30 Years of Moving Earth
How one channel became a community
Living systems persist by carving channels where there were previously none. The path is never granted—it is forged by moving through what stands in the way. This is the Constructal Law: the tendency of everything that lives to evolve toward configurations that move its currents with greater ease.
The first channel is the hardest. The current that crosses over a new threshold into untouched ground bears the full weight of the resistance—no one has loosened the earth ahead of it.
Adrian Bejan began carving that first channel nearly thirty years ago, and has been deepening it since: bolstering the law across disciplines, across skepticism great and small, across the quiet weight of being the one who saw it first. He tells his students, “Your mother only made one of you.”
Adrian expounds on this in his latest book Diversity Through Freedom: “You are an individual, irrepressible, and irreplaceable. Nobody is like you. You are an important person, the one-of-a-kind. Seek freedom, it’s all right.”
What happens when one lone creative does seek freedom and trusts that his ideas are important? When one pioneer chooses to cut the channel and forge the pathway?
The Constructal Law tells us that the pathway will branch — a river reaches the sea not as one line, but as a diverse configuration of flows working as one.
The diverse research and strengths of the Constructal Community bring the movement to life. From Mary Bejan and Terry Bristol for their presence and grounding, to Umit Güneş and Elsie Gothman for their dedication to organizing and circulating the research — together, this community has been a true expression of an evolving living system, working with its natural diversity to spread new ideas across the globe. (And we can thank Dan Baciu for the maps and research to visualize it!)
I am one who now enjoys the fruit of that path-paving.
I’m Christine Bizzell, a strengths practitioner, independent researcher, and founder of Canon Collaborative in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For six years I’ve been researching how the Constructal Law maps onto human experience. It was 2020 when I sent a cold email to Bejan, whose work with Marcelo Errera on wealth inequality had sparked a serious pull toward research for the first time in my life. (I’m telling more of that story over at my blog, Patterns in the Wild.)
With Adrian’s encouragement, I presented at my first Constructal Law Conference in Torino in 2023. With a real hypothesis and a real fear of public speaking, I presented early before the courage could sink into the comfy red cushions.
12th Constructal Conference 2023, Energy Center of Torino
Hosted by Umberto Lucia and Giulia Grisolia of Politecnico di Torino, Italy
What I remember most are the smiles, the warm applause, and thoughtful questions from Mircea Scurtu, Adrian Pet’rescu’, and Miguel Panão. And Adrian, who warmly congratulated me on my debut presentation while assuring me this was only the beginning (this guy really can predict the future, it seems). My idea felt seen by a room of world-class scientists.
In Bucharest the next year, I understood that this was no longer a group I was visiting but a community I belonged to—a room full of colleagues laying new pathways themselves. I am in the greatest company.
14th Constructal Conference Dinner 2024, Bucharest, Romania
Standing from left to right: George Stanescu, Adrian Bejan, Marcelo Errera, and Dan Baciu.
As Bejan shares, we have an opportunity to speed the process of creating design to better serve society—as individuals, and as a whole. As this community comes together for the 30th anniversary of the Constructal Law and 16th conference in Paris, we celebrate the countless pioneers among us—made possible by our first pathway paver, Adrian Bejan, whose own words hold the invitation: “The holistic view is the key to understanding design in nature and predicting the future.”
At the 15th Conference in Miami, I initiated the Constructal Strength Ecosystem—an invitation for this community to map its diverse strengths together, and to explore what becomes possible when an empowered community unites its strength toward this shared purpose.
The Constructal Strength Ecosystem is now live: canoncollaborative.com/constructal-strength
