limits unlike its competitors.

These tools enable you to create a design that is easy to email to clients. Pens, pencils, and tracing paper have their place but do not transfer easily to digital platforms for email or collaboration. Electronic tools do however take some getting used to and there can be a learning curve before acceptable models are produced. Fortunately there are more than enough internet “how to” resources.

One important requirement for a drawing tool is the ability to switch between “layers”. Layers allow zones and sectors to be drawn separately and switched on and off to demonstrate the various design aspects.

Inkscape is the main tool for the Permaculture Designer. Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It’s free and open source. It uses vector graphics to allow for sharp printouts and renderings at unlimited resolution and is not bound to a fixed number of pixels like raster graphics.

It has reasonable learning curve, The extensive tutorials and youtube videos facilitate learning the basics – it is worthwhile persevering with.

Have a look at the design for our property. We photographed the property with our drone using the Dronelink map creation feature, processed the images in webODM and used Inkscape to add the different components.

Note: If you have access to Adobe Illustrator and are familiar with it then this can be used instead of Inkscape.

Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.

Many people are familiar with Google and Apple maps, Geo maps on the various websites, and so on. These maps are are produced by software known as a Geographic Information System.

The GIS we use for processing site details for permaculture projects is the open source https://www.qgis.org software.

For use in the field we link these maps to:

• https://merginmaps.com/ app. Unfortunately Mergin have reduced the cloud storage available for their free accounts making the app useless for any “free” use.
• We have good experience with the free QField app. This offers a decent free cloud storage quota. It also links directly from your desktop to your mobile device which removes any storage limitation. This is our preferred option.

While we do not cover GIS in the course we are happy to discuss the possibilities it offers should you be interested.

We find a drone controlled by Dronelink makes mapping a breeze. We use WebODM to stitch the images together to give the didgital basemap.