Reimagine our future, starting with design
Recorded at Climate Con 2021 on November 9, 2021
Reimagine our future, starting with design
Nature is regenerative, and designers who mimic it can teach us a lot about how it works. Meet biomimicry practitioners who see nature as a muse, teacher, and the best creative partner.
A conversation with:
Dawn Danby (Spherical)
Michael Pawlyn (Exploration Architecture)
Dian-Jen Lin (Post Carbon Lab)
Marc O’Brien (Climate Designers )
Full transcript.
Marc O'Brien: This is the Reimagine our future starting with design. So let's dive in. We only have 30 minutes together. So we're going to just go right into into the conversation a little bit about me before we start, my name is mark or Brian. I'll be your moderator today. I'm a climate designer and a design educator.
I've run a creative studio called The Determind where we support organizations, addressing our changing climate. I also, co-founded a Climate Designers, which is a hub for designers and creative professionals from all industries committed to using our creative skills for climate action. And my journey to this point in my career has been centered around the idea that design has the potential to create massive positive change with so many challenges in the world.
I see design as a force for good creating opportunities for people, communities, businesses, and governments to create thriving, flourishing systems and ways of life for all living species. And I'm super excited. To share the stage with three designers using their talents, time and energy in creating those types of opportunities.
And I'm looking forward to having them share their journeys with us and hopes to inspire and motivate you all to use your creative talents and taking climate action. So let me introduce you to our panelists. Dawn Danby is an ecological design strategists, cultivating reciprocal relationships for healing living systems.
She's the co-founder and principal strategist of Spherical and integrative research and design studio offering Cosmovision remediation and ontological repair services. Michael Pawlyn has been described as a pioneer of regenerative design environment. Macquarie he's a British architect noted for his work in the field of bio mimetic architecture and innovation, as well as jointly initiating the architects declare movement in the UK.
And Dian-Jen Lin or DJ is a transdisciplinary designer with an academic rigor of a researcher, the analytical rationality of a scientist and the aesthetic sensitivity of an artist with a decade of professional experience in the fashion and design industry. She has worked with multidisciplinary teams across sectors to build impactful collaborations.
So three things. I hope that we're able to cover during our time together. Our lessons that we can learn from nature, where sustainability fits into this conversation that we're having today and visions of a future shaped by regenerative design. So with all that, let's dive in. So I'm going to call on let's start with Michael first.
Michael, I would love to hear your personal journey and share with us how you came to embrace regeneration and or biomimicry in your work and maybe in your life.
Michael Pawlyn: Sure. Firstly, thanks very much for involving me. So as a teenager, I was passionate about three things, design biology and the environment.
And at that stage, I couldn't see how you could combine those. So I went off to study architecture. I left biology behind and then should be great, good fortune. I got a chance to work on the Eden projects when I was about 30 and that's when I saw the potential of biomimicry. And then later on, I realized that biomimicry offered ways to be regenerative.
Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that regenerative was the most useful framing for what we need to transcend trends. Sustainability.
Marc O'Brien: Awesome. Appreciate it. Michael. Don, what about you?
Dawn Danby: Let's see. I went into design, exclusively focused on sustainability, and that was a decision that I made when I was in my late teens.
Because that spent most of my teenage years really. Trying to think into how I can dedicate my life to some kind of environmental work, but also go into the craft that I was interested in, which is, I thought I'd be an artist, cause I actually didn't know what design was really besides architecture.
And so I studied industrial design originally. Which for any of you who do it and think about it through the lens of the ecological or these ecological or human impacts of anything that gets made, all of a sudden, the entire universe of complexity opens it behind you. And you start looking at all times of other things around all of the ways that materials are extracted and how they flow, how they move and how things don't stay still.
And a lot of that was pretty early on. It really drove my focus. And what I will say about it is that these terms. Sustainability, ecological design, regeneration, biomedics. They all have different meanings. Look, we can get into some of that. But I think at the core, and in my early days, I was focused on looking at how I can be of service to living systems.
And we called it lots of different names, but that was the commitment I made. And don't get too hung up on the language. The language will shift and change, like everything.
Marc O'Brien: Thanks to that DJ. Okay.
Dian-Jen Lin: Yes. So I I worked in the fashion and design industry in the past decade, and then I realized that everything I was taught in the school was completely not addressing to what I was asking.
I don't know if anybody had any fashion industry related experience, but feminism is be horrible industry from, if you think about like 10 years back I've worked in high pressure studios, high-end fashion studios, and There's like a staircase where it's dedicated for my colleagues who feel like crying during the working hours, they can go there and cry silently on their own.
And that's where I came from insight. I can see what we do. So we've burned samples. We caught up pieces. That's been made perfectly because when they are getting. They're afraid to house. The brands are afraid of them being taken out of the bin and then being sold. So they want to protect their intellectual property.
And by doing that, it's by burning by chopping it up. It's just a lot of things that doesn't really make sense. At least for me, but I think maybe for people they just weren't necessarily asking questions. That's why I quit doing that. I did a degree in sustainability and now we do microbial sustainable textile coloration.
And I wonder if that, which is more on the climate positive side is that we were with Michael organised, synthetic sorry, photosynthetic micro organisms, including LV and sundial bacteria. We use them to grow colorants or recruit coatings on textiles so that what I'm wearing right now is actually for instance I do have to provide a moisture ventilation in life, but it's our way of injecting climate positivity back into the very dead and carbon intensive fashion lifestyle.
Marc O'Brien: Thank you. Cool. Awesome. I always enjoy learning people's journeys and how they got into the work that they're doing now because it's never a linear path. So I want to for the sake of the people joining. And Don, you mentioned don't focus on the language. It all just boils down to living systems, but for the sake of this panel and for those that are just getting their foot in the door, when it comes to regeneration and, or biomimicry maybe you can start Dawn..
How would you define regeneration and or biomimicry? to say maybe a 13 year old, how do you come to bring it down to a level where anyone can understand and maybe in your definition or how you describe it, maybe offer some examples that the attendees listening and watching can understand.
Dawn Danby: Okay. I will attempt. And actually what I, when I said don't pay attention to the language, it's more don't get attached to the language because meetings do change over time. So don't get all hooked in a tight player, role identity. Like it co-opted and turned upside down. You never know, but but the language is important because we are talking about different types of things.
I think that's really our studio here, we have, I run it for rent, a studio that I co-founded called spiritual. And the work that we do is largely in support of people who are working in regeneration in some way. But I think that there's a distinction there that I want to draw around regenerative systems or generative design. This is very much pulling from the pioneers of this work, because I think that there's a lot of confusion right now because you're seeing people use regenerative as a synonym for sustainable and all these things. And we can, I'm sure. Get into this a little bit more, but when I think about regeneration, I'm thinking about part of life processes, that living systems regenerate, the things that we make, the objects, the buildings, they don't, they're not living, so they're not themselves regenerating, but it was a part of a process. And it's a way of thinking to me about both. How do you have living ecosystems that are functioning and they're living in diamond cycling and doing what they do.
And they're healthy. And then how do you actually engage with those which humans. How do you people in the mix, it's part of why the work that's done in regenerative development. If you go back and go and look at the work of Regenesis Institute, or if you look at Carol Sanford Institute, they've been, these are people who've been working in regenerative development for a long time.
They will often talk about the fact that regenerative process is actually one where you have more than just ecological restoration. And now you're fixing. Clear-cut or something, but you actually have people involved and that you're working with the people themselves. So you can, and we all know this, there are times where you can walk into a room and you can make everybody totally miserable because you're like, oh, I got a cloud over my head. And there's times where you can come in and you can actually uplift people's will and invite them to work with you. And that self is regenerative too.
That's a part of the work and a lot of, the stuff that we looked at and I'll just give you one link. I can drop it in the chat, which is region.earth, which is a map that we've made of regenerative projects around the world. So you can actually look at it's 350 short films, documentaries of projects of people regenerating their places.
And I think the key there is that you've got unique designs and you've got people involved in them. It's really like a critical like combination it's and it's a reframing of housing is going to be involved in the systems. I've talked a long time. I thought I'm not the best person to define biomimicry.
I feel like I should have that to Michael, but it will say I've had the great fortune of working with the biomimicry Institute and the 3.8 over the years at different times. And I've always been hugely inspired by the work in biomimicry. But I have to say after many years, I've, I think I've worked on one project and many that was actually biomimetic.
And I would say actually biomimetic because we were working with scientists who really understood how to actually make. Functions in nature and bring that into new projects and designs. And that's often, sometimes tricky, I think, for a lot of design projects. So I'm always impressed by people who actually pull it off, but I really do feel like Michael should be the definer. No, he refuses.
Michael Pawlyn: That all sounded very good to me doing.
Dawn Danby: Maybe a simple definition or can we make, we help the audience make the distinction between perhaps biomimetic and.
Michael Pawlyn: I can offer a short one if you'd like me to mark. So if I was explaining it to a 13 year old, I think I would say biomimicry is about learning from the way things work in nature to design better solutions for humans so that we can integrate ourselves into the web of life .
And this could involve as an example, rethinking the resource flyers in a city so that it shifts from being a linear wasteful system towards one that is cyclical and zero waste and regenerative.
Marc O'Brien: Beautiful, short and sweet. Love it. Michael DJ, how would you describe regeneration or biomimicry?
Dian-Jen Lin: We don't personally work with biomimicry as much, but maybe a little bit on my take on the regeneration, but I think my context was works better for the fashion industry.
I don't know how everybody's involved how well everybody's involved. For instance, a lot of these attempts in making fashion sustainable include using, say recycled polyester or organic cotton and these types of materials. But if I were to explain to a kid, I would say that it mentioned that one today you're sick and you have two options.
One option is that you take a painkiller and you still go to school. The second option is you take a day off school, you rest, you drink plenty of water, eat healthy food, and you sleep and you rest very well. And what the fashion industry has been doing is option one, which is take painkiller and move on.
And that's what sustainably some sometimes perceived that way so that you can just sustain yourself and then move on, continue doing business as usual. So that's the other one, which is rest, eat healthy sleep is actually regeneration is to allow the planet to heal, to restore and to, for us to clean up the mess.
So that's what I would, how I would explain.
Marc O'Brien: Great. I love that. So let's, I'm going to actually skip ahead of question and DJ, because you brought up sustainability and this is open to anyone who wants to answer on the, in the spirit of defining what things mean, what is sustainability and how, or maybe even where does sustainability fit into this conversation?
Dian-Jen Lin: And I think sustainability is everything. I I think when people asked me about, how the sustainably fit in any conversation, I think that extra compensation which would have is how long do we still want to live on this planet? Because science and math told us, we have, about a decade left where the less generation that's here to be able to save the planet, to actually make an impact, to reduce that increase of temperature.
Aren't we all earthlings? Is there any aliens in this room? If we don't try our best to, either my surrogate all set and regenerate through whatever we're doing, I don't know then. Do you want to live on this planet or not? That's what I think.
Marc O'Brien: Don, what about you? What does sustainability fit into?
I know you can talk hours around this topic, sustainability in this conversation. What about you?
Dawn Danby: No. I think that sustainability was it's almost there's two big things that we need to be doing right there. On one hand, we need to be making products, the world more sustainable, where we're actually swapping out the way that we do one side of things and shifted into something else that we changed the nature of what we make.
And a lot of that is the word work in sustainability. It isn't really regenerative necessarily in quite the way that we think about that. But the other thing that we need to do is also restoring living systems and we have to like heal landscapes and detoxify land. So those are different activities. And when I think about sustainability, I'm really looking at the entirety of human activity.
And that is particularly in the industrial and the built environment in those sectors and going, how do we change everything that we're making? And so it's not that sustainability is supplanted by regeneration. It's more that we have to think about all the tracks that we need to be moving in parallel and apart.
Part of why I say that is because there's roles to be played in all of them. It's not just oh, used to be a mess, but now it's, you've been made redundant by her death by regeneration, not the case. There's work to be done across the board.
Marc O'Brien: What does it look like to move away from doing less harm to becoming more environmentally beneficial or in this case, restoring and rejuvenating living systems
who
Michael Pawlyn: you asking about
Marc O'Brien: open to anyone?
Michael Pawlyn: For me, The really exciting potentially. Is with regenerative design is that we should be able to get to the point where we are actually participating and co-evolving as nature. And that's what the Regenerist group have argued. Yeah I'm also a fan of a philosopher called Frayer Matthews.
Who's, he's articulated a kind of deep philosophical philosophy of biomimicry. And there's one really crucial concept in that which she refers to as current activity which is the way in which organisms in living systems. Don't just exist to survive, but they survive in a way that enhances the existence of the whole system.
And we very rarely done that as humans. There are some indigenous peoples who have shown that is possible. But there are not aware of any really significant examples in industrialized societies. And so that's really where we need to get to. And I'm actually quite critical of the framing of sustainability.
I think it's high time we moved on from sustainable to regenerative because I think sustainability has been far too mechanistic rather than systemic. I also think it's been very anthropocentric just about humans and actually it needs to be about the whole web of life. So it needs to be bilingual.
And also there's a rather deflating sense to the way it's framed, which is the implication that the best we can aspire to with sustainability is to get to a hundred percent less bad. And that's what bill McDonald has argued. I think it's high time. We went beyond that and I've actually just published a coauthored book with someone called Sarah Ishioka in which we've argued this case for moving on from sustainability.
And it's not a case of. Jettisoning everything about sustainability. There's a lot to it, that's valid. But it's time that we transcended and included all the useful bits from sustainability and moved it on in a way that it needs to.
Dian-Jen Lin: I definitely agree with that. And I feel like what Michael was saying is exactly what we're trying to do. So I think I agree that, in an, on an industrial scale, there's not so much that's happening in terms of what human does also benefits the environment, benefits our surroundings, but this is what we're trying to do.
We're trying to inject that climate positivity and the potential of doing something. While we are for instance, generating a revenue stream. So we try to see, okay, capitalism is very based on exploitation information and balance the, where can we find a place in that to inject, but climate positivity to inject back equality to and inject by accessibility and to make it to collaborate interspecies and to actually to enable all species, all live in bringing it's not just humans. To envision and visualize how the future is going to look like. Does that make sense?
Dawn Danby: Good luck on that. Just that one point that you said about how do you get things collaborative? Cause it feels like one, one of the key things.
I think it comes up when we think about designers too, like what's the role of designers and sectors is there's so much collaboration and reciprocity that you have to design for, but yet it is core to looking at, it was one of the big features of regenerative systems is that really cyclical life systems.
And now that they are functioning reciprocal systems. And that framing. I think it's really important when we think about relationships and then part of why we that out is because there's so much work happening right now. And part of why some of us are really bummed about the term sustainability or not.
Marc O'Brien: I don't disagree with that.
Dawn Danby: That there's so much work going on right now with people who are so technology focused and that they forget. It actually, they're finding ways to say no. The relationships between cultures and land don't matter, cause we to be like that kind of framing is one of the more toxic issues that you're going to encounter in the climate dialogue.
So relationality and reciprocal systems is actually really important. It's important when we think about any of this work, it's never been so much. We're going to come in with technologies and corporations to fix everything is anti relational. It's actually tonight.
Dian-Jen Lin: Duke. Does Michael want to say something on that?
Michael Pawlyn: Particularly.
Dian-Jen Lin: Because I want to say a little bit about the sort of a lot. I think probably you all know about it a bit about it. It's the old. The object oriented ontology is to perceive yourself as a species, perceive yourself as an object. And from being an imagining that you are, I don't know, a species or an object, but building a close a piece of clothing manufactured, also effects and to see.
And to try to understand how that journey comes about. And then you can start talking about lifecycle. You can start talking about ecosystem and that's what, that's, how at least I think, in the fashion and there's this family communications that is a really great and wonderful tool for you to learn, to see different perceptions in different areas.
Marc O'Brien: Cool love it. I just got word that we can go for about five more minutes. So about 25 after. And so as we wrap up, maybe each of you can go around and share maybe one key idea or actionable takeaway that the audience can leave with. What's one thing that you would want them to know after leaving this panel about regenerated regeneration, regenerative design biomimicry.
Dawn Danby: So if you're new to work, to looking at climate or looking at planetary issues in your work or your studies you will encounter many sad things and lots of sad information. And. You will become increasingly good at being nihilistic about the state of things. And so take care of yourself, take care of your people.
And remember that we have to be able to like, to be able to do the work. You have to be able to hold that. And then you have to wake up in the morning and be able to do something. And if you're finding that you're putting fold into the undertow of the side of things, but it can be crippling and can actually prevent you from doing work.
There's a dance there and I'm saying it because it comes up for everyone at some point. And so if you're new and you're encountering this stuff in dark, there are lots of other practitioners out there. Lots of other people working in this have been doing it for a long time. And we're here to carry you along.
Marc O'Brien: Great. Thanks, Dawn.
Dian-Jen Lin: Maybe I can just say that. Oh, Michael, you say, I feel like I'm taking the safe. I just want to say, I think, I also relates to what Dawn was saying. I personally suffer from climate anxiety and I realized that, if you're trying to work in sustainably in regeneration, It feels endless. It feels like we're fighting a war that does not see the end. And, with cop 26 happening, we realized that there's more fossil fuel delegates and then any other country that because, and that's very devastating, they're trying to shape our narratives, doing what they used to do and we can't let that happen.
We need to stay strong together and then try to take care of ourselves. Thank you.
Michael Pawlyn: Okay. What I'd add to that is that I think it's really important to learn, to distinguish and challenge certain framings or worldviews. We now know from quite recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, that the way we perceive the world or the way it's described to us has a huge bearing on the way that we behave as a result at a societal level.
And so if, as a society, we have a view of nature as something to be conquered and plundered for resources, then it seems quite normal to do that. But if we actively cultivate the idea of nature as a web of life, and we are an integral part of that, then that will help to cultivate a much more respectful way of dealing with nature.
And I'll give you one more example from a slightly different area, but for me, it's still an important part of regenerative design. It's rethinking our attitudes towards time and thinking about being a good ancestor, thinking in the long term and so on. And. If you think about a framing or a story, like time is money that's been repeated so often.
The people started to think that is the inescapable truth and is not, it's nonsense. That is a story. And it's much easier to see that as a story when you hear a counter story. And my favorite one is from a guy called Karma Tshiteem. He was head of the Gross National Happiness program in Bhutan. And he said, time is not money.
Time is life. And think about the difference in the implications between those, if you're someone that runs a business and your view is time is money, then it would seem normal to you to exploit people and monetize them and not really give a damn. If your view is that time is life, then you're likely to be more respectful of those people. And for yourself, you're likely to think carefully about how you spend your precious time on earth, because one thing that you can be damn sure off, 20 years from now, your kids will be saying to you, mum, dad, what did you do when you knew.
Marc O'Brien: Amazing. Thank you all for your time. And for your knowledge, your wisdom.
