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Designing with permaculture

The design process

Terra Humana editorial teamLast updated: 2026-10-168 min read

Notebook with landscape sketches, compass and trowel on a stone at the edge of a hillside at dawn, mist in the valley

In brief

The ordered steps of a permaculture design, from observing site and people through analysis and design to building, care and review, repeated in loops.

What the design process is

A permaculture design does not begin with a drawing. It begins with looking, and it never quite ends, because a living system keeps answering back. The design process is the order in which this work is done: first gather what is there, then make sense of it, then decide, then build in stages, then care for what was built and learn from it. The other tools of permaculture, such as zones, sectors, the base map and overlays or element analysis, each have their place somewhere in this sequence.

Bill Mollison devoted a chapter of Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988) to methods of design. Teachers have since condensed the sequence into acronyms that students can carry in their heads. Two are especially common.

  • SADIMET: Survey, Analysis, Design, Implementation, Maintenance, Evaluation, Tweaking. The British teacher Aranya builds his step-by-step guide to permaculture design (2012) around a sequence of this kind.
  • OBREDIMET: Observation, Boundaries, Resources, Evaluation, Design, Implementation, Maintenance, Evaluation, Tweaking. It splits the survey into three parts and adds a first weighing of the findings before anything is drawn.

Shorter and longer forms circulate as well. SADIM stops at maintenance; GoSADIM, as described by the writer Graham Burnett, puts the articulation of goals at the start. Looby Macnamara's Design Web, set out in People and Permaculture (2012), takes the same elements and lets the designer move between them freely, which suits social and personal projects. No version is the official one. What they share is the order of looking, thinking, acting and checking.

The steps, one by one

1. Goals. What should the place give, and to whom? Write down needs, wishes and limits of the people involved, including time and money. Goals stated as questions ("How might we keep water on the slope through the summer?") leave room for answers no one has thought of yet.

2. Survey and observation. Walk the land in all weathers and seasons. Note where water runs and stands, where frost or heat lingers, which plants come up unasked, where the paths already are. Aranya advises surveying the site before meeting the client, so that the first look is unbiased. A notebook with dates, photographs from the same spots each month and a spade for looking into the soil are enough to start. This is where the observation year belongs: many teachers advise watching a full cycle of seasons before large changes that are hard to undo, and Aranya recalls this as Mollison's advice. Small, reversible trials are part of observing, as the principle observe and interact describes.

3. Analysis. Now the findings are sorted. Which resources are free or cheap? What limits the project: slope, shade, water rights, budget, skills? Where do water, nutrients or labour leak away? Each important element is examined for its needs, products and properties.

4. Design. Work from the large pattern to the detail, as the principle design from patterns to details asks. The lasting things come first: the scale of permanence gives an order, from climate and land shape through water and access to trees, buildings, fences and soil. Zones and sectors place the elements, and only then come the choice of plants and the details of beds.

5. Implementation. Build in stages, often by season, starting with what everything else depends on, usually water and access. A small first stage that works teaches more than a large one that fails; this is the logic of the principle use small and slow solutions.

6. Maintenance, evaluation and tweaking. A design is tested by use. What works, what struggles, what has changed? The answers flow back into small corrections, and over the years into new rounds of design. Here the process meets the principle apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

An example from practice

In 2017 the Australian designer Dan Palmer compared nine published accounts of the permaculture design process, by Dave Jacke, Ben Falk, Aranya, Toby Hemenway and others. Most followed the same line: study the people and the site, develop a design from broad patterns to fine detail, then implement it. Yet many authors also admitted that real projects are messier. Jacke, co-author of Edible Forest Gardens (2005), calls the sequence in his book an idealised linear one; in his own work he implements key pieces and redesigns as the system develops. Palmer used this to question whether design on paper and work on the ground can be kept apart at all. The lesson for beginners is practical: follow the steps, but expect to walk them more than once.

Common mistakes

  • Planting before looking. Trees bought in the first spring often end up in the frost hollow or the path of the winter floods. The money is lost, and so is a year.
  • Skipping the analysis. A long list of observations is not yet a design. Without sorting it into resources, limits and flows, the drawing simply follows taste.
  • Treating the plan as finished. A plan that cannot change becomes a burden. The evaluation and tweaking steps exist because the land will always know something the designer did not.
  • Forgetting the people. Time, money, health and skills are part of the site. A design that needs more care than anyone can give will fall back to whatever grows by itself.

Further in the TerraWiki

The design process at Sa Medada

Sa Medada is a slope in Jerzu, in Ogliastra on the east side of Sardinia, with mild winters and a dry season from roughly May to September. A first reading of the land exists: a LiDAR wetness map shows a comparatively dry main area and moister channels along the edges. Banana, mango, avocado, cherimoya, papaya, moringa and citrus are being trialled in the microclimate, and the first tree, a service tree, was planted in 2024 on the very hot southern flank. How these plants fare is part of the observation. A laboratory analysis of the soil does not yet exist.

Project Eden begins with pioneer plants, ground cover and holding water. Swales are planned; none has been built yet.

Plants in this entry

Frequently asked

What are the steps of the permaculture design process?

Most versions share the same core. First comes a survey of the site and of the people who will live with the design. Then an analysis sorts what was found: resources, limits, flows and problems. Only after that comes the design itself, working from broad patterns to details. Implementation follows in stages, then maintenance, and finally an evaluation that feeds back into small corrections. The acronyms differ from course to course, but the order of looking, thinking, acting and checking stays the same.

What does SADIMET stand for?

SADIMET stands for Survey, Analysis, Design, Implementation, Maintenance, Evaluation and Tweaking. It is widely taught in British and European permaculture courses, and the teacher Aranya builds his step-by-step guide to permaculture design around a sequence of this kind. The last two steps matter most: they turn a straight line into a loop, because what is learned after planting changes the next round of design. Shorter forms such as SADIM leave them out, longer ones such as GoSADIM add the articulation of goals at the start.

What is OBREDIM or OBREDIMET?

OBREDIM is a variant used in many permaculture courses. The letters stand for Observation, Boundaries, Resources, Evaluation, Design, Implementation and Maintenance; OBREDIMET adds a second Evaluation and Tweaking at the end. It splits the survey into three parts: what you see on the land, what limits the project, and which resources are at hand. The first Evaluation weighs these findings before any drawing begins. It is a useful reminder that time, money and skills are boundaries and resources just as much as soil and water.

Do you really have to observe a site for a whole year before designing?

Many teachers advise watching a full cycle of seasons before making large changes that are hard to undo, such as earthworks, ponds or the main tree plantings. Aranya recalls this as advice from Bill Mollison. A single season hides too much: winter waterlogging, summer heat, the low winter sun, the paths of storms. The observation year is not a year of doing nothing. Small, reversible steps such as a few beds, mulch or trial plantings are part of it, because they show how the place responds.

How does Terra Humana apply the design process at Sa Medada?

At Sa Medada a first reading of the land exists: a LiDAR wetness map shows a comparatively dry main area and moister channels along the edges. Banana, mango, avocado, cherimoya, papaya, moringa and citrus are being trialled in the microclimate, and how they fare is part of the observation. A laboratory analysis of the soil does not yet exist. Project Eden begins with pioneer plants, ground cover and holding water; swales are planned, and none has been built yet.

Mediterranean hillside garden in evening light with an old olive tree, a small pond and a wooden table full of figs, pomegranates, bread and jars of seedNext in this themeThe three ethics of permacultureThe three values at the root of permaculture: care for the earth, care for people and fair share, which sets limits and passes on surplus.

Related terms

Morning mist rising over a Mediterranean slope of old olive trees and macchia, with dew sparkling in spider webs and a shaft of sunlightObserve and interactThe first of David Holmgren's twelve permaculture principles: watch a place closely, act in small steps and let its response guide the next step.A river delta from above at sunset, its channels branching like a tree across wet sand and marshDesign from patterns to detailsHolmgren's seventh permaculture principle: first see the large patterns of a place, build the design on them and fill in the details as you go.View from an open stone doorway across a hillside garden: herb beds close by, fruit trees and compost beyond, then olive grove, woodland and wild hillsZones in permacultureA permaculture planning tool that places each element by how often people tend it, from the house in zone 0 out to wild land in zone 5.Aerial view of a small permaculture homestead with a pond, round garden beds, a flowering hedge and a young food forest linked by pathsMollison's design principlesThe design rules Bill Mollison set out in 1988 and 1991, from relative location and multiple functions to zones, succession and the edge effect.A green band of shrubs follows a moist channel across a dry Mediterranean hillside at dawnApply self-regulation and accept feedbackHolmgren's fourth permaculture principle: design systems that largely keep themselves in balance, and read the land's signals early enough to change course.A tiny oak seedling in leaf litter, an old oak blurred behind itUse small and slow solutionsHolmgren's ninth permaculture principle: small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, make better use of local resources and last longer.

Mentioned in

See this in practice

Project Eden →

Further reading from around the world

Freely available sources we recommend for going deeper.

Sources

  • Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers' Manual, Tagari Publications (1988)
  • Aranya, Permaculture Design: A Step-by-Step Guide, Permanent Publications (2012)
  • Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, Edible Forest Gardens, Volume 2: Ecological Design and Practice for Temperate-Climate Permaculture, Chelsea Green (2005)
  • Dan Palmer, On the relation between designing and implementing in permaculture, part 2, Making Permaculture Stronger, republished by resilience.org (2017, accessed October 2026)
  • Graham Burnett, The permaculture design process, spiralseed.co.uk (accessed October 2026)
  • Looby Macnamara, People and Permaculture, Permanent Publications (2012)

Last updated: 2026-10-16