Full Circle: Design Without End

Our planet is reaching a critical point. Human development since the Industrial Age has thrown the earth’s ecosystem out of balance, depleting its natural resources, contaminating water, damaging soil, polluting air, and negatively impacting the climate through the unchecked use of natural gases.

The way to solve environmental degradation and climate change is to redesign our approach to making things. At present, most designers use human-centered design practices which leads them to focus on a single problem and finding solutions for it. Regenerative Design asks that we see ourselves and our actions as small parts of much larger systems and that we design in ways that strengthen and replenish natural systems instead of depleting them. 

Full Circle: Design Without End, an exhibition at MODA from March to September of 2022, introduced visitors to Regenerative Design and the systemic design approaches like Cradle to Cradle (C2C) and biomimicry that inform it. Full Circle showcased the work of designers using and experimenting with regenerative approaches to realize works ranging from large-scale architectural projects to everyday products; and it provided real-world actions that can be taken by everyone to address the climate change challenge we are facing.