Changing the Nature of ‘Things’

This paper is the first in a series of transdisciplinary explorations. It brings together
reflections from two design and technology practitioners and educators from leading
international non-profits (the FabLab Network and Tactical Tech) with nearly 20 years of
experience in digital fabrication and the impact of technology on society. The texts are a
synthesis of a series of discussions, built on a shared understanding of the role of design
and technology and the current challenges we, as societies, and the planet face.
The urgency of climate and environmental challenges invites a complex reading of design
in the context of digitalisation. We need to think about design as a creative problem-solving
process and as a catalyst for radically changing the nature of things. The integration of
digital and hybrid solutions into design practice is an opportunity to revise approaches
to design, with the potential to drive the regeneration of our natural ecosystems and not
just mitigate their destruction, moving from a human-centred to a life-centred design
mode. Data-driven technologies are increasingly becoming a part of many environmental
and climate-related responses, from geo-engineering to ecological conservation to
disaster mitigation and management, as well as being essential to the facilitation of new
approaches to designing products and services. Design for digitalisation and regeneration
can facilitate the move away from designing objects towards designing material flows and
from designing ‘things’ to designing systems.
Digital regenerative design is a dynamic and evolving field of practice, and there is
therefore a pressing need to approach it in a more entangled way, embedding methods
that support experimentation, impact analysis, learning and iteration. For this approach
to succeed, there is a need for a planetary-scale digital design intervention that entails
continuous focused efforts for at least a decade and considers its effects for at least a
century. If designers, technologists, communities and industries around the world are
able to support and champion independent spaces for critical reflection across disciplines,
as well as support design-led environments that foster open learning and iteration, then
a regenerative digital design movement may emerge that can play a significant role in
enabling the transition that our societies and our planets need.
The paper brings together different perspectives on the gap between the intention of how
‘digitally mediated’ and hybrid things are designed and the way they are realised. The
dialogue, and resulting texts, are an exploration of the synergies and tensions between
these perspectives: the potential and realities of digital technologies for regenerative
design; the shared hopes and limitations of the implementing environment and the ways
in which we, the authors, incorporate these dimensions into design teaching, theory and
practice and into the continuation of our work with international non-profits over the last
two decades.