In January 2022 I started writing a book about regenerative design, a subject that, at the time, I thought I knew very little about. And of course, I decided to blog about it[1].
The first version of that book was less a “this is what regenerative design is” and more the story of our discovery of the topic, our wrestle with the ideas and how they may relate to my area. After all, can structural engineers even be regenerative? I know practitioners in the field who would say no.
This raises a series of questions:
Can regenerative design be taught, or does it need to be discovered?
Should regenerative design be taught as a separate subject, or should it be embedded in everything we do?
If the world needs to be regenerative should we teach anything else other than regenerative design?
I’m not sure I know the answers to these questions, but I guess I have opinions and those opinions are expressed in the way I have constructed this unit.
But first, what is regenerative design?
RESTORE define ‘regenerative design’ as “Enabling social and ecological systems to maintain a healthy state and evolve[2]”
Theirs is not the only definition, but it is the most succinct.
The problem with this definition is that most engineers (including me when I started the book endeavour) have no idea what it means for them in practice. A simpler but less accurate description is going beyond “do no harm” and “doing good” not just for people, but also for planet. So, designing something that takes carbon out the atmosphere, increases biodiversity, improves the water cycle, removes microplastics from the environment rather than create them, reduces ocean acidification etc. At the same time, it improves living standards for people. When put like this it seems simple, but it is very difficult to achieve in our current ways of working.
To understand how regenerative design could work in practice requires a breadth of understanding of the complexity of our current systems and why we currently do things the way that we do as well as an understanding of how it could be different.
Likewise, our students have been educated to think in a certain way, with a defined goal and a set of behaviours, which don’t necessarily align with regenerative practice.
Which brings us to the first question, can regenerative design be taught or does it need to be discovered?
The way I have structured my unit highlights my current thoughts on this. I provided a breadth of materials and resources on the unit. I have not prefaced projects as better or worse or harder and easier. And I have intentionally not made the last one summative (i.e. the only one that counts and therefore means anything) because I want the students to explore different design approaches and reach their own opinions. But I also advocated for this unit to be after Sustainable Systems so the students were grounded in systems thinking, a key tool when approaching regenerative design. Which I think links to my own philosophy on teaching regenerative design, in that there are a series of helpful tools that you can teach people, mostly from the systems space, but these tools are not, in and of themselves regenerative. Once armed with these tools you can then start to make sense of the information and discover regenerative design.
Why do I think this? Because it was my own learning journey which I have reflected on.
Does that mean it will be true for our students, who come from a variety of backgrounds (culturally, in terms of work, education etc) – I don’t know yet, but I intend to have a try and reflect on the outcome.
The next question, should it be embedded or a separate subject? This is a tricky one. There are (groans from the students about to sit an assignment on the topic) no right answers. It depends. Right now, regenerative design is a little known and even less understood topic. By embedding it we risk it becoming impossible to see and it may well disappear into the mass of information students are presented with. Therefore, at this point in time, it is helpful to shine a light on it, show how it is different, exciting, challenging. But it may not always be that way.
Finally, and this is a tough one, if regenerative design is all we need should we teach anything else? As you can see from my unit, I teach it last, so I guess my answer is yes, we should also teach other things. And here is why:
Firstly, everyone comes with preconceived ideas about design, from culture, education, books we’ve read, films we’ve seen. I think it is helpful to start here and build. Most criticism of regenerative design is it’s too theoretical. People want to know what it looks like and how it works, so we first need to give them language and frameworks for what they know, and then we reframe these to what they don’t yet see around them but they can now imagine.
Secondly, our graduates are not (unless they are very lucky) going to get jobs in regenerative practices so they need to understand the world as it is, not just as it needs to be, so they can help bring about the change we need.
Finally, I think graduates will need to explain to those around them (challenge upwards) how regenerative is different, and to do this they need to understand both.
So, I have taken these approaches in my own teaching. Next week we will reflect on whether this has been successful. For now I would like to share the outcome of one of my student groups working in this space.
[1] https://bilt.online/category/publishing-a-book-in-a-year/
[2] RESTORE. Sustainability: Restorative to Regenerative. Available at: https://fairsnape.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/ sustainability-restorative-to-regenerative.pdf
Excellent set of thought provoking questions. Thanks for sharing James. I also realyl liked student poster. Excellent work!