Soenke Zehle, Sónia Alves
Having worked with a co-creation method that grants the “lab” a key role in system design processes, we have become fascinated with the foundational role of the lab as shared point of departure, but also a key dynamic (em)powering expanded forms of co-creation engagement (Jones & Van Ael, 2022). To explore how our teaching on generative and regenerative systems at an art and design academy can be redesigned for greater impact, we have co-founded two labs with a multidisciplinary team – a Generative Arts and Design Lab and a Regenerative Economy Lab – based on a lab model that has helped us understand the foundational role of labs in such co-creative, impact-oriented learning processes. Conceptually, this has been inspired by the coupling of generation and regeneration in research on socio-technical-ecological systems (STES), and we see this essay as a contribution to the STES conversation. We aim to operate complementary labs exploring holistically the dynamics of generation and regeneration (cutting across the boundaries of socio-technical-ecological system) in a way that can (em)power a co-creative process taking us beyond the lab and into studio, arena, and agora contexts. In doing so, we want to attend to the conflicts between acceleration (the disruptive dynamic of generative systems, here mainly in the sense of data-driven ai platforms) and deceleration (the ecological timescales of regeneration). MORROW.TODAY names both one of the labs and our approach to agency, intelligence, and impact: reframing STES design as a politics of time to foreground the need to align multiple temporalities for a regenerative future.
Keywords: generative systems, lab, more-than-human design, regenerative economy, socio-technological-ecological systems (STES), triple loop learning