Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Jon Goodbun, and Tuukka Toivonen
Delfina and Tuukka’s position paper* explores how art and design universities seek to cultivate a regenerative imagination as a fundamental basis for developing personal work, transdisciplinary projects and enterprises. It aims to unfold those characteristics to start addressing the question of what is distinctive about the approach and ethos that art and design schools bring to regenerative design and innovation.
The authors argue that a way to “explain” the existence of this catalytic environment is through the (relative) absence of conceptual and practical obstacles and inhibitors: art and design school members are not told that humans and the environment are fundamentally separate (the latter amounting to ‘natural resources’ for the former); they are also not told to refrain from engaging directly and experimentally and neither are they told to stop applying their imaginations to perceiving relational patterns and possibilities that might or might not currently exist.
When moving from the ecological to the regenerative imagination, we find that a primary difference is that the regeneratively oriented creator or group will be ultimately searching for (and elaborating, validating) certain regenerative potentials. In short, these translate to opportunities to participate in naturally occurring biological and ecological processes in a way that supports life’s abilities to regenerate and sustain itself while often also speaking to human existence.
The short paper reflects on an emergent modality of regenerative imagining, designing and innovating that contrasts with science and engineering-driven approaches in several important aspects (while in conversation with both).
Delfina and Tuukka’s exploratory position paper for this session makes a positive argument for the existence of an intellectual and experimental space within art and design schools, which can create “an emergent modality of regenerative imagining, designing and innovating.” In this dialogue session with Dr Jon Goodbun, they will explore the very real barriers, “false consciousness,” and indeed dangers around the conceptions and possibilities of both design and design schools within a context of unfolding capitalist-crisis-in-the-web-of-life, but will nonetheless attempt to define what are the potential positive future scenarios for a regenerated and regenerating conception and practice of design, design research and design education, drawing upon our various experiences and schools of thought and practice.
*Cultivating a Regenerative Imagination at Art and Design Universities
ProfileS
Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, PhD is a Research Professor at the Avans Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology on Biodesign and More than Human Perspectives. She co-directs the UKRI-funded Becoming Regenerative Lab and holds a Senior Research role at the Royal College of Art. She holds a BA in Biology and completed her PhD at the Royal College of Art in the School of Design, where she has taught in the MA Design Products, MSc/MA Innovation Design Engineering, and MA Fashion programmes. Driven by her interest in ecological thinking, reflective practices and inter-relations as a systemic response to the environmental collapse, Delfina’s critical practice examines material ethics of care and the necessary paradigm shift in design. She co-founded the Design Research Society Special Interest Group on Design and Ethics. In 2021, she was chosen as one of the Future Observatory Design Researchers in Residence at the Design Museum in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Jon Goodbun’s research explores architecture within a broader context of systems-theoretic discourses, focusing on concepts such as ecological aesthetics and environmental semiotics, which he derives from Gregory Bateson’s anthropological cybernetics. Trained as an architect, Goodbun currently runs the seminar program on The MA Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London and has an environmental arts, architecture and research practice – Rheomode – based in Greece. His recent work, particularly in relation to Climate Justice and the Environmental Architecture programme at RCA, emphasises the need for a dialogical re-conceptualisation of design, planning, and strategy to address the evolving demands of global and local Green New Deals. His co-authored book, *The Design of Scarcity* (2014), has been translated into German (2018) and Greek (2020). Goodbun is also working on a new book titled *The Ecological Calculus*, which argues for an understanding of architecture as a foundational systems theoretic practice, and reads Marxian World Systems Ecology approaches together with a Batesonian cybernetic aesthetics. He is currently engaged in three major research projects: the AHRC-DFG joint-funded ‘Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design’ (which is supporting his attendance at this event), and the RCA RKE funded work using evaporative cooling ’The Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens’, and finally ‘Rheomode Ikaria’, a regenerative permaculture-inspired landscape experiment.
Tuukka Toivonen, PhD (Oxon.) directs the UKRI-funded Becoming Regenerative Lab that brings together investigators from Loughborough University London, University College London and the Royal College of Art to examine how regenerative designs, startups, and innovations emerge. He is a member of the faculty at STEaPP, University College London and a Reader in Regenerative Design and Innovation at Loughborough University London. Tuukka’s research explores creative processes in relation to regeneration, design and the more-than-human world. Tuukka’s empirical work has been published in prestigious outlets such as the Academy of Management Journal and Stanford Social Innovation Review. He writes regularly for the legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton and supports emerging transdisciplinary startups in the regenerative sector. www.tuukkatoivonen.org