Tag: regenerativedesign

What you only notice when everything quietens down

This is my final post for the year. Some things we notice because we are looking for them. I have lost my keys; I look around the house,…

Juice the System: a strategy for exploring complex systems

Last week, I wrote about an idea-generation strategy I regularly use in teaching called Juice the Brief. This week, I’ve been working on an analogous method called Juice…

Imagining the wood from the trees

This week, I’ve been writing about observation as the starting point for regenerative design. Today, I’ve been working with colleagues at Hazel Hill Wood to envision a year-long…

Begin design with observation (Part 2)

Yesterday, I wrote about how starting design with observation allows us to take a broader, more holistic view of the systems we’re working within. Another reason to start…

Begin design with observation (part 1)

We often think of design as starting with a design brief—a set of requirements outlining what we want. But when seen through a regenerative lens, design begins differently….

Story of poo

Some context. When people started visiting Hazel Hill Wood for respite and educational weekends in the early 1990s, there were no buildings. I believe the first structure to…

Where we make but also where we take

This has become one of my catchphrases in regenerative design*. To think of design as being for ‘where we make but also where we take’. The role of…

Remote treehouse design

Sometimes humour serves best to highlight the ridiculousness of a situation.  In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between designers and the ecosystem they draw…

Just build less

More and more people are asking: how do we move from sustainable design to regenerative design? In these conversations, we often talk about system change. We talk about…

Seeing the latent potential

As Rob Hopkins points out in his wonderful book From What Is to What If, the climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the imagination. If…

From no run to park run

A few days ago, Parkrun turned 20 years old. What started as a simple community gathering, launched by Paul Sinton-Hewitt on October 2nd, 2004, has grown into a…

No more fish in the sea

Somehow the topics of my posts have returned to the subject of the sea. It is apparently a rich subject to trawl.  Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun,…

Plenty more fish in the sea

Yesterday’s post on the fish écluses on the Île de Ré speaks to the idea of creating straightforward connections between the resources that humans need to live and…

The past, present and future at the same time

In conversations about regenerative design I draw heavily on Bill Sharpe’s Three-Horizons Model because it allows us to make sense of a complex situation. For in any group…

On the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and teaching design

In the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics…

340-degree vision

I read on a fact sheet that guinea pigs have 340-degree vision. On a horizontal plane they can see almost all around. Imagine! Their only blind spots are…

Some things you might not know about the Regenerative Design Lab

In the coming weeks I’m going to be talking quite a lot about the Regenerative Design Lab because we have a new cohort starting next week. Some of…

Harnessing waves in our work

Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s theme of riding the waves of human energy in our work. The idea is to create a cycle of working that tunes…

Riding the wave

I spent most of yesterday afternoon up to my middle in waves learning to surf. (I’ve got a long way to go). So it is no coincidence that…