What began as a conversation this week on the blog about how designers predict the future has unlocked some deeper reflections on how we approach regenerative design.
Let’s rewind.
As designers, we are always concerned with the future. Our job is to imagine how things could be and shape the conditions to get there. To do this, we rely on two types of indicators:
- Lag indicators — evidence of what has already happened. The results of past design decisions.
- Lead indicators — signals in the present that suggest how the future will unfold.
When conditions are stable, precedent (ie lag indicators) can be a reliable guide to the future. But in changing, complex systems, the past is no-longer such a reliable guide to the future.
In these situations, rather than predict the future directly, we can try to assess the capacity of the system we are working with to successfully respond to change.
Capacity to change — a key regenerative lens
In regenerative design we use the living world as a template for understanding how to create systems that thrive. Thriving ecosystems adapt continuously to shifting conditions. This capacity to change is a key characteristic of living systems — and is a guiding principle for engineers (and other humans) thinking about how to create thriving systems.
In the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, we go on to define four factors that indicate a system’s capacity to adapt:
- Building blocks that can easily be recombined.
- Coexistence of diverse variations to allow for different responses.
- Feedback loops that reinforce adaptations suited to current conditions.
- Mechanisms for retaining and repeating what works.
From analysis to a design brief
These four factors are both analytical prompts and design levers.
When we encounter a new situation, we try to establish the extent to which each of these is present and use this as a measure of the system’s capacity to survive and potentially thrive through change.
And they can be used as design requirements, giving us factors that we can build into a design brief to create a brief for thriving.
In a complex situation it is hard to predict the future — instead, regenerative designers seek to make things better by building in the capacity for people and ecosystems to respond together to changing situations in a way that creates thriving for the whole system.