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Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.
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 strengthening the connection between designers and the origins of their materials. We discuss unlocking symbiotic loops in material supply and enabling designs that best serve the local ecosystem. All of these changes are essential—and they’ll take years, even decades, to fully implement.
But these conversations can be a distraction from a much more pressing, if uncomfortable thing we can do to shift our industry towards more regenerative ways of working. Given the massive contribution that construction makes to greenhouse emissions and the massive impact it has an habitat destruction, it is simply this.
We must build much less stuff.
Build less is writ large in the IStructE’s Hierarchy for Net-Zero Design. And while this hierarchy focuses on carbon, given the impact that material extraction has on habitat loss, there is a strong case that building less will significantly reduce our impact on ecosystems too.
Of course, there will be things we need, structures we can’t do without. But once we set the intention to build less, we can redirect our creativity as designers toward adapting and thriving with what we already have.
We’ll still need to build some—but we can, and must, build much less.
