Designing in a broken system: Reflections from the World Design Congress 2025 and what they mean for Becoming Regenerative

Arriving at the Barbican amid the September tube strikes, we joined the 1,200 attendees and 120 speakers from 22 countries, keen to observe and situate our emerging findings within rapidly expanding discussions of regenerative innovation and change at the World Design Congress. One of B-Regen’s Co-Investigators, Dr Delfina Fantini Van Ditmar, was chairing a panel, and fellow Co-Investigator Dr Onya Idoko joined her for the two-day event, alongside Post-Doctoral Researcher Dr Katie Pfeiffer and our Research Project Manager, Hannah Lyons Tsai.

Design for Planet: promise and blind spots

The conference was optimistic, with a clear consensus that the field of purpose-led design is growing as the Design Council launched Design for Planet, its five-year strategy looking to support those working in the UK’s design economy to address the climate crisis.

Regeneration was also explored through policy / economic change (within a session with Marianna Mazzucato and Kate Raworth) and cultural activism (by Brian Eno and Tori Tsui). Here, both the strengths and limits of design were explored in depth. Within a provocative session led by Danny Sriskandarajah (NEF), Kate Raworth (author of Doughnut Economics) and Mariana Mazzucato (UCL and author of Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism) discussed how entire economies, business models and policies need to be redesigned. They suggested that closer attention is needed to the mechanisms of policymaking, with concrete social-ecological goals and pathways to change being set through governance structures. For instance, Mazzucato noted that the foundations for better policy already exist within human-rights pillars, yet they’re not currently being implemented. Actually holding people accountable and designing that into contractual structures could make change possible.

While the definition of design here is stretched to policy-shaping and economy-restructuring, the meaning was clear: the ways in which our world is built, and the actions which are incentivised within it, are not inevitable but created by people’s choices. Therefore, they can be changed - redesigned - towards better ends, but this involves engaging with the broader systems of finance, governance, policy, and procurement. Tori Tsui issued a challenge here: if the world is designed, “so many of us are at the mercy of what you [designers] decide to do with your imagination… Everything we're witnessing in the world is the product of someone's imagination,” yet, she presented, “what can be imagined can be reimagined."

This obviously poses a challenge for individual designers or makers who look to influence systems outside of their control. These tensions came into sharp focus in the panel chaired by Delfina, which explicitly explored what happens as nature-centred design meets preexisting standards, expectations, and governance barriers. Titled ‘Nature as a Designer: When Nature is on the Team’, the panel featured Edward Hill (Materra), Milica Apostolovic (AECOM), Rhea Thomas (SeaSprout), Prof. Robert Fish (Imperial College London / Natural Environment Research Council) and Simeon Rose (Faith in Nature). It set out to answer a key question: what happens when we treat nature not as a resource, but as a collaborator? 

Delfina began the panel by setting out a provocation. Collaboration is a central value in design — a powerful means of breaking down silos, fostering inclusion, and enabling more systemic ways of thinking. Increasingly, we hear about the idea of collaborating with nature as we seek to restore, repair, and reimagine our relationship with the living world. But, she argued, this language also invites reflection: nature doesn’t explicitly agree to collaborate, so when we speak of it as a partner, what are we really saying? Might we, perhaps unintentionally, be projecting human values and agency onto non-human systems? Could this be a one-sided relationship dressed in the language of mutuality? How has working with nature changed how you design?

The conversation began by focusing on how principles and practices evolve, as natural rhythms, agencies, and limits come to be integrated into design practice. Yet, while starting from the framing of collaboration with more-than-humans, it quickly drifted into the challenges faced as designers attempt to shift standards, aesthetics, and processes to be more aligned with living systems. In conversation with Rhea Thomas, the challenges of new material forms emerged. Noting that regenerative and biodegradable materials are often judged against plastic standards and legacy systems derived from fossil fuels, she described how her products, made from leftover shellfish waste, are “designed to break down” but end up penalised for doing so. The deeper challenge is not material innovation but the standards, expectations, and invisible rules of the system. 

Milica Apostolovic raised a related problem: prevailing skills gaps. Working with nature requires people who can bridge disciplines which require different technical expertise, but also different intellectual frameworks and understanding of ecology. She presented a tempered vision: to make improvements within a system geared against regenerative outcomes, one must understand both economic feasibility and real environmental cost and see how they weigh up for different stakeholders. Naive enthusiasm or ecological idealism only goes so far without support from corporations, incentives from policy, and technical expertise in implementation. 

To shift the odds in nature’s favour within decision-making processes, new governance and structures are needed. Simeon Rose from Faith in Nature presented a compelling case on how corporations might redesign themselves to include more-than-human perspectives and benefits in their corporate boards. Faith in Nature gives ‘nature’ a “seat at the table”, Rose put it, and is represented by two lawyers with the right to consult whomever they need to make appropriate decisions on nature's behalf. Rose described how their guardianship model was intentionally shared and was open-source, in case other companies wanted to emulate it. 

Across the session, panellists touched on the underlying issue: changing mindsets. The persistent clash between ecological values and market logics, and the prevailing challenges innovators face within systems, infrastructures, and regulations which reward degenerative outcomes, points to fundamental shifts in feeling, valuing, and acting required for regenerative practices. Regeneration requires a society which understands the value of the ecosystems in which it is embedded. As Edward Hill put it, it requires society to see the soil as vital for our own survival rather than a resource to exploit. Here, public engagement plays a role. As Robert Fish pointed out, scientific facts alone don’t shift policy; mobilised publics which make nature visible and meaningful may be better positioned to do so.

The tensions and challenges highlighted in this panel echo the frictions we saw across the Congress—and those emerging within our own research at B-Regen. When bold regenerative ideas meet the limits of existing infrastructures, funding structures, and institutional habits, actors are forced to continually negotiate between what is possible today and what might emerge as more responsive futures take shape.

What this means for Becoming Regenerative

Across all speakers, a common thread was that regeneration demands new mindsets and systems, not just better products. Whether through financial mechanisms, legal representation (as with Faith In Nature) or cultural shifts, the work ahead is fundamentally about reimagining processes within the ecosystems that support life.

The WDC made clear that regeneration cannot remain rhetorical - and B-Regen’s work is helping articulate the complex, real pathways into regenerative practice. Our accepted WDC paper is a summary of our preliminary findings spanning pedagogy, entrepreneurial journeys and policy conditions; evidence that regenerative imagination from design education meets friction in market systems.

As our research continues, we will keep tracing how regenerative ideas emerge, evolve and navigate these constraints in real-world contexts.

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