Thematic Group: Communicating the Impacts of Regenerative Design

How do we plan for, understand, and communicate the impacts of regenerative design? And who gets to define what counts as impact in the first place? This working group aims to bring together designers, practitioners, researchers, and cultural producers to collectively explore the tensions and possibilities of regenerative design practices rooted in territorial cultural heritage, commons-based peer production, and more-than-human approaches. The session is structured as a generative and collective enquiry; one that centres the difficulties of measuring practices that are, by nature, relational, slow, and place-specific.

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The working group is moderated by Jessica Guy, coordinator of Regenerative Ecologies of Design & Production project (RED&Pro), bringing together researchers, makers, designers, and communities to move beyond sustainability, toward production systems that are rooted in place, guided by heritage, and built to give back.

Jessica Guy (They/Them) is a designer, maker, and strategic research Lead of Distributed Design at Fab Lab Barcelona | IAAC. Their work focuses on investigating design ontologies and epistemologies through plural perspectives and commoning. Grounded in care, critical hope, and more-than-human perspectives, Jessica’s research examines how design driven by communal values and regenerative practices can shift the modus operandi of design production and education. Jessica was awarded a research fellowship from the Creative Impact Research Centre Europe (CIRCE) in Berlin. Their research paper, co-authored with Milena Juarez and Oscar Gonzalez, on how Fab Labs can enable climate action won Best Paper at the Fab 24 Conference. At Fab Lab Barcelona, Jessica serves as Project Coordinator of the EU Project Regenerative Ecologies of Design and Production (RED&Pro), the Distributed Design Platform, and Make Works Global.