In 2022 I founded the Regenerative Design Lab with the intention of helping to figure out what regenerative design might mean for the construction industry, and how we might shift theory into practice. 

Over the past four years this has been a shared journey, one shaped by more than 70 participants we have had in the Lab programme, by my Lab co-facilitator Ellie Osborne and the hundreds of conversations we have had along the way. 

At the start, we realised that was lots we didn’t know. Regenerative design felt like a like a tangled web of many different strands, including themes as diverse as: philosophy, technology, systems thinking, Indigenous wisdom, ecosystems, social justice, biomimicry and community organising. 

Our first aim was to simply hold space for these conversations and create a framework for reflective exploration and application of these strands of thinking.

At a similar time, James and I started writing a book. Our job was to take this emerging theory of regenerative design and present it to an audience of structural engineers in a way that was both inspirational and also routed in the realities of projects.

I have to be honest, that at times, across all these initiatives, the weave of these conversations had been very confusing and I regularly tied myself in knots.

But over time, patterns had begun to emerge. Certain ways of structuring the conversation worked better for some participants in the Lab than others. Some approaches led to more reflection and introspection, others led to people taking action. And there are clear patterns emerging in what helps to bring different audiences on a journey.

James and I rewrote the Regenerative Structural Engineer three times before we found a way of sequencing our arguments that seemed to work. That the book has now been sold in over 26 countries – a sign that this pattern resonated. 

In the two years since then, I’ve had many more conversations, both inside the Lab and out, and learnt more about the different ways to hold a conversation about regenerative design.

One of the questions I get most often is usually a variation of: how do I talk about this with my clients/can you just give me the slides?

But it’s not as simple as that. You have to take people on a journey. The journey depends on who you are and who they are. But if you can find a formula that works, you can create a pattern that you can repeat, from conversation to conversation, from projects to project, so that over time we can gradually shift our industry.

This book is my attempt to guide people in finding their own patterns for exploring and talking about regenerative design. It is an attempt to stitch together what we’ve learnt from all this work and create repeatable patterns that can spin out into practice.