Regenerative Economy Lab

Morrows is a collaboration between HBKsaar and K8.

• Regeneration processes stabilize and strengthen ecosystems, organisations,
  and individual actors.
• A regenerative economy uses finite resources to create economic as well as
  ecological, social and cultural value.
• K8 develops value creation processes for a regenerative economy, strengthening
  ecological, social, and cultural systems.

Having worked with a co-creation method that grants the “lab” a key role in system design processes, we have become fascinated with the foundational role of the lab as a shared point of departure, but also a key dynamic (em)powering expanded forms of co-creation engagement.

Conceptually, this has been inspired by the coupling of generation and regeneration in research on socio-technical-ecological systems (STES). In doing so, we attend to the conflicts between acceleration (including the disruptive dynamic of generative systems, here mainly in the sense of data-driven ai platforms) and deceleration (the ecological timescales of regeneration).

MORROW.TODAY names both our lab and our approach to agency, intelligence, and impact: reframing STES design as a politics of time to foreground the need to align multiple temporalities for a regenerative future.

Our focus on entrepreneurship links us to the wider start-up ecosystem – co-working spaces, hubs, and of course the different public and private value-creation contexts we think are relevant to a future regenerative economy.  The space of the lab operates as a heuristic device, in some sense the architectural complement to a layered model of human history where change happens on and across all layers but at different velocities. In the case of the Regenerative Economy Lab this strikes us as particularly useful because one of the concepts we are trying to come to terms with is the “planetary” as possible framing of agency and intelligence.

The example we chose for the economic design is the “donut economy” because of its general accessibility and growing popularity among decision-makers: however we organize the co-creation of value, the space we have to do so is circumscribed by ecological ceiling on one side and our social foundations on the other. If these ceilings (specified in another model, the “Planetary Boundaries” defined and monitored by the Stockholm Resilience Center and other climate research centers) turn out to be less flexible than we hope (and that is what their recent assessments suggest), the space we need will be provided by transformations of our social foundations – the ways in which we live and work.

Proposed by researchers as a different approach to matters of sustainability, our own interest in “regeneration” grew with every sobering assessment of the strength of sustainability as narrative and imaginary. In conversation after conversation, colleagues told us about the difficulty of rekindling the enthusiasm that had driven and greeted earlier waves of “earth politics” – not only because political progress has been slow, but because key aspects were either missing or difficult to articulate, especially the concern with value-creation models that give back more than they take. In the “Creative Agency Model” underlying our lab activities, we have chosen to stress “regenerative” rather than “sustainable” agency, since we understand the outcomes of planetary boundaries research to mean that we need both, new approaches to life in a more-than-human world and a collective effort to regenerate already damaged ecosystems.

To structure the enormous amount of playbooks and toolkits that have been created by regenerative economy enthusiasts, we have made Design Journeys through Complex Systems our method textbook. Not only because it is itself an archive of validated transformation design approaches, but because its authors situate the “lab” as a context of systems design processes that move from “lab” to “studio” to “arena” to “agora” – a movement of becoming public that reflects and resonates with our own interest in public agency, public technologies, and public value.

Locally and across our networks, we are in a much larger conversation about how to effectively challenge the cultural hegemony of tech-centric narratives. Given that the term “generative” has effectively been integrated in conversations about our collective futures, we use the term’s visibility (and apparent tangibility) to reframe its use. The dynamic coupling of “generative” and “regenerative” is part of such a reframing, and part of how we aim to playfully put into practice use of an otherwise rather unwieldy concept of socio-technical-ecological systems.

One of the main reasons why the question of impact has become a central matter of concern for us is that impact is a lens through which we can explore both – the undesired impact of unsustainable processes and systems and the alternative views of regenerative systems we wish to co-create. Our approach to designing-for-impact is by default anticipatory, calling on us (and our research partners) to imagine impact and then design towards it, aligning actors and processes along the way.