Knowledge of making life: design patterns for regenerative-adaptive design

An astonishing intense fascination is under way in the design sciences, where the words of ‘living structures’ and ‘adaptive’ are being linked with ‘technology. In part fuelled by the emergence of the Anthropocene discourse, these words are inspiring authoritative new insights into the workings of wild nature, humanity’s position and responsibility to planet Earth, and is being articulated through the rapidly increasing science of pattern theory. The new terminology is provoking the design sciences to seriously consider technologically-informed innovation in design and new possibilities including living technology, morphogenetic sequences, self-organisation, generative codes, biophilia, biomimetics and regenerative-adaptive design, opening the doors to a new era in ecology-informed design. The idea of design as an adaptive and transformation process, is at the core of the whole systems theory pioneered by Alexander in A Pattern Language (1977) and The Nature of Order (2001–2005). Alexander positioned this hypothesis in generative codes supported by morphogenetic sequences. Drawing upon Alexander’s The Nature of Order (2001–2005), this paper advances a regenerative-adaptive design theory (Roös, 2016), towards a holistic integrated design method that incorporates the principles of regenerative design with an adaptive pattern language that re-establishes human wholeness with nature and offers relevant strategies towards resilience; in essence creating a living technology.