Regenerative Design: Social Housing and “The Wild House” 

This chapter explores aspects of the regenerative retrofitting of a mock-up, urban social house, modelling a family home environment that materially enables people from all walks of life to experience ‘living with/as nature’ and the material consequences of regenerative design principles within their daily lives.  In partnership with arts and ecology academics, tech organisations and local government social housing providers, we have transformed our renowned Brighton ‘Waste-House’ into the ‘Wild-House’, providing a new living space and associated products as an eco-system of material forms and sensory interactions and experiences. The Wild House seeks to explicitly devise and deploy regenerative material resources in ways that acknowledge both the technical and cultural dimensions that require consideration within the context of more circular ways of working. Through their material resourcing and systemic design, objects and home are all connected to the natural habitats from where they are sourced through both technical and expressive design approaches, augmented by a range of connective, material and sensorial technologies. This we refer to as an ‘Ecology of Things’ (EoT) - a propositional experiment in bolstering material and ecological literacy and aesthetic relationships through a sensory-led experience of the habitats that provide material resources.