Regenerative Lenses: Tools to design for a thriving ecosystem

Reflections on a Process - and how to do it yourself.

Was my pleasure yesterday the latest iteration of the Minimum Viable Lifecycle Analysis workshop, which has now become Regenerative Lenses (still a working title, but punchier.

Overall the workshop was well received and the process is starting to take shape. I will share the photos of the outcomes when I get the documentation through, but for those who would like to try at home, or attempt to apply the process to their own ideas, here’s where to start, along with the basic philosophical underpinning.

I began the workshop with the following question. I invite you to consider the same.

Which is better for the environment? A paper bag, a reusable plastic bag, a cotton bag, or a single use plastic bag?

I ask the students for a show of hands (note - I would think this polling method could be improved) for the sustainability of each product).

Disclaimer:
The results of this process may result in seeing the world differently. A side effect is to see many of the harms we are complicit in. It’s not a happy world view.

Know that:

It’s not your fault, it’s the system you were born into, and you are dependant on to live.

It is within your power (if you work together with others) to change a small part of the system.

Through many of these small changes we can build something better.

Take care not to deceive yourself to make yourself feel better, accept things as they are and then work to improve the world for us all.

I feel this is important as despair can be the result of such lenses, but it is not the intent. We must see the world clearly in both it’s wonder and tragedy if we are to work to improve it. Self Delusion gets us Nowhere, but neither does wallowing in Existential Grief.

This covered, let us process to the Process (feedback welcome as is a work in progress).

Lens 1. The Ethical Compass

The Ethical Compass is not so much a tool as a direction of travel.
It seeks to clarify what regenerative design practices and products should aspire to create. The other lenses help identify which quadrants your product draws from or contributes to. Metaphorically speaking the dominant direction of travel is West (Death - Sunset), whilst we need to orient our culture towards the East (Life - Sunrise).

The red line represents Business as Usual, the dominant design and business pathway practiced today. It extracts valuable resources from the environment (habitat loss is not a finite loss, it is a loss of multiple potentials and services) - the top left quadrant. It dumps toxic wastes into the environment (finite, yet high cost environmental legacies, which are costly to fix) - bottom right quadrant. The product creates a deliberately short period of value (through single use or planned obsolescence (aka designed to die/built to fail) - top right quadrant, before becoming toxic landfill or free range pollutant - bottom right quadrant.

This toxic design pathway is incentivised by our present economic system. Extraction of resource, by under-compensated labourers (aka slaves, or below living wage) = lower costs and higher profits. Externalising costs (AKA dumping wastes in the environment without responsibility or accountability) likewise reduces cost and increases profit. A system that does not KILL or at least severely punish businesses that behave in this manner, will continue to be victims of Giants eating our forests and shitting toxic wastes. But our society does worse than this - it REWARDS them for it. Personally I favour whatever the business equivalent is of heads on sticks, with a hard ban on anybody involved doing anything to make money unless its profiting from cleaning up their mess. If the cost isn’t a deterrent then it’s just a line on a spreadsheet and worth their risk.

The Green Line represent a regenerative design pathway.
The bottom left quadrant represents material resources which are harmful to the environment. Frequently these are the same wastes that are dumped by business as usual. But by viewing them through the lens of resource, we may can consider how they can be food for products, infrastructures, and other beings. Toxicity is a relationship. Harm is a relationship. It’s all a matter of context.

But using materials from the bottom left quadrant eg. waste plastic, we improve our environments and provide a service to the ecosystem that sustains us.

The top right quadrant represents a beneficial output - something that is useful to the individual, society, and/or the environment.

Ideally such outputs should be repairable, organic (ie. remaining useful to ecosystem), designed for disassembly/reuse and created to live as long as they are useful, and then easily recomposed into new systems as needed.

Presently such design patterns are not rewarded. This is something I’m working on with Biomemetic Business Models - Business Model patterns that can thrive in the existing economic perverse incentives and still outcompete Business as Usual Practices. The goal is to Kill the Giants and force adaptation through superior business models (yes I know this is grandiose, but something need to be done to balance the scales).

First however we need to enable designers, inventors and consumers to see clearly the systems we are a part of and consider how to better design products that move us in that direction.

This is why I have helped birth the Quick Life Cycle Analysis. To provide those without access to some basic analytical tools to think more clearly about the environmental impact of products.

With this guiding pattern in mind, let’s return to the bags.

What order did you place the bags in?

I pose this question as it highlights biases and gaps in how we think about products, materials and their environmental relationships. I will come back to this in a moment.

In our consideration of materials there is a strong emphasis on end of life - the plastic bag holds sway in our consciousness due to its presence in our environment. The reusable plastic bag acquires guilt by association, the cotton bag carries favour through its appearance and its “natural” properties, as does paper. Aesthetics, visibility and emotions hold strong sway over our thinking.

The Quick Lifecycle Lens aims to break this pattern by widening the scope of consideration.

Birth (Mining, Farming, Component Manufacturing, Production etc.)
Life (Use, Expected Frequency of Use, Lifespan, Repairability)
Death (Chance of Failure (and likely causes), Planned Obsolescence, End of Life Toxicity, Opportunity for Recycling and Reuse)

When we view the above products through this lens, we get a different view on the overall Harms and Benefits at every point of a products life.

The benefits of a product during its life should outweigh the harms.

Quantifying harms is a challenge - if we get caught up in metrics and measures - static points in dynamic systems we risk getting blindsided by data or falling into a trap of “Heisenberg Metrics” (what we choose to measure is what we choose to grow/reduce, ignoring all other relationships and effects).

Everything has to be considered in Context - in time, in space, in relationship. Water can be thirst quenching, or water can be a flood. Medicine, Food, or Poison all depend on relationship and quantity.

That said Habitat Loss (eg. a forest) is potentially an Infinite Harm - Loss of carbon capture, loss of biodiversity (and the knowledge, potential utility, unmeasurable and ineffable qualities), loss of potential for infinite regeneration and growth, loss of flood defences, loss of soil. The destruction of Habitat is the destruction of shelter and food of billions of beings, and the denial of the infinite life that would stem from them.

On the flip side of the equation, the creation of Habitat is an Infinite Win (Benefit), as the potential for exponential growth and exponential benefits is contained within the Forest and its inhabitants.

The creation of Habitat can only offset its destruction after prolonged periods of time. Speed of Growth and preservation, must outpace Speed of Death and Toxic Desertification.

Note: Toxic Desertification is worse that Death. Death is a natural systems process where nutrients are returned to the soil. We are not killing systems in Natural Ways, we are salting the earth with complex chemicals that the Earth will need even longer periods of time to work out how to eat.

In terms of Moral Weight therefore we must consider Habitat Destruction and Denial of regrowth through poison as heavier burdens than CO2 production - as CO2 is life in waiting - it is an unbalanced cycle. Whilst Habitat production is both a loss of capacity to balance that cycle and a collection of losses that defies measure.

Speed of Death, Slowing Life (Biotic Friction), Desert Maintenance (Industrial Farming Practices) both as primary and secondary effects are essential to consider in our ethical evaluation.

But to come back to the exercise.

Quick Lifecycle Lens

I present to students the outcomes of Quick Lifecycle Lens for Bags, examples below - if you want to see all then please click here for the full presentation.

Based on conducting a quick lifecycle assessment for all bag types listed. When compared, the Cotton bag comes out least favourably, with the reusable plastic bag on top. With even modest reuse (perhaps as a bin bag) the Single Use plastic bag has the ability to improve its environmental relationship (although far from perfect). Whilst the Cotton Bag has Biotic Friction, and Desert Maintenance baked into its production.

Having presented the process and its outcomes. The students are then split into groups of 5 to participant in their own comparative studies, of suggested examples.

This begins with the students are asked to create lists to answer the following, using search engines if required. (in future I may ask them to use a Wardley Map for this purpose, but at present I’m seeing it simple).

For products selected, answer the following questions for each stage of the life cycle.

Birth
(If possible Quantify or Estimate Quantity)
What Resources are used? (eg. Oil)
What Materials are used? (eg. PET Plastic - Specify)
What commodities are used and where are they from (eg. Solar Energy or Oil)?
What Processes are used? (eg. Injection Moulding)
What Components are used? (eg. Outer shell)
What are secondary effects of its Birth? (eg. Deforestation - Flooding, Soil Erosion etc.)

Life
(If possible Quantify or Estimate Quantity)
What Resources are needed to use it? (eg. 1 sqm space in workshop)
What Materials are needed for use? (eg. filament)
What commodities are needed for use and where are they from? (eg. Solar Energy or Oil)?
What byproducts are there of process (eg. Waste)?
What are secondary effects of the products existence?
What is life expectancy?
Is it possible to maintain or repair, what is needed to do so?

Death
Death
(If possible Quantify or Estimate Quantity)

Are there intentional failure points (e.g., planned obsolescence)?
What is risk of catastrophic failure (eg. dangerous/hazadous failure mode - nuclear power)?
What are likely causes of premature death (eg. Water damage)?
What are realistic recycling possibilities?
What wastes are produced?

After this students are invited to use these questions to research more deeply, and consider the harms and benefits of a products full lifecycle. Guiding questions are provided to assist with online research. (although on my first workshop I gave out template prematurely and they just got straight into it - next one will follow this pattern and we will see which is superior method).

After completing the process and a round of reflection (I hope to include photos in future), students where then introduced to DeepSeek and Quick Lifecycle Lens prompt in order to compare their own results and provide them with additional tools to assist in their assessment.

This was a part of a larger workshop that also offered design strategies for regenerative design, and a comparison of existing practices (Circular and Blue Economy).

I offer all tools to the Regenerative Design Community under a BY-SA licence. Please feel free to recommend suggestions as to how to improve.

I feel the next stage will be to combine with Wardley Mapping and then use the combination of these tools to consider specific points of supply chain replacement/evolution as well as combining with a Product Ikigai, and Biomemetic Business Model pathways to market to create a full stack approach to regenerative business.

Let us together find ways to outcompete business as usual with Truly Ethical Businesses grounded in reality, that destroy destructive models and force evolution.