Tag: interconnection

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Building repair infrastructure

Here are my working thoughts on United Repair Centre, one of the organisations I met at the Future Observatory event The New London Commons: Circular Hubs for Fashion and Construction.

This organisation does not just do repair.

They are building the infrastructure that makes repair possible — at scale — in the fashion industry.

A rich example of both an organisation aiming higher in the system, and the Living Systems Blueprint in action.

In my post earlier this week on steel reuse, I wrote about the emergence of a new ‘blue book’ on the operations shelf of the Systems Bookcase. This is about new operational systems: 

  • Recovery processes
  • Coordination between demolition and construction
  • Storage and logistics
  • New roles and responsibilities

None of this is visible in the final building — it is the hidden infrastructure that enables reuse to happen. 

It is very interesting to see how United Repair Centre is doing taking a similar approach in fashion. 

What’s particularly striking about their work is clearly it reflects the Living Systems Blueprint in action, building:

  • Interconnection
  • Symbiosis
  • Capacity to change

Interconnection

At a materials flow level, there is the connecting together of a waste stream with an input stream. 

But that means connecting many more stakeholders: 

  • Customers
  • Brands
  • Repairers
  • Logistics

And rather than disposable clothing from anywhere and thrown away to anywhere, their work reconnects people with the things they own and the people who repair them.

That is interconnection at many levels. 

Symbiosis

Turning a waste stream into a value stream is only the beginning.

From this, positive feedback loops can start to build.

Repair creates demand for skills.

Skills create livelihoods.

As repair becomes visible and valued, the perceived value of repaired goods increases.

Each part begins to reinforce the others.

This is a fascinating collective reversal of entropy — materials becoming more valuable over time through how we organise ourselves to work with them.

Capacity to change

By running a repair skills academy, they are not just building a pipeline — they are increasing the system’s ability to evolve.

Repair skills are adaptable and transferable.

And there is a learning loop between repairers and designers, enabling garments to be designed for repair from the outset.

This is not just a system that produces outputs.

It is a system that builds its own capacity to change.

There is an interesting difference from the steel case. In steel reuse, the enabling infrastructure remains largely invisible. Here, repair is made visible — badges, stitching, signs that say ‘repaired’.

Making repair visible shifts it from stigma to pride. And at that point, we are no longer just working on operations.

We are working on mindsets.

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Signs of local weather

I’m enjoying being absorbed by The Secret World of Weather, by Tristan Gooley. It reveals to the reader secret signs all around us about how the weather is likely to behave. Signs that hide in plain sight, that we have forgotten to notice.

The repeating theme in the early chapters: modern forecasting models deal with macro effects, the movement of large masses of air or wind high above our heads. These are what the weather apps tell us about. 

These models ignore the local effects: landscape, ground cover type, sun traps. But it is at this scale that we experience the weather, and it is at this local level we need to make decisions: what to wear, where to sit, where to plant things.

Reading those signs is to reconnect ourselves with our local landscape, an example of the sort of local interconnectedness that regenerative design needs. 

When we ignore the local detail, we have to compensate with more effort: more heating, cooling, protection. We end up working against the conditions rather than with them.

When we appreciate the local lie of the land, we can learn to work with what’s already there – and learn to live and even thrive within it. 

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How connections slip through our fingers

I’ve been doing work this week with teams thinking about interconnection. More precisely, how connected we are to the places impacted by our design decisions. 

Take the component of a building and a product. Try to trace it back to its origins, and you will probably find that that part in itself is made of sub-components. Each of these sub-components with places from different places. The further we try to trace, the more our grip on the supply chain disappears. Like trying to carry water with your hands cupped together, the water just slips away the further we try to carry it.

Connection is important because it leads to understanding — we get deep feedback on the impacts on of our decisions, and how to make decisions that actually bring positive impacts. 

So what do we do? 

We can’t redesign global supply chains. But we can seek to shorten the distance in what we do. 
Work with supply chains that are shorter and more transparent 

Select materials whose origins we actually understand

Reduce the number of nodes in the system, thereby reducing complexity and increasing predictability. 

In regenerative design we want to make sure our deisgn choices are creating thriving. The shorter the distance between us and material, the simpler the supply chain, the better feedback we get and the better choices we can make.  

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Feedback = understanding

I’m grateful to my friend and Regenerative Design Lab colleague Ellie Osborne for this model. 

On the second day of our Cohort 5 Autumn Residential, we were sitting around the fire discussing interconnection in design. More explicitly, how connected do we feel to the places where we take materials from to build our buildings. 

A key factor in how regenerative systems stay in balance is through local feedback loops: knowing how much material is available and how much can be used without causing harm.

The feedback loop gives information about what is available. But perhaps a more human way to understand this feedback is to think of it as understanding. 

If a developer decides to build a new building in the city using material dug from just outside the suburbs, I am likely to have a much stronger view about this decision than if the material comes from a distant place I have never heard of.

I have an understanding of what it would mean to double the size of the open-pit mine if it were right here, compared to elsewhere. 

Now, mining, at small scale, can have a positive impact on habitats, and has been an important part of human construction for millennia. But that’s not the point. 

The point is, the closer the site, the stronger the feedback. The stronger the feedback, the stronger the understanding.

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Where we make but also where we take

This has become one of my catchphrases in regenerative design*. To think of design as being for ‘where we make but also where we take’. The role of the regenerative designer is to create a transition to an industry in which our designs create human and ecological thriving.

To make that possible we need to bring two separate things into our view at the same time. The place where we are doing the making, and the places that are we are drawing upon to do that making.

Because if our work makes the world better where we are making, but worse where we are taking, we are not creating thriving. We are just shifting it from one place to the other.

*It definitely is a catchphrase – I’ve already written a post this year with this exact same title.

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Letting things done

Anyone into productivity books will probably be familiar with the classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s a book title that transcends the book —it becomes a value system. Done things are good things. Undone = unorganised.

So here are three alternative work modes I’ve been playing with:

Letting things done

This mode is for going with the flow — doing what needs doing in the moment. It’s a way of working that responds to feedback from your environment, especially your connection with others. It is about noticing what signals say more of this and less of that.

Doing things fun

This mode is the of energy flow. When things are enjoyable, it mysteriously unlocks hidden energy. ‘In every job that must be done, there’s an element of fun, you fine the fun and… the job’s a game’, or so said productivity consultant Mary Poppins.

Letting things go

This mode is for the work of relinquishing control. It is letting something go. It is exchanging with others. It is opening the work up to reciprocity. You have to breathe out in order to breathe in again. It’s the same with plans and ideas.

So we have:

  • Getting things done
  • Letting things done
  • Doing things fun
  • Letting things go.

Whereas getting things done signals our intent to exert our will, the other three signal working with interconnection, following available energy and emergent potential. It’s a nice map onto the Living Systems Blueprint:

  • Interconnection (letting things done)
  • Symbiosis (doing things fun)
  • Capacity to change (lettings things go)

As far as we are aware, humans are the only species that produce productivity text books. The other species just to seem to get on with it, using the resources available to them to live in harmony. Now, that’s the productivity book I want to read.

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Systems Survey

This motif combines the Living Systems Blueprint with a civil engineering perspective to create six questions for a site investigation that can reveal the underlying system characteristics.

  1. What is connected and what is separated?
  2. What is thriving and what is in decline?
  3. What is in flow and what is static?
  4. What is changing and what is fixed?
  5. What stories does this place tell?
  6. What is the place trying to do – and what helps or hinders it?

User guide

  • Site survey — use these questions to bring a more systemic lens to a traditional site survey.
  • System investigation — use these questions to think more about infrastructure and policies and how they relate to the patterns they create on the ground.

This post is an extract from the Motif Library in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. 

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Carrier Wave

In radio communications, a carrier wave is a signal that carries another signal. The carrier wave is the disturbance in the electromagnetic spectrum that travels out across the medium. Information to be transmitted is encoded by modifying the base wave’s amplitude (as in AM, amplitude modulation) or its frequency (as in FM, frequency modulation).

The carrier wave metaphor is a useful motif for thinking about what it is that transmits feedback around a system.

Through my phone I am connected to hundreds of contacts — but that doesn’t mean I am in communication with them. In contrast, with the much smaller group of people I work on projects with, there is regular transmission of information. In this smaller group, regular dialogue creates a carrier wave for feedback — how is everyone feeling? Are things going well? Where are the potential problems? Some of these signals are not explicit, but more subtle shifts in conversation — changes in tone, mood or bigger gaps in the signal.

Our reliance on others tunes us into the feedback available through our relationships. I can easily search online for live data feeds concerning the quality of water in rivers around the country, but I’m far more likely to pay attention to the river I swim in.

When thinking about levels of interconnectivity in systems, consider the reciprocity that exists in those relationships. It is not enough to build connections. Through the internet, engineers have never been more connected to communities and ecosystems — but what matters is having something that flows through the connection. A carrier wave for the feedback.

This post is an extract from the Motif Library in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. 

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The Pattern Book – a new collaborative project in regenerative thinking

Earlier this month, we unveiled the Pattern Book project, an innovative workbook designed to guide professionals in the built environment towards regenerative design principles.  The Pattern Book is the next evolution in the development of the Regenerative Design Lab.

New patterns for the future


The Pattern Book aims to be an emergent, collaborative resource, offering a collection of tools, techniques, and resources under Creative Commons.

“We see in patterns, we recognize patterns, we create patterns. To create a world in which construction brings about thriving rather than destruction, we need new patterns for thinking about how we design and build,”

Oliver Broadbent
Continue reading “The Pattern Book – a new collaborative project in regenerative thinking”
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Announcing the Regenerative Design Lab Summer Research Workshop

The Regenerative Design Lab community is growing. In 2022, the first 20 people began their journey through our pilot of the lab. Now over 50 people have completed the lab programme (and some of them have been through twice!).

So now our work as conveners of the Lab is as much about nourishing this existing community of regenerative practitioners as it is about recruiting more. And so to help support and further the work of this group of change-makers, we are holding our second summer research workshop.

Continue reading “Announcing the Regenerative Design Lab Summer Research Workshop”