Cultural and technological shifts. Societal and environmental drifts. What will tomorrow’s objects and spaces be made of? Will form, fabrication and experience follow intention? And can design foster mutualistic relationships within the natural world? Solely focusing on designing the new, however, is unsustainable. While navigating the traps of anthropocentricity and technological solutionism, there is also a need to ground design in the plurality of human and nonhuman realities.

Unmaking the linear

A strategic framework for advancing regenerative practice. It challenges the extractive nature of most design processes and explores alternatives grounded in ecological responsibility and living systems intelligence. Each strategy reconsiders production, consumption, and value—aiming to move design beyond contemporary industrial logics toward adaptive ways of making.

Cite this framework: Olivier Cotsaftis (2023). Unmaking the Linear: A Strategic Framework for Regenerative Practice. Author’s website, accessed [Month Day, Year].

Unmaking the linear

A strategic framework for advancing regenerative practice. Each strategy reconsiders production, consumption, and value—aiming to move design beyond contemporary industrial logics toward adaptive ways of making.

1. Rethink current paradigms. Imagine alternatives. Unlock regenerative potentials. Use alternative resources and resource traceability tools. Design policy innovations.
2. Redesign for disassembly and/or decay. Reduce resource consumption through advanced manufacturing (e.g., digital and biofabrication). Use mono-materials where possible. Lower energy consumption.
3. Refuse. Reduce consumption. Incentivise behavioural change. Adopt degrowth business models.
4. Reuse instead of replacing.
5. Repair instead of discarding.
6. Restore to extend lifecycle. Retrofit to improve performance and experience.
7. Repurpose. Revive resources through upcycling.
8. Recover resources through relevant collecting, sorting and processing systems.
9. Rot (decay) organic materials through home or industrial composting.
10. Rest resources for future use.

Designing conditions for coexistence

The mutualistic entanglements that shape the systems in which we live are often overlooked. From here, regenerative and more-than-human design offer a rethinking of anthropocentric narratives, decentering the human from the design process and positioning co-evolving mutualism as a primary objective. Beyond symbolic redistribution of agency to nonhuman collaborators, these practices move from speculation to operation through the construction of conditions that support the coexistence of living species with other living and nonliving things.

Designing conditions for coexistence

The mutualistic entanglements that shape the systems in which we live are often overlooked. From here, regenerative and more-than-human design offer a rethinking of anthropocentric narratives, decentering the human from the design process and positioning co-evolving mutualism as a primary objective. Beyond symbolic redistribution of agency to nonhuman collaborators, these practices move from speculation to operation through the construction of conditions that support the coexistence of living species with other living and nonliving things.

Beyond binaries: New relationships

Our relationship with nature is rather binary. We either want to exploit it or save it. None of this is beneficial in the long term. What we perhaps should recognise is that nature is not an outsider.