Regenerative Design Lab

The Constructivist Regenerative Design Lab is an eight-month learning journey for people across the built environment who want to explore what regenerative design means in practice — in their projects, organisations, communities and in their own lives and work.

Over eight months, the participants develop an enquiry, experiment with taking action, reflect on what happens and learn alongside a community of fellow practitioners.

Some people arrive with a specific project or challenge. Other start with a much bigger question. Enquiries change along the way: they narrow, broaden, take unexpected turns and even lead us to explore the relationship between ourselves, our work and the world around us.

That’s why the Lab takes time.

Regenerative practice asks us to work with complex systems. Observe, change something, pay attention to what happens, learn from it and decide what to try next. The Lab creates the time, structure and peer support to go beyond just thinking about regenerative design and starting to put it into practice.

Our journey so far

Since 2022, seven cohorts have joined the Regenerative Design Lab, brining together people from engineering, architecture, policy, education, manufacturing and finance from across the built environment. Along the way we’ve:

• Developed a robust methodology and regenerative design toolset.
• Published The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design and The Regenerative Structural Engineer.
• Built an alumni network that is continuing to shape practice in their organisations and projects.

Each cohort adds to that work. Participants don’t simply learn from the Lab: what they discover through their own experiments helps us understand more about what regenerative practice can be.

The Regenerative Design Lab 2027

In 2027, we are running two parallel Regenerative Design Lab cohorts, each with around 20 participants.

Both will follow the same eight-month RDL journey, combining residential gatherings, online workshops, individual experimentation and peer-led enquiry. Each will be rooted in a different place.

Register your interest

Applications for both cohorts will open shortly. The applications will be reviewed and shortlisted on a rolling basis from early December for interviews in January.

What’s happening in 2026

In 2026, we are running two cohorts:

What to expect

The Regenerative Design Lab is part learning programme, part experimental space and part community of practice.

Over eight months, you’ll combine residential gatherings, online workshops and your own enquiry into regenerative practice. We’ll introduce ideas, tools and patterns, but the real learning happens through trying them out: taking action in your own context, noticing what happens, sharing what you discover and deciding what to try next.

Bring an enquiry

You don’t need to arrive with a perfectly formed project.

You might want to explore regenerative design on a live building project, rethink the strategy of your organisation, develop a new product, change the way you work with communities, or investigate something much more personal about your own practice.

Recent RDL enquiries have included regenerative business strategy, rethinking timber housing manufacture, social infrastructure, circular construction, nature-based transport, engineering commons, organisational redesign, sustainable lighting, urban ecology — and how we choose to spend our time.

Some enquiries start broad and become more focused. Others begin with a very specific problem and open up into something much bigger. We expect your question to change as you learn.

Put ideas into practice

RDL isn’t about finding the right definition of regenerative design or collecting another set of models.

You’ll be encouraged to experiment: to use your work and life as places to test ideas, take small actions, notice their effects and learn from them.

Working with complex systems means we can’t know in advance exactly what an intervention will do. The Lab gives you time to act, reflect, adapt and try again.

Learn with others

You’ll make this journey alongside a cohort of up to 20 people, each following their own enquiry.

Peer support is central to the Lab. As the programme develops, participants form working groups around shared patterns and interests, challenge and support one another, and increasingly take responsibility for their own learning.

Our aim is that, over the eight months, you become less dependent on the facilitators — and more able to draw on your own practice, your peers and the wider RDL community to continue the work.

Go deeper

Regenerative design can challenge more than the way we design projects.

Taking living systems seriously can lead us to question our ideas about value, leadership, time, relationships, place and our own role within the systems we’re trying to change.

We make space for that enquiry too. For some participants it becomes an important part of the journey; for others, the focus remains firmly on a project, organisation or area of practice. There isn’t a predetermined destination.

Join a growing community of practice

The Lab doesn’t end after eight months.

You’ll join a growing alumni network of practitioners across the built environment who continue to share experiments, support one another and develop regenerative practice in their organisations and projects.

Each new cohort increases the possibilities for that network — connecting people working on similar challenges, and creating groups of practitioners who can support one another in making change.

Who is the Lab for?

The Regenerative Design Lab is for people across the built environment who want to put regenerative thinking into practice — and have the capacity to influence the systems around them.

By influence, we don’t mean seniority.

Our cohorts include people at different stages of their careers: from early-career practitioners to people leading teams, organisations and policy. What matters is that you have somewhere to take the learning — a project, organisation, community, field of practice or network in which you can experiment and bring others with you.

You might be an engineer, architect, designer, policy-maker, educator, strategist, sustainability practitioner or working somewhere we haven’t thought of yet.

We’re particularly interested in people who:

are already questioning whether conventional approaches to sustainability go far enough;

• are curious about regenerative design, systems thinking or related fields and want to go deeper;
• have a real context in which they can experiment and take action;
• are willing to question their assumptions and allow their enquiry to change;
• want to learn with others and contribute generously to a peer community;
• have the capacity and ambition to influence practice beyond themselves.

You don’t need to be an expert in regenerative design. But this isn’t an introductory course. We’re looking for people who are ready to explore the ideas deeply, put them into practice and learn from what happens.

We deliberately bring together people with different roles, levels of experience, perspectives and areas of interest. Part of our selection process is about composing a cohort in which those differences can create unexpected connections and help everyone see their own work differently.

Meet the Regenerative Design Lab facilitators

Previous cohorts

Since we launched the Regenerative Design Lab in 2022, we have welcomed a wide range of built-environment professionals to the programme, including participants from: Architects Declare, Arup, Beep Studio, Buro Happold, DEFRA, Engineers Without Borders UK, Elliott Wood, Essex County Council, Expedition, GLA, Hawkins Brown, IStructE, Piers for the Planet, Price and Myers, Ramboll, Robert Bird, Sheffield Council, Studio Dash, UCL, UKGBC, University of Bath, University of Bristol, WSP and YesMake.

• Cohort 1 (2022): Piloted the Lab with 19 leaders and future leaders from engineering and construction → Read the Cohort 1 report
• Cohort 2 (2023): Developed and tested our Lab methodology and toolkit for explaining key principles in regenerative design→ Read the Cohort 2 report
• Cohort 3 (2023–24): Explored the intersection of policy and regenerative design → Read the Cohort 3 report
• Cohort 4 (2024–25): In partnership with Chatham House, focused on creating policy that delivers regenerative design → Read updates from Cohort 4.
• Cohort 5 (2026-): a live experiment in running the Lab process within an organisation. This has been paused while the host organisation refocuses its work, and we hope will start again.
• Cohort 6 (2026): a return to our regular Lab format, bringing together participants from across the built environment to explore regenerative design.
• Cohort 7 (2026): an experiment in running an alumni cohort, for graduates of the Lab programme who want to go deeper into their practice.

With gratitude…

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