Pace Layers as a sense-making device

Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers model is a curiosity. It has little theoretical basis, and Brand himself is the first to admit that it is “completely data free”. It’s not been widely enough used, it seems, to have built up a body of practice that might have helped with some of these issues. But when you use it in workshops or training, people find it useful and it opens up interesting conversations. The Pace Layers model first appeared in Brand’s book, The Clock of The Long Now, to try to help people think more richly about longer timescales. It was a sketch, both visually and verbally, drawn for the book in the late 1990s with some primitive drawing software by the Long Now Foundation’s then Chief Executive, Alexander Rose. Here is that illustration: (Source: Stewart Brand, Clock of the Long Now) And here, because you can find it online, is Stewart Brand’s original scribble: (Stewart Brand’s original Pace Layers diagram, 1996. Source: Long Now Foundation) Impressionistic The account in…