Cultivating a regenerative imagination at art and design universities

This short paper explores how art and design universities seek to cultivate a regenerative imagination as a fundamental basis for developing personal work, transdisciplinary projects and enterprises. It aims to unfold key processes and characteristics to start addressing the question of what is (or may be) distinctive about the approach and ethos that art and design schools bring to regenerative design and innovation compared to other HEIs. We argue that one way to position their potentially unique approach is through paying attention to the (relative) absence of conceptual and practical obstacles and inhibitors. Pivotally, art and design school members are not told that humans and the environment are fundamentally separate, or that the latter amount to ‘natural resources’ to be exploited by humans. Instead, they are encouraged to engage directly and experimentally with other beings and to apply their imaginations to perceiving relational patterns and possibilities that might or might not currently exist or be directly observable. When moving from the ‘ecological’ to the ‘regenerative’ imagination, we find that a primary difference is that the regeneratively oriented creator or group will be ultimately searching for (and elaborating, valid- ating) certain ‘regenerative potentials’. In short, these amount to opportunities to fruitfully and relationally participate in naturally-occurring (but increasingly disrupted and diminished) biological and ecological processes with the purpose of enhancing their ability to regenerate while speaking to human needs. This paper reflects on an emergent modality of regenerative imagining, designing and innovating that contrasts with science and engineering-driven approaches in several important aspects, rooted as it is in a more-than-human ethos that stresses the ontological equivalence of all forms of life.