When Earth Wakes Up to Itself

A Reflection on the Design Science Studio

I didn’t expect to cry at my last Design Science Studio salon.

We were showcasing projects. I’d prepared songs, my small offering to what’s been called the regenaissance, a portmanteau of regeneration and renaissance that captures the unique moment in which we find ourselves, of collapse and of breakthrough, of looking back and looking ahead, what some call an ancient future.

The salon was a moment to share the creative work we’d incubated over seven months of deep immersion in Buckminster Fuller’s design science principles, regenerative systems thinking, and what DSS calls “art that changes history.”

I was sandwiched between a musician from Kenya, a biomimicry architect from Central America, an experience designer from Spain. All of us on Zoom, faces in little boxes, sharing our work.

And then the tears came.

Not sad crying. Not even happy crying. The kind of sobbing that overtakes your body when beauty overwhelms your ability to process it. I wept because everyone in those little boxes, separated by oceans and languages and entirely different cultural contexts, was responding to the same thing. Earth crying out in pain. And every single person was answering with creativity, with love, with beauty.

I was watching the planet wake up to itself through us.

What DSS Actually Did

I came to Design Science Studio because I was stuck. I’d spent years learning how systems work, why they fail, what drives our collective self-destruction. I understood the metacrisis intellectually. I could explain rivalrous dynamics and coordination failures and the tragedy of the commons.

But I couldn’t see my whole self in my work. I made music, I wrote, I organized, but these felt like separate activities. The systems thinker in me was the serious professional. The artist in me was the hobbyist working on a side project.

DSS didn’t give me new information. It gave me permission.

Permission to understand that creating beauty isn’t frivolous when systems are collapsing. That the separation between art and activism, between aesthetics and systems change, is itself part of the problem. That cultural transformation and institutional redesign aren’t separate projects, they’re the same work.

The curriculum spans regenerative design, bioregionalism, living systems, traditional ecological knowledge, and imagination activism. But the real curriculum isn’t the content. It’s the community of practice holding all of it together.

The Effect of Networks

Three hundred and seventy-three people have gone through Design Science Studio across its first three cohorts. Forty-two countries. Two hundred and eighty-six projects incubated.

Those numbers don’t mean much until you understand what they represent: a distributed network of people who now think in living systems principles. Who understand Buckminster Fuller’s “comprehensive anticipatory design science”—that you can’t solve problems at the scale they were created, you have to redesign the whole system to work for 100% of life.

And networks don’t scale linearly. They cascade. One person connects five others who each connect five more. Ideas cross-pollinate. Projects merge. Someone in Barcelona learns bioregional governance from someone in Aotearoa who learned commons coordination from someone in Taiwan.

DSS gave me the systemic foundation and the creative confidence to see the broader biophilic design that connects all of these domains of innovation and imagination, rooted in the understanding that building coordination mechanisms for regenerative culture is art. That designing governance for watersheds is creative practice.

What Actually Happens

You show up twice a week on Zoom for seven months. Sometimes it’s a speaker—someone doing cutting edge experiments with participatory governance or regenerative economics or indigenous land stewardship. Sometimes it’s working sessions where you develop your project alongside others. Sometimes it’s just conversation, people thinking out loud about how to translate these principles into their specific context.

The salons are where the CoHeart showcases what they’re building. A protocol for commons governance in digital spaces. A performance piece about grief and ecological breakdown. Songs, films, installations, systems, frameworks, tools.

All of it aimed at the same question: How do we participate in patterns that support life instead of extract from it?

Nobody pretends to have the answer. It’s not a program with a single methodology or outcome. It’s an incubator. A laboratory. A community of practice for people who understand that the future isn’t something that happens to us, it’s something we create together.

The Buckminster Fuller Lineage

In 1965, Bucky Fuller called for a Design Science Decade: a global effort to redesign our systems so they work for 100% of life. He understood that our crises weren’t random failures but predictable outcomes of how we’d designed our civilization.

That decade ended but the work Bucky inspired didn’t.

In 2020, Design Science Studio launched a second Design Science Decade. We’re halfway through now. The fourth CoHeart starts in December.

This is generational work and it begins with each of us learning these principles, translating them for our context, and building the cultural capacity to actually implement them.

The Call

Applications close November 21st. I’m writing this because I know there will be someone reading it who needs to hear about DSS.

If you make things: art, systems, frameworks, experiences, anything, and you feel this pull toward regenerative futures but don’t know how to bridge your creative practice with systemic change, this program might crack something open for you like it did for me.

It’s not for everyone. It asks you to hold complexity without collapsing it into easy answers. To learn systems thinking while staying connected to beauty. To build practical tools while keeping the imaginal alive.

But if you’re already doing this work, trying to hold the artist and the organizer, the dreamer and the pragmatist, the mystic and the materialist, DSS gives you a community and a framework for understanding that you’re not confused. You’re seeing and giving voice to what needs to be seen and heard.

The Earth is calling. Not metaphorically. Literally. Through the fires and floods and failures of coordination. Through the breakdown of institutions that can’t process the complexity we’ve created.

And she’s also calling through us. Through the ways we respond with creativity and care. Through networks of people learning to listen across systems, to coordinate without control, to participate in patterns older and wiser than any institution we’ve inherited.

That’s what I saw in those Zoom boxes that made me weep. Earth waking up to herself. Learning to coordinate at the complexity required. Doing it through beauty and relationship and distributed intelligence.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably already an Evolutionary. If you want to find the others, join DSS.

bit.ly/dssjoinus

Design Science Studio is a program of habRitual in partnership with the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Applications for the fourth cohort close November 21st, 2025.