Conference Agenda

Ruderal Definition seeks to co-create a definition of regenerative design through collaborative documentation and critical reflection. Regenerative Design as a theory and a practice is increasingly invoked across a multiplicity of design domains, yet its meaning is fluid and unresolved, and our lexicon is fragmented—inviting both productive plurality and the risk of greenwashing and dilution. Our exploratory workshop treats this disturbed semantic ground as ruderal: a site where meaning can coalesce and stabilise through shared inquiry. The session positions regenerative design as an emergent practice and seeks to produce artefacts, specifically mapping, concepts, and relationships, that will help designers speak rigorously across fields without eclipsing industry- and place-based differences. We aim to surface productive tensions and generate a living, publicly accessible knowledge artefact that captures the multiplicity of regenerative approaches while identifying areas requiring further conceptual development. 

We will address three connected research questions: 

 

How do researchers-designers understand regenerative design principles across diverse contexts, and what tensions, gaps, or insights emerge when we map our practices against a collective, proposed theoretical framework? 

How can collaborative mapping serve as a rigorous method for recording, verifying, and interrogating design research knowledge beyond traditional textual formats? 

What new relational understandings emerge when place-based regenerative practices are situated in cross- and transdisciplinary dialogue, revealing patterns, absences, and possibilities across cultural, industry, and economic boundaries? 

To paraphrase Randolph Glanville (1981), design research is not just a practice of creative exploration for desired change in products and systems, but a model for better research, a designed process for scientific discovery, as well as the invention of artefacts.  

This workshop seeks to create and test a definition of regenerative design that emerges as a system of looking with, thinking with, and responding with the world we are entangled in. Can this definition hold across academic fields, geographies, and praxes, and can we discover shared phenomenologies of this robust design definition in a collaborative creative exercise?  

Through documentation, word play, critical reflection, and collaborative mapping, we seek to create research knowledge, in real time, among the communities in which it will be used. We will then document these findings through photography, ephemera, and field notes.   

Artificial Intelligence is now part of design education, which raises the question of whether these tools build students' critical thinking and creative voice, or quietly erode them. This workshop treats participants' own tool use as the object of study. In small groups, students, educators, and practitioners work with NotebookLM environments that are preloaded with research, institutional AI policies, and classroom resources. They will use the system as a thought partner while documenting their exchanges. They isolate sources, capture notes, and participate in a structured reflection during which they examine how that mediation shaped their reasoning and discussion. The aim is to test our understanding of how AI tools can cultivate authentic creative voices and critical thinking skills.

Note: This workshop is best experienced with a Google account. Facilitators recommend that participants bring a laptop that is logged into a personal Google account or a mobile device with the NotebookLM app already downloaded and logged into.