Written by:
Sophia de Sousa
Our November Chat, Regenerative Co-design was co-hosted with Holly Doron of CoLab Dudley. It brought together a group of people from different parts of the UK, who shared their own lived experiences and those from practice, teaching and research. From the outset, we explored different interpretations of the term “regenerative” with Holly describing it as moving away from the notion of minimising harm on our ecological systems towards a process of actively healing. In the context of design, regenerative co-design places as much emphasis on the design process as the outputs. However, Holly and others in the conversation expressed a level of discomfort with the term “regenerative”, which carries with it certain cultural references and connotations. Holly quite quickly introduced an alternative term, “life-centric co-design” into our discussion.
Key Themes
The conversation that followed was enormously rich and built on this notion of reimagining how we invite people into design processes and decision-making that takes us away from the bounded and linear systems in which most of us have been trained, whether formally through education or informally through lived experience. This shift, participants suggested, started with creating safe spaces for curiosity and redefining our notion of and relationship with failure. We also spoke about the power of seeing the places around us through the eyes of others, imagining both human and “more-than-human” experiences, and how this can help build empathy. This led to an interesting conversation about building on the collective intelligence that comes from sharing learning and evolving it, and the challenges for how we create the spaces and infrastructure to do this.
Build Safe Spaces for Curiosity
It quickly became apparent within the group how much we all value spaces for conversation and connection where people can share stories and both exchange and co-design ideas. This felt at odds with the way most people are invited to talk about their places, and to engage with design and regeneration processes, which tend to be linear and constricted by the confines of boundaries, budgets and deadlines. One participant posed the question of how we get to a “looseness of dialogue and a space for curiosity and safety”.
Another participant, reflected on her experience of teaching within a university programme and how the current forms of teaching and particularly, how you assess student learning, creates barriers to curiosity. She stressed that the “tightness” of the education system does not create enough space or feeling of safety for students to explore, feel lost in that exploration, or to fail.
We collectively felt a frustration with curiosity, exploration and experimentation not being sufficiently recognised and valued as an approach to supporting dialogue and collaboration. By the same token, in the spirit of regenerative or life-centric co-design, curiosity should be valued as a positive benefit or output of collaborative action. We can nourish this essential quality of curiosity by granting access to other people’s stories and learning. As one or our participants put it, this might help us build the courage to create more spaces for curiosity within institutions where such an approach is unfamiliar or even discouraged.
Holly also spoke of the principle of “ritualising unlearning”, and its place in creating those safe spaces to challenge, reimagine and configure systems and ways of working. This can help us move towards life-centric co-design.
Use Roleplay to Build Empathy
Holly talked about a programme at CoLab Dudley exploring “more-than-human experiences”, which invited people to imagine a place from the perspective of critters and nature, for example imagining the high street as a snail or butterfly. This really captured the imagination of all those in the group, who began sharing ideas for how this approach could be built into their own practice in different ways. One of our group, an urban designer and educator, proposed that asking students to imagine moving through the city as creatures or natural elements, such as a river, might help her students engage differently with it and with urban design principles.
This touched on one of the life-centric principles that Holly shared, that of realigning as part of nature and place. Creating a contrast with people-centred design, this principle suggests that we take a more holistic approach to designing for all life forms.
This led to a conversation around the value of roleplay in helping people work collaboratively, and its power to help create empathy within the participating group. Another member of our Chat, who works in the context of housing and as an educator, was inspired to introduce empathy into his teaching as a “gateway to asking people to think in a different way”.
Steward Collective Intelligence
Another key theme emerged from discussion around creating safe spaces to connect, share, be curious and collaborate. This was that there is something to be gained from bringing learning together across communities, sectors, disciplines, but also across time. We noted that so many people and organisations are doing interesting things, but that it is easy to miss them. This might stem from the limited time and resources we have to share learning and make it available to others, or because those leading projects move on, or organisations close.
We also noted a concerning tendency for knowledge and stories to disappear as new projects and initiatives take their place on web-based platforms. Despite advances in technology, there is a real challenge of managing, and making accessible, an ever growing amount of content to share. More often than not, websites are curated to highlight “fresh” stories, and consequently older content gets timed out of circulation. Project websites often close when the funding period ends.
We spoke of the need to bring more generosity into the production and sharing of knowledge. Some noted they had encountered others’ tendency to want to own and protect what they have learnt or produced. In contrast, we talked about the power of open-sourcing content, and the growing movement of creative commons, which helps the creators of work to give permission for others to use and build on their work under certain conditions (e.g. for educational purposes) but also expects users to credit them. Perhaps we need to do more to value sharing as a positive output or outcome. By stewarding and making available our collective intelligence more widely, we can embed a principle of sharing, generosity and cumulative experimentation and learning.
Wrapping up
The discussion at Regenerative Co-design inspired us to reflect on our own practice and how we might apply some of what we had heard and learnt from the others. It demonstrated the power of safe spaces for reflection, conversation and sharing, and the impact it can have on those who take part. As explored within our conversation, this is sadly precisely the type of impact that goes unmeasured and under-celebrated, despite its ability to genuinely help shift culture and practice. As Holly so aptly put it, we should all feel more confident about sharing our thinking and “work messily and out loud” and encourage others to engage with, build on and evolve the ideas and learning we develop.
Useful Links
An example of entanglement with the more-than-human, Dudley Borough-based Helen Garbett’s art practice with limpets: https://www.thelimpetarium.com/introduction
Place detectorism pack – an activity you can try in the places you care about, exploring with or as your more-than-human companions.
More on Holly’s research on regenerative and life-centric approaches: https://hollyrosedoron.medium.com/list/phd-research-de6349470bc9