Design has shaped the way I see the world for as long as I can remember.
For most of my life, I thought about design through the lens of human experience. I was drawn to the way it could shape how we move, interact, feel, and connect with the world around us. Over time, that perspective began to widen. I started thinking not only about how design shapes our experience of the world, but how it shapes the world itself. Not just for people, but within the larger living systems we are part of.
Last year, while volunteering with Third Horizon Earth, I was introduced more deeply to regenerative development. It was one of the first times I encountered a way of thinking that connected design, ecology, community, systems, and future making in such a grounded way. It also shifted how I understood the role of design. Design began to feel less like the creation of isolated objects and more like something relational. Something that can support healthier connections between people, place, material, and environment.
The more I engaged with these ideas, the more I started rethinking what makes a design truly meaningful. Not just whether it functions well or looks beautiful, but whether it is rooted in context. Whether it reflects the lives, knowledge, and materials of the place it comes from. Whether the process of making it creates connection rather than distance.
I realized there was only so much I could learn from afar. If I wanted this way of thinking to genuinely shape me as a designer, I needed to engage with it more directly. Regenerative development is deeply rooted in local communities, local knowledge, and local environments. To begin understanding it, I felt I needed to listen in person, learn from people more closely, and explore what it means to design in collaboration with those realities rather than simply designing around them.
That is where The Regen Project began.
It started from a desire to learn, to listen, and to collaborate. To meet people working in different places around the world, to understand how regeneration takes shape in their contexts, and to let those encounters inform the designs I create. For me, the project is not only about research. It is also about exploring how design can become more meaningful when it emerges through relationships, through shared learning, and through a deeper respect for place.
At its core, this project is part of my journey as a designer. A way of asking how design can be more connected, more grounded, and more responsive to the systems it enters. And a way of discovering how collaborating with people, places, and local ways of knowing can lead to designs that carry more depth, care, and meaning.
