That means we have now sold 400 copies. For a niche book about how to hold conversations about regenerative design in the built environment, that’s incredible.
And so I wrote the lovely people at Calverts Design and Print Coop and asked them for 200 new Pattern Books to be printed. They have now landed!
So, sorry if you got an out-of-stock notice. The Pattern Book is back and ready to support you in your regenerative thinking in 2026. Order your copy here.
This warrants news longer post but for now the short version is this.
In 2023 I began the Fellowship with the aim of helping the built environment shift from a paradigm of harm to one of healing.
What became clear early in that process was that regenerative design isn’t something you simply teach, apply or deliver. It’s a way of thinking that develops over time, through action and reflection, across a wide range of actors playing different roles in systems change.
Personally the process has been stretching, demanding, and, honestly, sometimes overwhelming — but I feel it has precipitated a huge amount of work that I believe makes a significant contribution to figuring out what we should be doing next as an industry.
One thing I’m sitting with today – if you are in the midst of thinking about regenerative design, and find it slow-going and challenging then you are probably working in the right space. The elements of a regenerative future surround us; we just need to figure out how to rewire and reinforce them to create something thriving out of our work.
I am deeply grateful to the Commisioners for trusting me with this brief and for supporting this work. I am excited to share more about where this goes next.
Our big news this week is that the application process is now open for Cohort 6 of the Regenerative Design Lab.
Here’s some things that make this moment particularly significant
This is an open lab — unlike the previous two labs where we had focused more explicitly on policy, this lab is for people interested in applying regenerative thinking across a wide range of contexts. We haven’t had an open lab like this for two years, so we are expecting a large number of applicants.
Policy makers are still very welcome, and you’ll be working alongside designers and built-environment professionals to explore regenerative thinking in practice.
With this lab, our community of past and present participants will exceed 100. The network effect of this many activated change-makers is potentially huge.
The fly-wheel is spinning — with each revolution of the lab, we add more momentum: insights, tools, learning from taking action. It gives each cohort the potential to go further.
We have a text book — the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is our manual for developing regenerative conservations with a wide range of audiences.
So are you ready to apply to join this journey? If so, we’d love to receive your application.
Last week I had the privilege of facilitating an afternoon session for the Engineers Without Borders UK Systems Change Lab in London.
This is such a powerful initiative. It is an action-led community whose purpose is to make global-responsibility the norm in engineering. In their previous meet-up in Birmingham, participants had designed a new community structure. My role this time was to bring that structure to life so people could feel how it might work in practice.
The community structure has three levels of engagement:
membership;
action groups that self-organise around specific themes; and
a steering group.
Sounds great — but does it feel like? How might it work? Where do people see themselves fitting in?
Three-part facilitation
Affinity Clustering
We began with one of my favourite warm-ups — walk around the room, catch someone’s eye, do a little hop — to set the playful tone from the start.
Then came affinity clustering. Participants walk around the room with a large sticker on their chest saying a topic they are interested in exploring in the lab. The aim is to congregate with people with related themes. I called ‘twist’ a couple of times to give players the chance to try out different group configurations before settling where they felt the strongest pull
Simulating an action-group meeting
Newly formed grouped explored their shared interests and how they could collaborate to take action on this theme. Each group chose someone to be their representative at the steering group meeting.
A steering-group fishbowl
The representatives from each action learning group gathered to form the steering group, and held a live meeting in the middle while others observed. Onlookers outside the fishbowl could pause the conversation and offer reflections.
Across these three stages the community structure came to life. People could feel the dynamics, understand the logistics and make suggestions for how to make it better.
The fishbowl in particular opened up important early questions:
How much autonomy should the action groups have?
How much should the steering committee steer or respond?
How does information get communicated across the whole Lab?
These are important questions in any organisations, but particularly ones that are action learning and self-coordinating.
If you’re interested in the EWB-UK Systems Change Lab, you can join their mailing list here:
Yesterday we kicked off our new introduction to regenerative design, ‘Seeing the System’.
The premise is simple: seeing more clearly the systems we are working with as a precursor to changing them for the better.
The system of drawing plans, mining materials, fabricating components, pouring foundations and assembling all these elements to create buildings and infrastructure — the system we call construction — is currently wired to cause net harm.
Yes we create buildings, yes these buildings for the most part are beneficial, but the side-effects are major contributors to climate change and ecological destruction.
To understand why, we have to see the system.
What kind of systems are we dealing with?
What are the feedback loops that reinforce the way the system works?
How is the system organised?
How do materials and energy flow?
What is the system optimised for? What are the mindsets that govern our behaviour as well as our dreams?
Then we can start to ask what if that system were different? What if every time we built something, the places that were touched by that process were better off? Habitats enriched, communities enhanced — all through the act of design and construction. That’s the goal of regenerative design.
Seeing the system helps us to interpret this dream, compare it to reality and then help us figure out what step to take next.
We’ll be running another edition of Seeing the System in the spring — stay tuned for more info.
This week I took my copy of the Pattern Book to Cambridge. (Its second visit: in July I dropped it — and my laptop — in a puddle. Both recovered, and this time was less eventful.)
I was there to deliver my annual September workshop for the new cohort of students on the Sustainability Leadership for the Built Environment (SLBE) masters at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Two Pattern Book entries featured strongly.
Continuous place-based design
The workshop was called Design your learning process. We began by asking: what is design? I asked students to sketch a diagram of design as they see it.
This is central to the Constructivist method: start where the learner is, then connect new concepts to what they already know.
After sharing diagrams, I introduced a series of design models, each adding a new dimension, until we reached the Continuous Place-Based Design motif. At each stage, I pointed to overlaps with the students’ diagrams.
The point isn’t to treat any model as a strict procedure, but to use it as something to compare with reality — and then think how we might shift that reality for the better.
Action learning
From there, we turned to the idea that continuous place-based design is really a learning process. Which led naturally to the Action Learning motif.
It’s easy to be passive in learning. The real value comes when we apply theory to practice and then reflect on the results. The Pattern Book entry for action learning even includes a script for running these conversations with colleagues.
This month, I’ve been in workshops on live infrastructure projects where the same theme has surfaced again: organisations struggling to learn from mistakes. Not lessons learned, but lessons lost. For me this underlines that action learning isn’t just a training method — it’s a principle for working in complex systems.
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It is such a pleasure to teach on this course — this is the start of my eighth cohort! Many graduates are readers here, so if that’s you: thank you for sticking with me all these years.
I’ve noticed recently how often a controlling mindset can creep in when I think about how we spread the word around the regenerative design lab. That controlling mindset seems to say, everything needs to be ready before we share any details. It makes assumptions about when people are ready to receive this information. And this mindset assumes that it is possible to control the way in which information is transmitted and digested.
But in a complex and dynamic system we know such control is not possible.
An emergent mindset wouldn’t seek to establish control but to work with this uncertainty. Rather than waiting for everything to be finished, it might say it’s enough to share the essence of what we are trying to do, and to let readers colour the picture in. It assumes that some people will get the info they need, and pass it on to others. Not everyone will get the message, but also that unexpected people will.
So it is in the spirit of emergent marketing that I share the outlines of our incomplete plans for our next cohorts of the regenerative design lab.
Cohort 5 of the Regenerative Design Lab will be an experiment in running an-house programme for an organisation. We are conducting this experiment with the Hazel Hill team of staff and trustees. It will be really exciting to bring together people who care for this wood with a process that has been hosted here since 2022, and will help us learn how to do this process for other organisations.
Cohort 6 will be our next open cohort, running March to November 2026. There won’t be any special theme to this cohort, rather we are interested in attracting people with a wide range of interests in regenerative design as it relates to the built environment. Details including pricing our now available. You can register your interest but applications won’t open until November.
And Cohort 7 will be our first alumni cohort, also running March to November 2026. We have seen that for many people that come on the lab, the programme is just the start of a journey into unknown territory that continues for many years afterwards. This cohort is here to support alumni as they continue on their journey of exploration and innovation in regenerative design.
So there you have the outline, which I’ll leave you to colour and share as you see fit, and I’ll let you know when there’s more news.
Interested in regenerative design? Are you — or your colleagues — wondering how to introduce regenerative thinking on a live project? Would a short course help build clarity and confidence, and give you a few practical tools to get started?
Would you like to sign up to Seeing the System, our new short online introduction to regenerative design, starting 12 November?
See what I did? It’s a classic ‘yes spiral’. One from the basic toolkit of advertising. But what this course aims to give you is a different toolkit: the basic tools of regenerative design.
Over four two-hour sessions, we’ll explore the core tools from our regenerative design toolkit. As you’d expect, the course will be delivered in our usual, engaging style — with space for reflection, peer learning, and short practical tasks between sessions to help apply the ideas to real work.
Seeing the System is part of our plan to grow how we teach regenerative design. Alongside the Regenerative Design Lab, this short online format offers a gentler starting point — ideal for those who want to explore the ideas without committing to the full Lab experience.
More and more design teams are committing to regenerative principles and goals in their projects. This is very promising. But it also raises the question, how do upskill a team in a way that is both quick and meaningful?
The Pattern Book gives us two starting points:
Pattern 01: Canvas — for teams who want to start with observing real systems and move to theory.
Pattern 02: Twill — for teams who want to start with theory and move to observation of real systems.
I’ve used these two patterns to create two new short online courses.
Both are designed as a rapid introduction to regenerative design. They don’t do the deep work (you have to do that). But they will give you a strong foundation to build from, ground in the frameworks we use in the Regenerative Design Lab.
Pick the course that suits your learning style. And please tell your friends and colleagues. Thanks!
This week I was invited to run an afternoon session for the Engineers Without Borders UK Systems Change Lab at their event in Glasgow. This event is part of their wider programme to create system change in engineering education to build globally responsible engineering.
My brief was to prompt some creative thinking as part of the ‘develop’ phase in their programme. The session was an opportunity to pair two tools that I have previously used separately in our facilitation at Constructivist: the Kalideascope and the Ambition Loop.
For years I’ve been developing and refining the Kalideascope as a structured model for divergent thinking. It helps users move beyond one initial idea by gathering a wide range of inputs, capturing questions and creating the conditions for new connections to emerge.
While the Kalideascope generates lots of ideas, we need a different tool for the convergent thinking that enables us to choose between ideas and improve on them. So here I brought in the Ambition Loop — a tool that Bill Sharpe introduced us to in the Regenerative Design Lab to help identify what ideas have the potential to create systems change. The Ambition Loop model helps us by going beyond testing our ideas against the brief to testing how ideas can be taken up by and amplified within a systems.
This pairing of the Kalideascope with the Ambition Loop created a strong arc for the session. The first tool expands the fields of possibilities. The second homes in on the ideas that the system might take up.
I am seeing that with the Ambition Loop model that it tends to draw out questions about who we need to partner with to make change.
If you have a copy of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, I suggest, like me, you annotate the end of the Kalideascope entry to say that it works well paired with the Ambition Loop motif as a divergent-convergent pair.
