The IASDR2021 Workshop The Art of Regenerative Design

The Art of Regenerative Design Workshop invites participants to explore a new and original mode for design to contribute to social and regenerative transformation. It’s a playful design mode that embraces uncertainty and unanticipated discovery – and helps establish an inner relationship with that which we don’t know that we know. Arts-based interventions create a gateway to our feelings, intuitions and senses, the deeper and diversified ways of knowing. It’s a mode in which what is designed, and the transformation of the designer unfolds hand in hand as part of a bigger eco-system. Participants bring a question, a challenge, or a theme from their own project they would like to explore individually and collaboratively. During the workshop they experience a process alternating between physical exercises (modeling in clay, drawing, creative writing) and reflection (note-taking and ‘show & tell’). The arts-based interventions allow participants to gather knowledge about the subject with all their ways of knowing, rather than just the thinking function. This in turn can lead to meaningful insights and a comprehensive understanding of the question or project they are working on. Hence, the workshop provides participants with new, original modes of creating knowledge which they can return to and incorporate in their practice. In the two weeks following the workshop participants are invited to reflect on the interventions in an interview with one of the workshop organizers. In January 2022, the IASDR conference and the participants will receive a condensed overview of the findings serving as a workshop evaluation.