We send monthly newsletters and occasional additional announcements about new events, design opportunities, and other great resources for climate designers.
Climate Designers Monthly: Regenerative Design
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Hey Climate Designers, Welcome back to the next installment in our new series focusing on different ways to look at systems change and design. These topics are following along with the perspectives in our Resource Library, and next up is regenerative design. Regenerative design goes beyond sustainability to actively restore, renew, and revitalize natural ecosystems and human communities. Instead of merely reducing negative impacts, regenerative design is focused on the creation of net-positive systems that heal the damage created by human extraction and contribute towards long-term balance and health. These aren’t new ways of being and creating as humans. As mentioned last month in our circular design issue, humans lived regeneratively with nature for most of history. It’s only since the industrial revolution and discovery of oil that things became so massively out of balance. One should be skeptical whenever regenerative design is framed as novelty. There is innovation in learning how to bring together traditional ecological knowledge with the demands of the modern world, but it is a remembering rather than a new creation to be co-opted as the latest climate buzzword. And yet, the work of remembering ways of the past and weaving them together with demands of the future remains a challenging exercise. More often than not what we design is reliant on complex supply chains and material inputs, many of which might not have a “sustainable” solution let alone a regenerative one. Manufacturing at scale is nearly always a net-negative exercise in today's world, whether it’s a digital product reliant on data centers, a physical product being mass-produced, or a development project taking over a large footprint. What would it look like to re-imagine how we create goods that meet modern demands in an ecosystem serving way? Is it even possible? Is scale the problem in itself, or the extractive mindset behind global systems? Is the future a return to local production? Despite the obstacles of creating regenerative projects within entrenched harmful systems, inspiring examples do exist. Most often they are smaller scale efforts with a close relationship to all stages of production:
Challenges remain, but piece by piece these individual efforts can come together to build the restorative systems we need. Let’s explore some different ways to approach regenerative design. Approaching regenerative designDesigning for regeneration focuses on place-based systems that support the healing of land, water, and living ecosystems as well as the communities living there. There are a number of ways to approach this kind of design thinking. Inspired by Nature: Biomimicry This is a great place to start for idea generation and inspiration. Nature already has regenerative design figured out. What can we learn from natural systems when creating regenerative solutions to modern problems? For example, adhesives are mostly petroleum based and often quite toxic. Rather, we can look for inspiration from water bugs or mollusks to create bio-based adhesives that solve that problem in an ecosystem serving way. And going beyond materials, we can observe climate resilient strategies in nature for arid environments and extreme rainfall, so projects are developed as part of ecosystems rather than separate from them. Designing with Nature: Living Systems With greater awareness of regenerative cycles in nature, we can break out of anthropocentric thinking and design with natural systems as collaborators. How might our dwellings, our cities, or our farms change when designed for soil, water, thriving plant and animal life first? When we design for the health of the whole, we unsurprisingly end up with co-benefits for humans. Habitat for birds creates shade for us. Living roofs provide habitat for plants and insects while regulating temperature. Living breakwaters create thriving communities of sea life while protecting human habitat from storm surges. We are nature after all. Regenerating Nature: Restoration and Healing The above are helpful ways to envision regenerative systems long-term, assuming a world in balance. However we’re not in balance. In a world where we’ve created so much harm, the call for regenerative design today is foremost about restoration and healing. Where are the areas of greatest harm, and what do they need? Restoration is a creative act and exciting design prompt. Remediation projects can create beautiful results that serve all different kinds of life and ecological systems. They can also bring communities together to deepen collective stewardship of the land. Regenerating Culture: Design Justice Regeneration is as much about healing cultural harms as it is the healing of natural systems, as the origin of the harm is the same. We got to this point of imbalance as the result of the colonial mindset of domination over vs kinship with. Long histories of violence and displacement ruptured connection to place. Modern economics further ingrained extraction into the collective psyche. An essential part of regeneration is decolonizing this mindset of extraction. As creatives, this means confronting the design industry’s colonial past, and centering justice, accountability, and care into our collective design futures. Resources to Learn MoreReady to work towards regeneration?
And perhaps the best way to return to reciprocity with nature is to be in it. Get your hands in the dirt and plant some seeds. Listen to the wind and watch the birds. Healing the disconnect starts there. Want to dig deeper? Check out our guide full of regenerative design resources.
We are using this series as a way to update and improve our Resource Library. It is a living document. Have thoughts to add? Let us know via our contribution and feedback forms, or join the Climate Designers team to get involved in a more meaningful way. Stay tuned for next month when we’ll dive into our next perspective! - Natalie Walsh Latest from Climate DesignersNext Sustainability Struggles Online Meetup on May 6thNot sure if you’re “climate enough” to join a room full of climate designers? You are. Successes & Struggles is built for all three stages of the journey:
The conversation is genuinely richer when all three are in the room. So join us and share your stories!
Volunteer with us!Join our global team of designers working to redesign the design industry! We are seeking support for the Newsletter Team, Chapter Leadership Team, Comms Advisory Team and a Podcast Audio & Video Editor for Doom & Bloom. We’re also looking for leads to support existing Chapters in Toronto, Singapore, Seattle, and Bengaluru. These openings and more are on our volunteer page. Community HighlightsWe’ve had a bunch of events over the past two months as part of earth month. Check out the recaps below! Reuse-a-Palooza with the Chicago Chapter “The Chicago Climate Designers Chapter tabled at Reuse-a-Palooza on March 15th. The circularity-focused event was held at The Plant, a sustainable food hub located in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. It provided opportunities to repair clothing and household items, safely dispose of tricky-to-recycle items, donate bicycles, clothing, and more. The Climate Designers table was focused on crowdsourcing local sustainability resources and networking with other groups. Event attendees were able to pin organizations they were aware of to a physical map of Chicago, helping to build a local database. It was a great time!” - Eric Johnson, Chicago Chapter Lead Climate Arts Fest with the Los Angeles Chapter Chapter Leaders Rachel Cellinese and Maragaret To produced a day-long event filled with creativity and inspiration at the California Center for Climate Change Education at West LA College during LA Climate Week 2026! From Indigenous to XR climate storytelling, art, crafts, film, music, repair, mending, games, sustainable fashion, to seed and soil workshops, the festival was an incredible gathering of LA’s diverse communities celebrating the intersection of art, culture, and climate. Check out a recap video of Climate Arts Fest Bengaluru Event Recap One of our first Chapters was in Bengaluru, India. After a hiatus we’re excited to see new leadership working to bring it back online. Keerthana led a virtual event, bringing in creatives from the community. “This marked an important milestone in kickstarting our first community project, along with meaningful discussions and insights from our passionate group, committed to climate-focused design. Excited about what's ahead and the impact we can build together. 🌱” Join the conversation on LinkedIn Events & Opportunities
External Events
Conferences, Cohorts, and Climate Weeks
Jobs
InspirationA selection from the team on the topic of circularity.
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Climate Designers
We send monthly newsletters and occasional additional announcements about new events, design opportunities, and other great resources for climate designers.
Hey Climate Designers, Welcome back to the next installment in our new series that focuses on different ways to look at systems change and design, following along with the perspectives in our Resource Library. Next up is circular design. The circular economy is a system where materials never become waste and are kept in constant circulation. It replaces the linear take-make-waste cycle with closed-loop systems that cycle materials through strategies such as repair, reuse, and recycling....
Hey Climate Designers, In the coming months, each of our newsletters will focus on a different way of looking at systems change and design, following along with the perspectives in our Climate Designers Resource Library. If you haven’t seen the Resource Library before, check it out! To begin, we will start with the broadest perspective of them all, thinking in systems. Systems theory has a ton of permutations and schools of thought, but at the core it’s the study of interconnected component...
Hey Climate Designers, As we enter 2026, we are reflecting on where we’ve been and where we’re going. For those who might be new here, we’d like to take a moment to re-introduce ourselves. We launched in 2019 with a mission to empower designers to learn, connect, and act on climate. We bring all design disciplines together with the goal of fundamentally reshaping the design industry to put climate at the core of every designer’s work. Over the years we've run virtual summits, in-person design...