What would it mean to design not only for a less damaged planet, but for a planet capable of thriving?

For decades, sustainable design has encouraged us to reduce: less material, less energy, less waste, while keeping resources in circulation. These efforts remain essential. Yet regeneration asks something more fundamental: to move beyond mitigating harm towards strengthening ecosystems’ vitality and capacity for self-organisation and renewal, while fostering cohabitation within more-than-human ecosystems. It challenges us to see humans not as external actors who manage, restore or repair nature, but as participants within living systems that continuously adapt and co-evolve. Rather than “fixing” nature, regenerative design asks how we might nurture the relationships and interdependencies through which living systems flourish.

Materials offer a compelling place to begin this shift.

In my work with grown and living materials, I am interested not only in their environmental potential, but in how they can reshape relationships between humans, materials and other forms of life. Their regenerative potential goes beyond replacing synthetic, non-renewable alternatives: it lies in recognising materials as active participants within living systems, with their own behaviours, temporalities and dependencies. Microorganisms grow, sense, respond and self-heal. Biomaterials decay and transform. Bioreceptive materials invite other organisms to inhabit them.

This relational potential becomes even more apparent when living materials encounter our bodies. Imagine wearing an interface that is itself alive: sensing, responding to and communicating biological or environmental conditions. Material, human and environment can no longer be understood as separate. The body becomes a meeting place between living systems.

Such encounters introduce growth, responsiveness, transformation and decay - temporalities that conventional products often suppress. A regenerative material approach asks us to design with these cycles, rhythms, and temporalities, strengthening conditions for mutualism, cohabitation, and co-adaptation across species, while inviting practices of care and new possibilities for collective wellbeing.

Yet technological innovation alone will not enable a planet to thrive. A material can be biologically sophisticated while remaining embedded in extractive systems. Regeneration requires a deeper cultural shift: from extraction towards participation, from human-centredness towards ecological interdependence, and from designing for nature towards recognising that we design within it.

Perhaps, then, we need to ask different questions about materials. Not only: Is it renewable? Is it biodegradable? What can it replace? But also: What living systems does it participate in? What relationships does it nurture? Whose lives does it support? And what might flourish through our participation?

A thriving planet will not emerge from a single material or technology. But design can help cultivate the conditions and relationships through which diverse forms of life can flourish and invite us to imagine how we might live differently within them.