REGEN: Toward a tool for regenerative thinking

To facilitate the practice of regenerative design and development, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) and a core team envisioned a forum, a repository of information and a framework that are capable of stimulating dialogue among a diversity of practitioners and decision-makers with different disciplinary backgrounds and viewpoints. The REGEN tool is a work in progress and intended to support any regenerative design and development process, particularly in the early planning and design stages, with new questions and new types of information organized into a web of interconnection. It is intentionally neither a rating system nor a universal definition of regenerative design. Instead, it is a systems-based model of making connections at and between systemic levels, issue level and strategic level, thereby allowing the discovery of synergies, and encouraging a dialogue about place and quality of life for all life. The conceptual development of the REGEN tool is presented along with thoughts for its realization. The regenerative design process has the potential to change worldviews in a constructive way when it brings together new types of information, examples of process, and a perspective that is systems based, place based and oriented on positive outcomes.