This week at the Regenerative Design Lab, we’ve been working with the Living Systems Blueprint — a model for connecting high-level regenerative thinking with more tangible design decisions.
The Blueprint identifies three qualities common to living systems. One of these is interconnection.
Thriving living systems tend to have high levels of local connectivity:
contact between species, relationships of co-dependency, flows of information and energy.
A good example is the mycelial networks that connect trees in a woodland. These networks allow feedback to travel through the ecosystem, helping the system adapt and stay in balance.
One feature of the industrialised human economy is just how separated we have become from the living systems that support life on Earth.
So interconnection becomes a useful design prompt.
How might we design more feedback into systems?
How might we reconnect supply chains to ecosystems?
How might we strengthen relationships between people, place and the living world?
Interconnection as a topic comes up in so many ways:
How do we connect with the systems that surround us?
How does information travel through supply chains?
How can we we pay attention to the signal when there is so much noise.
It’s a common thread running through much of this blog.
The Blueprint acts as a bridge between regenerative mindsets and design. It takes the best model we have for regenerative systems — the living world — and asks what we can learn from it.
Thriving living systems tend to share a few characteristics:
High levels of local interconnection, keeping different parts of the system in touch through feedback loops.
Symbiotic relationships, circulating flows of materials and energy to create more complex, mutually supportive structures.
A built-in capacity to change, adapting continuously in response to shifting conditions.
Together, these give us a different way to think about design. Importantly, they give us something practical to work into a brief — not just specifying outputs, but shaping the qualities of the system we are creating.
Because in regenerative design, we are not just designing buildings and infrastructure.
We are designing the systems that create them — where building is not the end, but a means.
A means to creating thriving ecosystems and communities.
20 chairs in a circle by the Gatekeeper tree at Hazel Hill Wood
It’s a deliberate place to start. For many, it’s the first time meeting each other face to face. And the first time meeting the wood.
Because the wood isn’t just a venue. It’s part of the work.
A thriving ecosystem. A container for learning. A place for discovery. A reminder of abundance, complexity, and timescales far beyond our projects.
And so we begin our inquiries here — deliberately stepping away from the pressing needs of day-to-day work, and into something slower, more exploratory.
Lab participants gather around the fire to discuss how regenerative design relates to their work — photo credit, Steve Cross
We don’t pretend the real world works like this. But this is a place we can return to — for perspective, recovery, and renewed energy to carry on the work of system change.
Everyone arrives with a Pattern from the Pattern Book, chosen as a guide through the Lab.
Over the first afternoon, we move through the wood. Three distinct habitats, each chosen to represent a different regenerative mindset. Each paired with a simple game and time for reflection.
Two lab members in discussion during one of our exercises exploring mindsets for regenerative design — photo credit, Steve Cross
Some of the work is quiet. Observing. Noticing.
Some of it is more active — testing ideas, asking questions, beginning to see how each person’s inquiry might take shape.
And some of it is unexpectedly playful.
There are moments of seriousness — conversations about organisations, systems, and the challenges of making change stick.
And then, at other times, we find ourselves in something like satsuma jousting.
Delicious food and lots of it — a key ingredient of the residentials at Hazel Hill Wood.
It’s easy to see these as opposites. But in practice, they are part of the same work. Play creates space. It changes how people relate. It allows new ideas to emerge that wouldn’t surface otherwise.
By the second day, the focus turns more directly to each person’s inquiry.
We work with the Systems Bookcase, exploring how different levels of a system interact — from underlying paradigms through to design decisions.
Two people on a reflective walk along a path at Hazel Hill Wood — photo credit, Steve Cross
Then back out into the wood again — in pairs, and then alone.
Why have I come here?
Within this broad area of interest, what am I actually curious about?
What pattern am I working with?
And what might I try next?
Lab facilitator Ellie Osborne lists four reflective questions for the solo walk in the woods — photo credit, Steve Cross
These aren’t intended to be final answers, rather, best next answers for now.
By the end, the group leaves the shelter of the wood and returns to their projects, organisations, and everyday constraints.
But not quite in the same way.
Because now we are observing, asking questions, looking for opportunities, looking for the lever that we will pull, the change that we will experiment with.
We’ll gather again here in the summer to share what we have discovered so far.
Cohort 6 at the end of their spring residential — photo credit, Steve Cross
The rhythm of the Regenerative Design Lab is loosely pinned to the cycles of the moon.
Not because we think it has any mystical power over the work. But because we are interested in creating a culture that pays attention to the living world — noticing what it’s doing, and what signals it might be offering. When to speed up. When to slow down. When to lean in, and when to sit back.
This kind of ecological participation — an interest in, and participation in, how living systems work — sits at the heart of regenerative design.
In the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, we introduced a simple device called the Lunar Sprint. It’s a way of structuring creative work around the phases of the moon.
In many sectors, it’s now common to work in sprints — bursts of energy followed by moments of pause and reflection. The Lunar Sprint takes that idea and pins it to something visible in the physical world. Something that shifts, whether or not we’re paying attention.
In this cycle, the full moon becomes a moment of showing up.
A point for sharing, publishing, or coming together. Where possible, we’ve timed Lab gatherings with the full moon — a moment where we account for ourselves, and our intentions to make change.
Between these peaks sits the new moon.
A quieter point. A reset.
Not a time for planning in detail, but for reconnecting with intention. For stepping away from practicalities, and returning to the question of what we actually care about.
At this point in the cycle, we ask:
– What am I curious about?
– Where do I feel constrained?
– What do I dream of doing this sprint?
From this moment of reset, we can let go of what didn’t happen last time.
And begin again.
In the days that follow, those ideas may turn into plans. Actions. Deliverables. But at this darkest point in the cycle, the aim is not productivity.
It’s direction. I don’t think the moon is doing anything to the work.
But it is doing something to our attention. And that feels like something to pay attention to.
Next week we begin a new experiment at the Regenerative Design Lab: we are starting our first alumni cohort.
Cohort 7 will be for returning practitioners — engineers (and other humans) who have been through the Lab before. Some applied as long ago as 2022.
That wasn’t so long ago in terms of building design ago, but in the field of regenerative design, which is emerging quite quickly, it feels like an age away.
In those first discussions, we had a strong pedagogy of enquiry, but the language was still forming and the frameworks emerging.
Since then the field has moved on and so have we. We have much better models and clearer patterns to work with. The connection between regenerative practice and day-to-day business can be more clearly articulated.
But more importantly the participants have moved on.
They’ve been in practice. They’ve tested ideas. They’ve discovered where the limits really sit and where they have been able to push.
And the operating conditions have changed too. The urgency has deepened. The need for thinking that is life-enabling rather than life-depleting is more acute.
So while Cohort 7 is a second journey, it is not a repeat because we return with more experience, new questions and opportunities.
This year we are also running Cohort 6 – our latest open cohort – in parallel. There’s something powerful I n this too: two groups moving through similar terrain but at different stages in their path. We’re curious to see what synergies develop between them, especially as we bring the two cohorts together for our final even in November.
Regenerative design is rooted in loops and cycles. I’m looking forward to seeing what this second cycle yields for our Cohort 7 participants.
Regular followers of the blog will noticed that the daily(ish) blog has been somewhat dormant over the winter. And maybe that is appropriate. Winter is after all the time when living systems reset, process, regroup and do the quiet work that gets them ready for growth in the spring.
The thing about this winter work is it doesn’t look like much while it is happening. In the wood it is quiet; on the allotment the winter days were very still… and very wet. But underground the stage is being set, slowly, gradually, for all the growth of spring. And when that growth comes, it comes suddenly.
For us at the Regenerative Design Lab, the invisible winter work has been to recruit two cohorts for Labs in 2026. This has involved lots of interviews during short days and dark afternoons with the many people who applied. We have also been thinking carefully about how we evolve our pedagogy based on everything we have learnt so far.
For me personally it has been a time during which I formally ended and wrote up my 1851 Fellowship in Regenerative Design. The Fellowship helped us grow the Lab from a seedling (the pilot phase), through the sapling stage (where it needed the support) to the young tree that it is this year, fully self supporting.
And quietly, almost every day, someone has bought a copy of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, which means that the seeds of this work are travelling further than I can see.
And so, the stage is set for spring, and springing into more visible action.
Next week is the kick-off for Cohort 6 and 7. For Cohort 6 we have a fascinating group of engineers (and other humans) from different disciplines, including a new interest from the infrastructure sector. Cohort 7 welcomes back alumni returning to deepen their regenerative practice.
We are also running regenerative design workshops directly for organisations, looking at business strategy, culture change and skills for facilitation and persuasion.
