Regenerative Design: Accelerator Insights #3
This is the third of four blogs sharing insights from our involvement in the Julie’s Bicycle’s Accelerator Programme, exploring the role of neighbourhood festivals, celebrations and gatherings in bringing about more regenerative futures for the places we call home.
In the first two blogs we talked about the cancellation of the 2020 and 2021 Walthamstow Garden Party festivals, and shared the some of the insights and questions emerging from collective conversations with local creative collaborators about what a new re-imagined festival might look like in 2022. In this blog we explore our first foray into Regenerative Design, working with regenerative artist and practitioner Dr Tanja Beer.
LIVING EVENTS
Connecting with Tanja as our Accelerator Programme mentor was brilliant. We’d long been a fan of her work and had fallen in love with her Living Stage project that had come to the UK in 2013.
When we met Tanja she had just finished working on a new project The Living Pavilion, which she described as:
“A transdisciplinary project connecting Indigenous knowledge, ecological science, sustainable design and participatory arts”
Highly recommend checking out the Living Pavilion Video or reading the Living Pavilion Report to delve deeper into her work.
Tanja’s work really resonated with us, bringing together elements from art, culture, ecology, justice & design in a really fascinating way. As a researcher, she had just written a paper exploring the concept of “Regenerative Place Making”, looking at how “temporary event spaces can activate socioecological connection and forefront Indigenous sovereignty to inform the future potential of place”. It felt like there was real potential for us to learn together and think more deeply about the potential of gatherings, festivals and events to rekindle deeper more regenerative relationships with place.
“We represent regenerative placemaking as a looping spiral that emerges from a particular place. Inspired by regenerative development and placemaking practices, ‘regenerative placemaking’ starts by listening to the place by finding the key patterns and attributes of the more-than human communities living within that space”
“The notion of the ‘event space’ can act as effective approach to test design and programming strategies for the long-term potential of the place. This small and temporary initiative can create ripples of inspiration that take the intervention beyond the physical borders of the site to enhance not only the capacity and capability of that particular place, but also its neighbouring communities” Living Pavilion Report
As a key part of the design process of Living Pavilion Tanja had used a design tool called the LENSES framework
Having spent years driving managers & colleagues mad with various different diagrams, network maps, illustrations of trees, icebergs and more, attempting to represent how we were working and thinking beneath the surface of what people saw, we fell in love with the look and feel of this tool. It seemed to have a kind of ancient magic to it and felt like a really interesting way of practically applying some of the thinking we had already begun as a team to generate our team compass.
With Tanja’s help we set an intention to use the LENSES framework to work collectively with partners to uncover potential for what a new re-imagined festival might look like in 2022.
REGENERATIVE DESIGN
In April 2021 we brought together a group made up of Barbican staff and local creatives from Waltham Forest to participate in a Regenerative Design Workshop led by Tanja Beer, using the LENSES framework.
Within the context of the LENSES framework the following definitions are used to define what regenerative design is:
Regenerate (verb):
To bring new and more vigorous life. Creating greater vitality, viability and capacity for evolution.Regenerative Design:
Nurturing the capacity and capability in people, communities, places and other natural systems to adapt, evolve, and thrive.
At the heart of this process are five core design principles:
1) WORKING IN WHOLES RATHER THAN PARTS
The world cannot simply be reduced to its parts. It all functions together.2) ACCOUNTING FOR UNIQUENESS
Each place, person, community and organization has it’s own unique potential.3) SHIFTING FROM PROBLEMS TO POTENTIAL
Regeneration is about change that is inspiring, full of potential, and focused on benefit creation.4) BEING OF SERVICE
The organisms that succeed in evolution are the ones that become important to the larger system they depend on, rather than simply focusing on individual survival.5) FROM SEPARATE TO ALIGNED WITH NATURE
Move towards going from being separate to being integrated. We need to forward a new discourse that humans can be collaborative, integral, and even important to nature.
You can delve into some of this thinking more deeply in the Regenerative Practitioner Field Guide
THE FRAMEWORK
As a design framework, LENSES brings together four different lens (Vitality Lens, Foundation Lens, Flows Lens, Whole Framework Lens), each is intended to provide a systematic, step by step, way of bringing new perspectives into the process of ideation and decision making, all with the aim of working towards more regenerative outcomes.
Foundations and Flows
Ahead of the workshop, we worked with Tanja to design a unique set of lens for us to look through, based on some of the values work we had been doing and the team compass that we had created earlier that year.
We identified our six foundations — the commitments that serve as a foundation of understanding for inspiration and guidance on decision making — as:
Neighbourliness / Celebration of Place / Participation / Gratitude / Multiple Perspectives / Care
And our 11 flows — unique “nutrients” or elements upon which the project relies — as:
Joyfulness / Cultures / Skills & Capabilities / Time / Money / Space/ Materials / New Technologies / Food & Drink / Sustainability / Nature
These foundations and flows were then brought together into our own digital tool to use in Miro. It definitely wasn’t as magical as the interaction wooden tool that Tanja had created for her project, but it was the closest we could get given the reality of our online lives.
Unlike many tools, the form of the framework, is really quite beautiful. It places regenerative outcomes at its core, like the seed from which everything else must grow. The foundational principles, act like the roots, ensuring that what grows is anchored to a clear purpose and the flows help us remember that what grows must be thought about in relationship with everything else. It helps hold ourselves accountable for the degenerative potential of our ideas as well as maximising the regenerative potential.
The Workshop
We set the intention to use the workshop to work collectively towards uncovering potential for what a new re-imagined Walthamstow Garden Party might look like in 2022.
We worked in small groups to explore the relationships between each of the “foundations” from which we wanted the festival to grow and each of the nutrient “flows” upon which the existence of the festival relied. Tanja encouraged us to try to think about historic and current patterns in how these nutrients flow, about where they come from, where they go, and how patterns of these flows might be altered (in either regenerative or degenerative ways) by our work.
This was harder than we expected and it took a while for us to get inside the process. Sometimes the conversation would go off track, with general thoughts and ideas springing up and taking us off in new directions. Ideas flowed and the conversations were rich and sprawling, but we only completed a fraction of the process.
Generally I think people left the session with a tangle of different feelings, a mix of intrigue, hesitation, curiosity and positive confusion! To do this process justice we would have needed much more time, to split the sessions across multiple days and ideally to do it in person.
Personally, I was surprised about how hard I found it to apply such a disciplined, systemic way of thinking. It required huge amounts of energy for me to keep bringing myself back to the framework and to not allow my thoughts and feelings to just meander out through general conversation.
We definitely left with a sense that we all need LOTS LOTS MORE PRACTICE with this kind of way of stretching our awareness and understanding through slowing down and disrupting our normal patterns of thinking and doing.
At this point, our questions still felt valid, but doubts were starting to creep in about whether we could ever retrofit a regenerative design approach to such a large scale festival model.
How could we go from doing things better, (being a more sustainable festival) to doing better things (being regenerative)?
How might a neighbourhood approach to festivals and cultural events help us rekindling deeper more regenerative relationships with the places we call home?
How might temporary events spaces be used as “living labs” to restore connections between people & place, cultures & nature and act as a testing ground to seed future potential in neighbourhoods?
What neighbourhood infrastructure would be needed to support these relationships to thrive beyond the temporal and spatial limits of events?
Since the workshop we’ve discovered such a rich field of work in this area. Below are some of the people, books , tools and frameworks that we’ve been dipping into and experimenting with in our team. Enjoy!
Read the other blogs in this series here:
Local Futures: Accelerator Insights #1
Positive Confusion: Accelerator Insights #2
Regenerative Design: Accelerator Insights #3
New Possibilities: Accelerator Insights #4
Links and further reading:
It was Daniel Christian Wahl who really set me off on this journey. His book Designing For Regenerative Cultures and the many recorded conversations and blogs he shares are a treasure trove of information.
RSA have an amazing programme dedicated to Regenerative Futures and have published this great report From Sustaining To Thriving
Following Cassie Robinson on twitter has led me to so many fascinating resources including the wonderful book Dancing at the Edge by Maureen Miller O’Hara, Graham Leicester and the Berkana Institutes’s Two Loop model that she shared her blog Hospicing The Old amongst many many others things.
Conversations with Pheobe Tickell have been so nourishing and hopeful. She is doing so much great work including Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance Don’t Go Back To Normal and the incredible Moral Imaginations. She also introduced me to SEEDS which I still don’t really understand, but I’m trying!
Jenny Anderson writes a fascinating blog An Economy Of Place and runs an organisation called Really Regenerative CIC
Bayo Akomolafe is Founder and Elder of The Emergence Network and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies.
Tools & Frameworks
LENSES is the regenerative design tool we used in our workshop
Three Horizons
Is a really powerful tool for thinking about the future. Identifying the dominant patterns that are no longer fit for purpose, how the emerging trends can shape the future, and what visionary action is needed to collectively move us towards a viable future. This is a great Video that brings it to life.
Design Web by Looby Macnamara is a framework and toolkit that activates healing and revolutionises our approach to creating life-sustaining and regenerative cultures.
White Supremacy Culture in Organisations is a brilliant tool book designed to hold conversations about racism in organisations created by CoCo (Centre for Community Organizations).
Books:
Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson
