Thanks our guests:
Michelle Fehler, Biomimicry Professional and Clinical Professor
at The Design School, Arizona State University
Rianne Makkink, cofounder Waterschool
and studio MakkinkBey, Netherlands
www.smb-waterschool.nl
Thanks to our cohort:
Chaoyi Lu @chaoyi.lu
Gabriella Rhodes @_rhodesgabriella
James Harlow @jamesharlowart
Lesley Roberts materialencounters.art
Lizzie Mandeno @lizzieshupak
Louise McArthur @louisemcarthurdesign
Sami Kimberley @samikimberley
Sara Muir-Smith @snakebirddesigns
Simone Suss @studiosuss
Sofie Keller sofiekeller.org
Tom Longmate @flumenlabs
YouTube video of final presentation, November 2025
Presentation was part of Public event Regenerative Realities > link
A key focus was in what ways do we need to expand regenerative design practice? Regeneration is not about fixed endpoints or singular solutions; it is an ongoing activation of restorative and relational processes. As practitioners, our participation requires flexibility and responsiveness to local conditions and communities of practice. We are part of these processes, using our unique abilities as creative practitioners to explore strategies for cultivating thriving living systems. This raises important questions: How do we know where and when to engage, and for what duration? What does it mean to design with a system that is alive and constantly evolving?
Every week was build on exercises to develop a relationship to watershed from Sensing: Ways of Knowing the Watershed, Seeking: Revealing Hidden Patterns, Shaping: Prototyping a Signal Change, Storytelling: Weaving Collective Narratives to connecting into a collective presentation.
This design sprint project connects design practice to our watershed, it revisits how we can design and understand whole systems and at the same time questions our role as regenerative practitioner part of a living system. What does it mean to participate in our watershed, what is a watershed and how do we understand our craft and make meaning?
Watershed is not only a geographic boundary that gathers and channels water toward a common outlet; it is a living field of relationships shaped by the movement of water across land, through soil, and within communities. Like craft, it is not one thing but a web of interdependencies; ecological, cultural, and temporal, all situated in place. To understand a watershed is to recognise that nothing occurs in isolation: what is shaped upstream reshapes what lies downstream. In this sense, a watershed is both a physical terrain and a metaphorical one, a shared space of consequence and care. It asks for attentiveness to flow, to accumulation, and to reciprocity. It reminds us that our skills, decisions, and forms of participation gather and move through larger systems, carrying responsibility with them.
Craft is not one thing, but a web of skills, practices, and traditions that are deeply
situated. Craft is not limited to objects or materials. It includes design, social practice, service, and systems, all as forms of craft. Each carries unique skills and approaches, and together they form a constellation of practices rooted in place. It is the way your unique skills are applied with care, intention, and responsibility toward community and environment.
Participation: to participate is more than simply to “be present” or to “contribute” ideas. Participation in regenerative practice requires a shift in posture, from doing for a system to engaging with it. It asks us to step into a reciprocal relationship, recognising that every act of participation alters the field, however subtly, and that we, in turn, are altered by our engagement. Participation in this sense is not a transaction but a process of attunement. It means listening deeply, noticing where energy is already moving, and whether our involvement amplifies or diminishes the vitality of the system
Stewardship is the practice of caring for what is not solely ours, yet to which we are deeply accountable. It is an ethic of relationship rather than an assertion of control. If craft is how our skills take form, and participation is how we enter into reciprocal engagement, stewardship is the posture that guides both, a sustained commitment to the well-being of the whole. Its nuance lies in understanding that stewardship is not ownership, management, or optimization. It asks us to hold something, land, community, knowledge, systems, in trust. The steward does not stand above or outside the system, but within it, shaped by the same flows and limits. Like a watershed, stewardship recognizes that actions accumulate and travel; consequences move beyond their point of origin.
A watershed is not only water moving through land. It is an ontology, a creative, interdependent, unfolding process of participation and relationships.