Becoming Regenerative

The mission of the ESRC/AHRC-funded Becoming Regenerative Project and the B-Regen Lab is to investigate how regenerative ideas emerge, evolve, and gain momentum, with a focus on the UK, Netherlands, Japan and South Korea. The project also explores how design can catalyse radical regenerative practices and imaginations – including interspecies collaborations – while speaking to the broader question of how art and design education can co-shape regenerative innovation. Our core aim is to unpack, in unprecedented detail, the currently unfolding journeys of creators striving to enact regenerative ventures in real-world contexts. By doing so, we will showcase pioneering examples of regenerative innovation that engage in thoughtful ways of thinking, caring, relating, and making, based on a strong sense of inhabiting a shared more-than-human world. Through a unique combination of evidence-based and imaginative research methodologies, Becoming Regenerative will shed new light on the creative and entrepreneurial processes that drive regenerative projects, all the way from the discovery of opportunities, promising materials and initial motivations to actualisation and impact. By consciously adopting a reflective methodological approach, we challenge hegemonic paradigms and embrace diverse and pluralistic methodological perspectives that can open up genuinely novel perspectives and possibilities. Ultimately, we aim to offer a critical yet hopeful exploration of how regenerative ventures – as well as the ecosystems that support them – can transcend existing models of creative entrepreneurial development. As such, we intend to contribute new answers on how ventures can help the world become more regenerative by transcending systems of profit maximisation and unsustainable extraction through consistently serving communities and revitalising the planet.