Regenerative Design Lab

The aim of the Constructivist Regenerative Design Lab is to enable the transition to a regenerative built environment. We do this by taking groups of leaders and future leaders on a six-month programme exploring the principle of regenerative design and experimenting with putting these principles in practice. Together we create a learning experience that is explorative and transformative: building a community of regenerative change-makers and giving them the tools to make change

We ran our first cohort in 2022; cohort 4 will run from Autumn 2024 to Spring 2025; and we will shortly be announcing details of a 5th cohort.

Current cohorts

Previous cohorts

Method

Our programmes are rooted in peer-support and practical action-learning, blended with expert facilitation and coaching. In our workshops and residential stays you’ll dive deeper, connect with your peers and reflect and apply learnings to a personal or professional inquiry. 

At the start of the journey we’ll uncover a foundational understanding of regenerative design and its principles together. You’ll also identify a live, workplace challenge or project as a field for experimentation and practice for the 8 months. Through cycles of action and reflection you’ll cross-pollinate ideas, discover new behaviours, and grow your resilience as you support each other to apply principles of regenerative design in practice. 

I took up engineering in order
to practise philosophy

Ove Arup

Inputs

Participants – you will be part of a group of leading engineering or construction industry professionals who see regenerative design as the future and want to make it reality. Together, you will become a peer-group that support and constructively challenge each other throughout the journey.

Live projects – each member of the cohort will bring a live challenge or project to the lab. Be it design-based, site-based, organisational or strategic, you will explore how regenerative design principles can apply to your work, while developing your own regenerative practice.

Ecosystems – regenerative design solutions are specific to the ecosystems in which we are working. That ecosystem and your connection with it becomes an intrinsic part of the journey. To further embed ‘place’ into our programmes we return three times to Hazel Hill Wood, near Salisbury. Hazel Hill Wood is a hearth for our group, and a place to explore our relationship with living ecosystems.

Outputs

Individuals will be supported on a personal development journey, increasing their awareness and skill in regenerative design practice. They will leave with a toolkit of approaches and hopefully a transformed relationship with the ecosystem they are part of.

Organisations will benefit from a key member of their team introducing innovative regenerative design practice into their projects. The Lab also aims to provide organisations with an opportunity to fulfil their regenerative design practice commitments.

Industry will benefit from the shared results of these experiments in regenerative design practice. The understanding we gain from this, and subsequent Lab programmes, will feed into teaching resources and briefing tools that will be shared via the Regenerative Design Lab website for use by industry and academia.

Reconnect with living systems

As part of each programme we hold three residential sessions at Hazel Hill Wood to explore our relationship with living ecosystems. Hazel Hill is a woodland retreat centre where people come to learn and heal through contact with the living world. It combines indoor workshop space and accommodation with access to a thriving forest with a range of ecosystems to explore.

We will take an experimental approach and observe, experiment, measure and learn from these complex natural systems. Participants will engage in a transformative process to shift perspectives away from believing we are separate from the natural world.

‘When we can think as part of a system, we can better self-regulate to thrive within the limits of that system’.

Looby Macnamara

Meet the Regenerative Design Lab facilitators

With gratitude…

We are grateful to an array of friends, partners and allies that have made The Regenerative Design Lab possible.