'Regenerative' Design Competition or 'Regenerative Design' Competition
Over the past two months, we ran an internal regenerative design competition. Our goal was to spread awareness of regenerative thinking across the 150-person practice, giving everyone the chance to learn, question, and explore what regenerative design could mean for us, our projects, and our industry.
This summary is not a how-to, but a reflection on how we approached the competition, what we tried, what worked, and what we learned. We hope it offers a framework others can learn from, adapt, or be inspired by.
Our first questions was: is it a competition about regenerative design principles? Or should the competition itself be regenerative?
While our focus was definitely on the former — encouraging ideas that align with regenerative outcomes — we also wanted the process and competition design to embody regenerative thinking. Inspired by initiatives like the Regenerative Design Anti-Conference, we aimed to create the conditions that foster symbiotic relationships within our practice. This included fostering interconnection between teams, disciplines, and hierarchies, and building in feedback loops wherever we could.
We started with the brief, which for regenerative design is complex. It could be as little as stating that a building (any building) must be developed whilst meeting the goal of regenerative design - defined by Constructivist's Oliver Broadbent and James Norman is 'for human and living systems to survive, thrive and co-evolve'.
But this feels quite abstract, so we translated it into five tangible requirements that could be theoretically used in any 'regenerative' brief.
The Brief
Use only materials from the existing built or natural environment within the local bioregion.
Materials must be sourced either from within the existing built fabric or from regenerative harvesting of local natural resources within the boundaries of the bioregion.
Designs should strengthen the link between a flourishing natural world and a thriving community, both economically and socially.
Proposals should demonstrate how the act of designing, building and maintaining the structure brings benefit to people and planet, not just in form but in process.
The building must become a part of nature, not apart from it.
Designs should enable flora and fauna to thrive. The structure should act as an ecosystem participant — integrating with, not separating from, the natural world.
Explore how the project can support other industries and systems, like agriculture, education or energy.
Designers were encouraged to look for symbiotic possibilities, where the building could serve multiple roles and provide value beyond its immediate function.
Be a good ancestor by designing for seven generations ahead, and learning from seven generations past. Submissions had to reflect long-term thinking, balancing urgent needs with future impact.
To guide this thinking, teams were asked to write a letter to future generations in 2200, an intentionally simple prompt to shift thinking from technical solutions to values, legacy, and empathy. A friend of ours even responded to every letter, creating a dialogue across time that many people said was one of the most memorable parts of the whole process.
Making It Project, Practice and Discipline Specific
From there, we tailored the brief to be meaningful for who we are at our core: engineers. We focused on outcomes, not rigid outputs, recognising that regenerative design resists prescriptive metrics and linear check lists. It asks for something deeper: systems thinking, curiosity and a dose of whimsy.
That said, we did include a notional target of 1,000m² of floor area to help scope the design. Many teams challenged whether this needed to be internal space — exactly the kind of critical thinking we were hoping for.
To further ground the brief, we added engineering-specific complexity. Regenerative design is sometimes dismissed as only viable for small, niche projects with limited loads or constraints. We wanted to explore how regenerative thinking could apply to real buildings, with real systems, at real scales.
So, we used a real project, a visitor centre that had stalled years ago. It was chosen as it offered a familiar but flexible context. Open enough to encourage creativity, specific enough to ground design decisions. By starting with a typology that felt closer to regenerative than degenerative, we made the design challenge more accessible.
But we also gave teams room to bend the rules. As Oliver Broadbent writes in his The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, there are levels of regenerative. We don’t need to go from 0 to 100 overnight. In fact, operating in a largely degenerative system (Type 1) often requires compromise, imagination and a healthy dose of whimsy. The power of a competition is that we can selectively ignore or bend existing constraints. The importance is balancing these things. We wanted to make the competition accessible, challenging and, within reason, practically implementable.
Quote
"When we asked how people felt after the competition, the word we heard most was “wholesome.” We couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome, and it’s left us thinking - how can we make more of our day-to-day work feel like this?"
How to get people engaged
Systems in nature survive and thrive because they are interconnected and have symbiotic relationships. This is a core part of regenerative design, and is particularly important to engage people with any initiative. There needs to be ongoing benefits in being part of the system, with enough things reliant on your actions to make it worthwhile acting.
The brief set a high bar. To meet it, we needed more than a standard competition format, we needed a process that encouraged learning, collaboration, and experimentation.
So we designed a programme that brought regenerative design to life across the whole practice.
Putting the Brief into Practice
Weekly Touchpoints
We ran weekly sessions with industry friends, who are also exploring regenerative design, to share their knowledge and how to apply it to the competition. These were more than CPDs, they became live learning environments where new ideas could be applied directly to the competition work.
These workshops also created symbiotic relationships by creating a sense of reciprocity between the organisers and the participants. Instead of setting a brief and stepping back, we encouraged a mutually beneficial and connected cycle of ideas and engagement.
A Regenerative Summer Social
We also tied our annual summer party into the design competition by hosting our summer party at the WWT Barnes Wetland Centre. This immersed all our team, even those not involved in the competition, in nature and gave them the chance to think and learn about regenerative design in an ecologically diverse setting full of feedback loops.
Cross-Team, Cross-Hierarchy Collaboration
Teams included people from every part of the business, not just designers, but operations, people team, marketing, and leadership. For many, it was the first time working directly together, and it made us more connected and interdependent as a practice.
Key was the buy in and involvement of our senior leadership, many of whom were also part of the competition.
Open House & Judging
At the end of the competition, we held a showcase, inviting industry friends to review and vote on the submissions. Each person was given 10 stickers to distribute among the ten teams. This created healthy competition and opened up deeper conversations about the process and concepts. It also gave our team the opportunity to persuade and convince, soft skills which be key to adopting regenerative design outside of the competition.
The grand prize for the competition was a day out to explore a key part of their design. We thought a lot about what additional incentives there could be, what would enable the competition's impact to transcend the submission date. The winning team therefore were given a day out of the office to explore a key part of their design. This creates additional feedback loops and something we hope to offer to more of the teams in the future.
Outcomes & Next Steps
But, the competition wasn’t just about design proposals, it was to give everyone the opportunity to learn about the regenerative design process and think about how it affects them. After the event, we held one-on-one catchups with each team to gather feedback on what worked, what didn’t, and what we could do next. These conversations are now helping shape how we carry the momentum forward.
Becoming a regenerative practice isn’t a fixed destination, it’s a direction of travel, and we’re still moving. Now the submission deadline is passed and prizes awarded, we are continuing our thread of learning and engagement, including how our annual Christmas party can support our broader regenerative ambitions.
As a business and as an industry, we are at the beginning of our journey. But change doesn't happen in a vacuum, so we are keen to co-evolve and co-design the transition collectively.
If you'd like to see the entries or talk about how regenerative principles could apply to your own work, get in touch or come visit us at Society Building Fitzrovia where we’re showcasing the competition over the summer.
