Category: For engineers (and other humans)

You start by imagining the people who are going to read it.

Some readers will be interested in exploring regenerative design for themselves. Others will be looking for ways to introduce regenerative design to their colleagues or clients. In other words, you’re writing for multiple audiences at once.

And next, you lay out all the pieces of the story.

Some pieces we’ve been working with for years—like the Systems Bookcase, the Second Site, or the Living Systems Blueprint, models that James Norman and I set out in The Regenerative Structural Engineer.

Other pieces are less formal. They’re the anecdotes, the linking phrases, the small examples that spark curiosity.

With all these building blocks in front of you, the question becomes: what order would you place them in for each audience? What sequence could create a compelling journey?

It’s no different from building an effective pitch deck when you’re bidding for new work. You try different combinations. You see which slides land, which case studies resonate, which arguments bring people along.

That’s exactly what we’ve been doing in the Regenerative Design Lab, in our presentations, and across the training sessions we’ve delivered. Testing different ways to sequence the building blocks depending on the needs of the audience.

And that’s what The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design captures.

We call the building blocks motifs. We stitch these motifs together into patterns. Twelve patterns—for twelve different audiences.

Designers are teachers. We take people on a journey that gets them to say, “Yes, that’s what I want.”

Good teaching is rarely about setting out the whole picture. It’s about creating moments of tension—when we show something unfamiliar—and moments of release, when the learner sees how it connects to the problems they want to solve.

We create this rhythm through stimuli, provocations, metaphors, and experiments—arranged in different orders to create different effects.

The problem I’ve found since starting my work on regenerative design is this: every time we try to teach someone about it, the story changes. The sequence of arguments and the exercises that land best are different each time.

And then comes the aha moment—not just for the participant, but for me: there isn’t one way to hold a conversation about regenerative design. There are many. But some patterns do repeat. Certain framings are best introduced early. Others land better with technical audiences. Some metaphors bring sceptics on the journey.

That’s when I realised: we could distil these experiences into a set of repeatable sequences. Patterns of practice for different audiences, goals, and contexts.

Hence: a Pattern Book.

We see patterns,

We think in patterns,

We create patterns.

A pattern is something that repeats,

A drum beat,

An oscillation.

Patterns make things regular and therefore intelligible,

Patterns help us predict what will happen next.

Out of a sea of random events a pattern can feel like a life raft,

Or pieces to build a boat.

The dictionary tells us the word comes from the Middle English ‘patron’ meaning something to be followed,

What if the patterns we are following are no longer serving us? 

What if the drumbeat is no longer leading us in the right direction?

What if the oscillations are going out of control?

Then we need to learn to see new patterns,

We need to learn to think in new patterns,

And we need to create new patterns.

This new book is about learning to see and create new patterns of practice — ones that we can integrate into our work. Patterns that can help shift our industry from creating harm to creating thriving.