An interview with Riel Bessai, PhD researcher at the Faculty of Industrial Design at TU Delft.
What does regeneration really mean and why is sustainable design still struggling to create real change? These are some of the questions explored by designer and researcher Riel Bessai in his PhD. Rather than focusing only on technical solutions, he looks at the bigger picture: the economic systems, cultural values and political structures that shape how design is practised.
In this interview, Elise Blondel, community manager of the Regenerative Futures Community, speaks with Bessai about his journey from engineering to regenerative design and why “regeneration is not going to happen from a conference room.”
From engineering to regeneration
Bessai began his career as an engineering consultant in Canada. “I was doing acoustics, noise and vibration work, which is quite a specific kind of compliance work across a variety of industries. What was nice about it was that it allowed me to experience the back end of how things actually work. I worked on wind farms, and I was up on the roofs of factories carrying out measurements.” While the work offered insight into how industries operate, it left little room for creativity.
“I always liked design and I always wanted to work on applied technologies for sustainability.” That ambition led him to TU Delft’s MSc in Industrial Design Engineering, a programme that focuses on the technical take on design.
“For my thesis, I focused on carbon-negative materials and how we might approach carbon sequestration through design. That work was quite successful and eventually led me to start a PhD on the same topic. For example, if we genuinely want to scale up carbon-negative design or production, what would that mean beyond CO2-related impacts, for example in terms of land use or impact on communities?”
Why sustainable design falls short
During his PhD, Bessai began to question why sustainable design, despite its promising concepts, has struggled to deliver meaningful change. While ideas such as regenerative design and carbon sequestration aim to move beyond incremental improvements and actively counter ecosystem collapse and rising CO₂ levels, they remain largely unimplemented. “These ideas exist, but they’re not being implemented at scale. So the question is: what’s standing in the way?”
Drawing on post-growth thinking — a critique of economic models built on continuous expansion — he reframed his research more fundamentally: “In one line, I’m looking at how material design practices can support a transition to a post-growth society, one that operates within planetary boundaries, isn’t perpetually trying to expand, and provides for both human and ecosystem well-being. And my claim is that this is only possible if we start to consider the socio-political implications of technology, and expand our understanding of what design actually is.”
This is only possible if we start to consider the socio-political implications of technology, and expand our understanding of what design actually is.
Regeneration as a multi-layered concept
“For me, regeneration primarily means a society within ecological cycles. But currently, we are exceeding those limits and overshooting planetary boundaries. That means that we cannot just aim at finding balance and keeping the system as it is. We first need to repair the imbalance before we can find true long-term stability,” says Bessai.
Regeneration implies a societal transformation. To structure this understanding, Bessai draws on a model from culturalanthropology: ‘I look at it across three layers’, he explains, ’technology, social structure and culture’.
- Technology refers to the entirety of technical systems through which we interface with the environment and meet our needs like housing, food, and transport.
- Social structure concerns how production and resources are organised and distributed, which is essentially the economic layer, or political economy.
- Culture relates to shared values, collective purpose and how people understand their relationship to one another and to the natural world.
“Yet much of what is currently labelled regenerative design remains confined to the technological level. This is where post-growth thinking becomes relevant. By questioning economic models built on continuous expansion, it pushes the debate beyond materials and technologies towards political economy and culture.”
Yet much of what is currently labelled regenerative design remains confined to the technological level.
The limits of metrics and the value of local knowledge
When asked how regenerative design can be measured, Bessai acknowledges the dilemma. While he agrees that clearer evaluation is important to prevent greenwashing, he also questions the underlying assumption that regeneration can be fully captured in metrics. “Regenerative design implies leaning into the complexity and interconnectedness of natural systems, which is very difficult to break apart and metricise.” He argues that the modern scientific mindset leans towards measuring, controlling and optimising, an approach that has also shaped how we relate to nature. “There’s a limit to how much you can measure.” Ultimately, he worries that the desire to quantify regenerative potential “is counterintuitive to the ethos of regeneration, which is not about controlling and optimising nature for our own sake.”
There’s a limit to how much you can measure.
Rather than relying solely on universal metrics, Bessai suggests that regeneration depends on local, experience-based knowledge. “I really like wine tasting,” he says with a smile. “You can taste the quality of the land management practices in the product. More importantly, these producers possess an extraordinarily deep understanding of their ecosystems. They can speak in detail about soil conditions, pest management, the impacts of climate change and the challenges of farming without synthetic inputs.”
Yet that knowledge is inherently local. “It’s context-specific. It’s not scalable,” he says. “A grower managing ten or twenty hectares cannot simply expand to several hundred and maintain the same intimate understanding of the land.” If such knowledge only functions at a certain scale, the question becomes whether production itself should be organised accordingly. For Bessai, this is where bioregional approaches become essential. Regeneration may not lie in ever more sophisticated tools to scale up local knowledge, but in recognising its limits and adjusting our systems to fit them.
Building space for change
Applying regenerative principles doesn’t necessarily create “better” products, at least not in the way we currently value products or services. Bessai challenges us to see value not just in the performance of the final product or in end-user satisfaction, but across the entire production chain and its wider impact on society and environment. “I know a guy in Rotterdam who makes his own bike frames,” Bessai explains. “He welds them by hand, one by one. His bikes will never compete with mass-produced carbon fiber bicycles sold in every big store. But he loves his work, makes a living from it, and enjoys creativity and control over his craft. That’s where the true value of his bikes lies. It’s not just the product itself, but the way it is made.”
In the commercial world, he continues, design is “just a tool to produce more goods and services and sell more things and optimise business to make attractive products.” What is needed, instead, is something more fundamental. “We need to change this sort of core fabric of society. And that’s a role for designers.”
We need to change this sort of core fabric of society. And that’s a role for designers.
“But unless there’s a space in which designers are given money and resources and time to work on these problems without commercial pressure or obligations, then design will only ever be that.” His PhD funding provided the time and freedom to put these ideas into practice without commercial constraints. One example is a carbon-sequestering public garden he developed with a community centre in Amsterdam. Together with local residents and children, he ripped up paving tiles, introduced bio-based materials and biochar into the soil, and turned a former parking lot into a communal green space.
Photo 1: The Carbon commons living lab (process) - a living lab set up to experiment with carbon commoning - organizing carbon sequestration to directly benefit communities.
Photo 2: The carbon commons living lab (outcome) - a public garden and community space was co-constructed to sequester carbon in the 2nd life bio-based materials, soil (biochar), and greenery
Get your hands dirty
Asked what key insight he would share with other researchers working on regeneration, Bessai does not hesitate. “Regeneration is not going to happen from a conference room.” Meaningful change, he argues, requires direct engagement: “get some dirt under your fingernails.”
Regeneration is not going to happen from a conference room.
Beyond hands-on engagement, his research also articulates a broader vision of what a regenerative society could look like. In the discussion chapter of his PhD, he outlines three broader imaginaries for a regenerative society. The first is conviviality. Instead of chasing “the latest, sexiest, most powerful iteration of the Mercedes-Benz, it should be about enabling people to create, repair and produce things for themselves.”
The second imaginary centres on decommodification. Rather than having design primarily service markets, he argues we should work towards “decommodifying basic needs and organising them as commons.” Access to housing, food and public space, he suggests, should not depend solely on market logic. The question becomes: how can design contribute in that direction?
The third imaginary challenges the dominance of optimisation and efficiency. Much of design, he notes, is focused on measuring and optimising. As an alternative, he proposes care. Together, these three imaginaries address technology, economic systems and culture, outlining a broader vision of what regeneration could mean.
PhD defence announcement
Riel will defend his PhD, The Carbon Commons: Design Practice for a Post-growth Society, on 4 June 2026 at 10:00 am at the Aula Conference Centre of TU Delft (Mekelweg 5, Delft). You are warmly invited to attend the defence.
Join the conversation
Would you like to learn more about regeneration? Sign up for the newsletter of the Regenerative Futures Community, or join the Regenerative Dialogues, a webinar series that brings together voices from different disciplines to explore what regeneration means and how it can be put into practice.
View Bessai’s publications & projects:
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.438
https://limits.pubpub.org/pub/l7i2kjaj/release/1
https://www.studio-method.xyz/
https://divisare.com/projects/539197-studio-method-riccardo-de-vecchi-the-reading-room-in-the-forest