$ Factor: Can We Make Regenerative Futures Viable?
Crafting A New Practice.
If the goal is regeneration and strategies have been laid out — how do we get there?
TL;DR
After spending the bulk of the 10s as a strategic/futures practitioner, I did the climate quitting thing, somehow joined academia again, and spent the last five years with the trouble finding out what would work for me.
The output of all that messy head-and-hand tinkering is a new practice that is transdisciplinary by nature and based on a more-than-human approach to designing. It also aims to avoid the traps of human-centred design and technological solutionism while adopting circular and regenerative design methodologies. Finally, it relies on pluriversal design thinking and material-driven design principles.
This seems like a lot (and it is) and I do not believe there is a need to expand on the cost of inaction but, considering the reality of the world we live in, can we make regenerative futures viable?
I’m currently testing this new practice framework on two research questions:
1- What material potentials can we explore using pre-consumer organic waste for circular and regenerative transitions?
2- How might materiality and phenomenology together inform the design of climate-resilient and regenerative urban spaces?
More on this later, but—how did I land here?
Here goes my first attempt to summarise the logic of this madness. 2018–2023: five years of transition in under 1,500 words, academic speculative loops and industry-partnered practical detours included.
EARLY EXPLORATION: RETHINKING DESIGN
I’m a Western urban man from the late 20th century, meaning that I have been brainwashed to believe that the future was technological and universal — an Orwellian dystopia where global businesses as opposed to states are in full power.
On the plus side, I had the privilege to be exposed to multiculturalism from a very young age, so the first thing I questioned when I embarked on my change journey was the universality of most of the works we see everywhere around us. Check these articles in The Atlantic and Dezeen or this opinion piece by Alex Murrell if you’d like to read more on the topic.
In the video below you can see me speak — a bit fast I know, I spent most of 2018 on high-dose corticosteroids for medical reasons — about the need to include cultural considerations when thinking about the future of our cities. This was my first attempt at discussing the need to adopt pluriversal design thinking in practice, although I had no idea what it was called at the time.
Having watched this video again, I stand by what we said because our sustainability transition is also a social innovation.
A few months later, I started working full-time at RMIT School of Design where I ran a biodesign studio for a few years, sometimes as part of the international Biodesign Challenge. Working in partnership with local and international colleagues, we trained a couple of hundred students to think about design through the lens of materiality and regeneration — a great way to conduct early research in the space.
And we got pretty successful at it!
In 2019, students' projects Symbiome and Enzer were finalists of the Biodesign Challenge and project Enzer won the ORTA special prize for textile bio-innovation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
A year later, student project Aegis won the Victorian Premier’s Design Award in the student category whereas project T’wine won a finalist position at the Taiwan International Student Design Competition. That year, I also won the 2020 Biodesign Challenge Outstanding Instructor Award.
THE OTHER PLACE: A PANDEMIC PROJECT
This exploratory work on biological approaches to design and fabrication and pluriversal design thinking — the latter continued through the Melbourne Speculative Futures network that I co-led with my colleague Sarah McArthur between 2018 and 2020 — led me to the formulation of two broad questions:
1- What leverage points can we identify through the speculative retrofit of conventional buildings into triple zero, regenerative and more-than-human architecture?
2- And, how can we reimagine the public place amidst deteriorating environmental conditions and extreme weather events?
Cue The Other Place. A project I’ve worked on for nearly 15 months from the start of 2020 until mid-2021. Truth be told I’m not a huge fan of this piece of work.
It’s a pandemic project, full of escapism and idealism. Through it, however, I started to accumulate knowledge of urban systems and infrastructures, and even began experimenting with parametric modelling. My conclusion on the latter is that parametric design is a great technology to minimise resource use, but it is definitely better left to experts (and perhaps generative-AI, too).
I published a book chapter on this project, which only scratches the surface of the insights I gained while doing the work. Specifically, I find the images uninspiring and detached from reality whereas my message is about pragmatic action for alternative presents.
More importantly, one of my main takeaways was realising the huge potential of pre-consumer organic waste in designing sustainable materials, which is now a core component of my new practice.
BACK TO BASICS: MATERIAL-DRIVEN DESIGN
At the start of 2021, I went from full speculative utopian thinking to sheer rationalism thanks to a circular biomaterial project financed by a large chain of Australian supermarkets.
Our goal was to develop a waste-based bio-alternative to shrink wraps — these polluting and toxic single-use plastics used everywhere in manufacturing to protect consumers from product tampering.
To summarise the work done by my research partner at the RMIT School of Engineering, I wrote to the client one day: “Our analysis showed that shrink wraps are 90–95% composed of a synthetic plastic named PVC — an oil-based plastic responsible for carbon pollution and microplastic production. PVC ranks as one of the most hazardous microplastics with strong mutagenicity and carcinogenicity. The remaining 5–10% are composed of a plasticiser that gives the material its properties. This plasticiser is made of phthalates, which are highly toxic molecules well-known for their detrimental effect on human health and the environment.”
Next time you peel off a jam jar, a fresh tube of toothpaste, or a bottle of vodka, know that this is what we’re releasing in the environment day after day. Nevertheless, this project taught me about the technical aspects of material-driven design.
Pro-tip: partner with a material scientist when conducting this kind of project. Material-driven design is a great practice when materials are well characterised, but has some limitations when working on material innovation projects — mainly, access to state-of-the-art equipment for material testing and characterisation.
EMBRACING MORE-THAN-HUMAN DESIGN
When designing for circularity and regenerative futures, discussions of values and ethics quickly come to the table. I started to genuinely question the anthropocentricity of my emerging practice sometime at the start of 2021, which led me to adopt a more-than-human approach to designing.
The thing is, when one starts to read on the topic, the literature can be quite abstract and impenetrable. Ideas that are being discussed such as nonhuman agency or nonhuman labour are interesting from a conceptual perspective, but are not very practical (especially when one talks about nonhuman agents like fungi or bacteria). It took me a couple of years to distil my thinking on the topic.
To make it short, I’ve explained my version of more-than-human design in Designing Conditions for Coexistence, a paper published in Design Studies and co-authored with some fantastic people. This version of more-than-human design is based on five principles:
1- Designing with living systems rather than for the living
2- Adopting an ethics of care
3- Applying circular and regenerative design strategies (see futureemsemble.co for a list of 10 circular and regenerative design strategies)
4- Embracing pluriversal thinking
5- And relinquishing control
I’ve also compared more-than-human design to other sustainable approaches to designing on my medium blog, and it has been interesting to see how the adoption of a more-than-human approach to designing has shaped my understanding of regenerative design (more on this later).
FIVE YEARS SUMMED UP: FROM EXPLORATION INTO PRACTICE
Amidst all of this, life, and a few other things, I also had the chance to apply this new knowledge into practice.
From late 2019 to mid-2023, I worked on a healthcare project trying to answer the following (simplified) question: How can design prevent mental injuries in Victorian Healthcare workers? And what started as a classic design innovation project ended up as a trial of the new practice.
In the last phase of the project, I ended up prototyping two product innovations, with conventional attention to function, experience, and cost, but also material, fabrication processes, circularity, and ecosystem regeneration.
While the prototyping of a pair of tailored and 3D-knitted scrubs made out of a cotton-seaweed blend was well-received and reached a stage where commercialisation is now a consideration, the prototyping of sound-absorbing and biodegradable 3D-printed furniture for a rest and recovery space is still in its infancy.
No matter the progress made on each front, this project revealed how circular and regenerative innovation can thrive within real-world constraints while still challenging conventional boundaries.
Five years summed up. ~ish. And if the goal is regeneration and strategies have been laid out — how do we ensure these transformative visions become adaptive and enduring realities?
Dr Olivier (Ollie) Cotsaftis is a transdisciplinary researcher-practitioner exploring pathways towards regenerative and more-than-human futures. His work at the RMIT University School of Design focuses on unlocking scalable potentials for ecological transitions, especially through biomaterials and climate adaptation. Before joining RMIT, Ollie was a design lead at Fjord Design and Innovation and the founder of future ensemble studio. He is currently an editorial board member for Biotechnology Design (Cambridge Press, UK) and the co-founder of neomatter, a nature repair and nature-based solutions startup.
