Transmissions x Conversations
A conversation on creating regenerative experiences, working with time, extractive economies and navigating living systems
One of the great things about writing on Substack is meeting other writers. Recently, Rūta Žemčugovaitė, writer of Regenerative Transmissions, began commenting on some of my work, and sparked a conversation. You can listen and/or read an edited version of a recent conversation on creating regenerative experiences, transmissions vs conversations, paradigm shifts and living systems.
Rachel Beth Egenhoefer: Your substack is called Regenerative Transmissions, tell me about this title - what are we transmitting, who are we transiting to, where are we transmitting? I’d love to hear how you came up with this title.
Rūta Žemčugovaitė: I see transmissions as a way to send a signal out. When I’m sending out a signal into the ether, I’m expecting someone else to pick up on that. Playing with the idea of being an envoy in this new terrain of regeneration, someone who is going in and exploring and sending out the signals back to someone who is not yet in this new space. I am thinking of “Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin. So we're sending the signal to people who are not as familiar with regeneration, as well as those who are. Looking for the points of connection - I think that's what transmission is about.
(c. 1400, from Latin transmittere "send across, cause to go across, transfer, pass on," from trans "across, beyond" + mittere "to release, let go; send, throw".)
RBE: How do you know when someone has picked up your signal?
RZ: That's a good question because the immediate thing is to think of the response. When we pick up signals, even those that influence us the most, the sender doesn’t alway know. When you’re listening to a song, reading a book, or listening to a podcast, you can be so deeply affected, yet the person who's sending out the signal doesn’t know. But sometimes we’re lucky to connect, and then we transition into a conversation.
RBE: Like this one!
RZ: Exactly. I’m also very curious about a point of transmission and a point of conversational nature of things - as a poet David Whyte says. I think the title of your substack, Regenerative Conversations, is also very interesting because it points at the very nature of regeneration.
RBE: How do you know when your signals are not crossed? Or there's a mixed signal, or a missed communication? There’s an intention of sending out a certain signal, but what happens when they are tangled or mixed or crossed?
RZ: I think the mission is to continue sending out your signals. What happens in between is my responsibility, but it’s also the receiver's responsibility. It’s both. I’m interested in where messages get mixed, that kind of limitality of ideas: where they get crossed. Conversation seems like an exchange rather than sending out one signal. Conversation seems much more intimate in that sense.
How is it from your perspective?
RBE: When I started my substack, I named it Regenerative Conversations, for exactly that reason, to have those exchanges. But as a substack author - I am transmitting things out, and I don’t always know where they end up. Sometimes people will contact me months later saying they just read something that I’d already kind of forgotten about. That’s part of why I’ve been reaching out and having these actual conversations with other writers to see where these different ideas connect and weave together.
RZ: I like this idea of having conversations through time and space, and you don’t know when the answer is going to come. The conversation becomes long-durational and extended. This is also at the core of regeneration - working with time. Not the immediacy of conversation and of things, but time.
RBE: I think about time a lot because there's so much in our world, with the climate crisis that is urgent, and we have to act now, and yet so much of the work that needs to be done is slow. In a way the damage that has been done to our earth, has been very slow, it’s taken years of pollution, of policy and behavior to get to where we are. But now, we live in such a fast paced world, that people want the quick fix. People want the disposable meal, the pill, the thing that's going to make it better now. It’s just at such odds with what we need to do. In terms of slowing down, and returning to other ways of being and connecting. To me there's a real tension there of fast and slow. We need to take immediate action to be slow.
RZ: Yes, where the immediate action can usher us into taking time and slowness and reestablishing our relationship with time.
RBE: I’m curious about your work as a regenerative designer. How would you describe your current work and how you got to your current place?
RZ: I started in Psychology, working on trauma healing & facilitation work. That work allowed my obsession with finding the root causes of things to really flourish. Working as a facilitator, I realized that my energy was always going one way. As rewarding as it was, I was reaching my first experience with burnout. My interest in technology and design grew in parallel, as I realized how design and architecture influence our well being. And working with technology, coding and AI, I realized I loved creating experiences combined with transformation (that comes from my background in psychology). All of these ideas started merging.
In the past few years, after reaching a burnout, I realized my body deeply wanted to connect with nature and slowness, and creativity. I became interested in mycelium and started designing biomaterials with it. And that’s how my research in regenerative design kicked off in a practical sense. Now I have a studio design-lab where I research mycelium and hemp, and am working on prototypes for sculpture.
RBE: It’s interesting that you talk about being a facilitator, and sending that energy out but not necessarily getting it back, which reminds me of this idea of transmission vs conversation, and conversation as experience. How do we design things that are not one way - but things that are meant to be circular. How do we design a holistic experience where everyone keeps on growing, and that everyone is growing as a result of that experience. Mycelium seems like a very physical example of this very conceptual idea.
RZ: Mycelium is a primary teacher of connection and of finding the links between systems - being a system itself and creating links between different systems. The relationality of things is at the core of regeneration, working with living beings and materials that point us towards that.
RBE: When people think about design, oftentimes they think about products or stuff. In a way, you are using mycelium to make an object, but you are also talking about this idea of experience. I’m curious how you see that tension of designing an object and experience? How do you think about these pieces that you are making?
RZ: As designers, and those of us who work in tech, we design things to be used. But, I think that we are first and foremost an experiencer, and then we can be a user. Experience comes first before anything else. When we’re talking about designing products, or creating art, we’re talking about designing experience.
I think about the analogy of a tree. Maybe some biologists would interject, but a tree first has to be able to perceive and experience light in order to be able to use it. It uses light, but it first has to experience the light. The tree has to experience what elements are around it in order to evolve in such a way that it is in conversation with all other elements around it. I think about designing in a regenerative way that allows us to have those experiences of relationality, and seeing deeper into the links of where the material is coming from.
As you’ve mentioned before, extractive design is one direction and doesn’t look back, it looks forward, it lands somewhere and stays there. With regenerative design we're looking backwards, forwards, a all around us to understand our place within the system. I want to say that mycelium is my co-designer. It’s not just a material I’m using, and yet again extracting the living being from the earth, and using it as yet another alternative material to work within an extractive economy, but to really change perspective on living systems all together.
And in many times, the message of the design or the artwork is in the experience of it. I don’t want to say “this is the message” in regenerative design, but I want to design the experience of the message.
RBE: I know in some of your writing and work and even in today's conversation you mention that you’ve had points of burnout. It seems as if there's a lot of connection between people working in this regenerative space coming from a place of burn out. I’m curious about your thoughts on the connection between personal burnout and regenerative energy, but also a collective burnout. It seems there’s a collective burnout right now from COVID, chaos around the world, war, extreme weather, there’s so much we’re all experiencing that there's this need for regenerative design on a mass scale. I’m curious how you think about the personal and the collective in that?
RZ: They are all connected! I think about the way we grow up and the society and culture we are born into. The first thing is how we do the things we do. How we do one thing is how you do everything. That’s what comes to mind first.
Some come from a culture where you have to suppress your needs and your desires in order to sustain yourself within the system. Because the system does not have time or interest or empathy for you to slow down. It doesn’t want you to slow down. And probably because the economy is set up in this way that looks for extraction. Not only in land, not only in animals, not only in materials, but also in people. People are seen as one of the resources that can be extracted. So I’m very curious about this topic.
Our personal energy, time and creativity are being fed into the extractive economy. So how can we actually extract ourselves from it? That's where the parallels of burning out ourselves and the planet. We’re depleting ourselves and depleting the planet. It’s the same extractive consciousness that is operating. Here, it does not matter who are we extracting from: an animal body, plant body, ocean body, land body–we are treating them the same extractive way.
That’s where the talk of paradigm shifts and belief shifts really comes into play. Because if we’re approaching reality through the filter of extraction, then our actions will follow. And if we’re shifting our beliefs about relationality, about interbeing, about valuing our own time and energy, life in a different way, then we make different decisions. But again, this is a challenge for society. Because it can move in a very slow and stagnant motion, and there's a lot of pushback because the current economy is standing on those pillars.
RBE: I think that's one of the big challenges we all face. In so many ways a lot of these conversations end up butting up against the need to move away from capitalism. Capitalism is the tipping point. It's that energy that causes so much of the extractive consciousness. It’s everything we consume and how it’s made and how it's disposed of.
RZ: I’m curious about what is in your regenerative design work and teaching? Where you are now, in terms of having been in this field for a long time what are still your biggest challenges?
RBE: A lot of my challenges are things that we talked about today - products, experiences, time, and systems. Students come to university with a goal to design stuff, whether that's websites or posters or apps or magazines or whatever - because that's what they’ve been marketed. We’re sold the idea that that's what a cool, sexy designer is. So part of the challenge is - how do you get away from that - how do you get away from designing stuff.
Being in academia, everything is designed around the semester. You can create a paradigm shift in a 16 week semester!? So again, there's this challenge of fast and slow. And also trying to grapple with some of these really big ideas. I sometimes have students who come back to me years later, and say “oh I finally understand what that one reading was about”. Because in a lot of ways, when you think about these ideas, they take time to really process. When you talk about an entirely different way of living and being - with designing with nature and with each other, you can just read that in an article and then do it. It takes time.
I think the third thing would be teaching about systems and systems design. I live in the Bay Area where we are surrounded by both Silicon Valley tech and a lot of sustainable initiatives. This sometimes makes for a lot of consumerist “sustainable companies”. So people tend to think that this is what sustainable design is - shoes from recycled bottles, or alternative meats, or hemp jumpsuits, or bags from billboards… these have their positive aspects, but theres also a lot of problems. One is that the product might be made “better” or in a more ethical way, but it’s still feeding that extractive consumerist consciousness. It’s not actually changing behaviors of how we live or how we relate with one another. It’s just replacing X with Y. I see so many students, and also companies out in the world - they think that’s the answer - I’ll just make my packaging compostable, I’ll just make my product from plants, and that will solve it. But if we take a step back and look at the system - are there commercial grade composting facilities in your community? If not, then all of that is just going to the landfill, so it doesn’t really solve much.
Another piece of this is that a lot of these products are marketed towards people who have the money to spend. Here in the US we see the middle class disappearing more and more, so a lot of these products are marketed towards people who can’t afford them. So then you are sold this idea that sustainability is for privileged people - it becomes a class issue. There's people for whom buying these products just isn’t affordable. There’s a reason why McDonalds is so popular - it’s food that is at a price point that many people need to rely on. So we can’t just solve things by saying “everybody eat organic food and we’re going to solve the climate crisis”. Not everybody has access to it or can afford it. How is food grown, who’s growing it, who’s delivering it, how? Those are really big questions.
These issues have to do with infrastructure, history, economics, politics… And then your mind is just totally out there - because you have this student who is like “I wanted to design a poster or a shoe or a website, and now you’re telling me that the work that is in front of us is to redesign a system with different laws, different infrastructure, different habits!?” Sometimes that can be really amazing and mind blowing. And also it can become very overwhelming.
Part of the idea of these conversations is bringing people together - because you do need all these people to work together - you do need different infrastructure, ways that cities are designed, ways that people get money, the way people are educated in order to get that money… all of it. That’s the challenge -
we think that sustainable design, or even design is this really simple thing, but actually it’s incredibly complicated. And the more we perpetuate the idea that it’s this simple sexy product oriented extractive consciousness, the more problematic it is. Instead we need to look at how designers work in all of these other landscapes.
RZ: Exactly! You’ve probably seen this all around you in the Bay Area, creating products to patch the system that is rapidly collapsing into itself. Yet sustaining and extending the time before the big collapse comes - just a bit, just to open up the user base, just to appeal to the organic upper middle class community. Just so we can extend our reach to get a little bit more if we say “this was made from recycled plastic from the ocean”.
RBE: I think that metaphor goes right back to the idea of burnout. I think about experiencing burnout and that kind of mindset that “I can just push through” … “just this one more project”... “one more thing will make it better…” that is that same exact thing as creating these band aid projects to extend things a little bit more. In some ways, in the start of COVID, when the world shut down, that was a kind of sense of burnout. A lot of us hoped here’s time for a system reset. I think in a lot of ways we started to see that, and now more and more we’re just seeing more bandaids.
RZ: Exactly. I also have a feeling that the band aids are soon not going to work anymore. More and more, regeneration is pointing us towards certain place based localities. And we burnout, as we think about everything all at once: all the systems that need to change.
What keeps coming back to me is a question: How do I want my day to look like so it is energy regenerative? Just even starting from that. Are we able to design our own systems in our own lives that will allow us to make that shift?
If we are burning out in an attempt to shift systems, then what is the point? And of couse, certain exhaustion is inevitable. But I think this is a big recentering and refocusing of our deep ingrained belief that “my energy, my time, ultimately doesn’t really matter because I keep giving it away”. So how can I re-prioritize those experiences that are relational and local? How can I become intimate with the place that I’m in?
I think our collective nervous system is inflamed. The burnout is actually your nervous system receiving a shot of adrenaline and cortisol over and over. The stress hormones just travel around and between us, and there's no time to process that out of the system.
One of my good friends is running an art-research project on climate change and explores an idea of a “cooling station”. So I want to ask: where can we create these internal “cooling stations” for our nervous systems that are constantly inflamed? So again, this idea of designing for experience of life that is energy-regenerative. Trying to think on this systematic level, zooming in and zooming out, in and out, is deeply interesting at the same time deeply overwhelming!
RBE: It’s hard to change the system when you're in the system. It's hard to create a new paradigm when you also live in the current paradigm. That speaks to what you just described, about how burnout occurs - when you’re trying to do this other thing, but also need to maintain where you are. You almost don’t have time for both. So you have to pick and choose and navigate between them. It’s like trying to have two full time jobs - living in one and trying to create another one. That leads to burnout. Are those two part time jobs? How do you negotiate that? And obviously it’s not something that can be as concrete as “20 hours here, and 20 hours here”, it’s this thing that is very flowy and uncertain. I think that's a big challenge.
RZ: How can we apply these practices? Has there been a certain shift in your decisions in life that allowed you to step more into those spaces of communion and rest and time?
RBE: That's such a good reflection question. I think looking back, I can point to a few moments. Years ago I spent a year traveling and living in very diverse places around the world - Africa, China, Europe. I saw shipping containers coming in and out of cities or in some cases empty ones becoming homes and businesses. I came back to Oakland, which is a big port city, seeing and experiencing shipping containers in vastly different parts of the world had an impact on me. As stereotypical as it might sound, I have two kids. Having kids has affected me in terms of thinking about how we educate them but also how we model things to them and how we model the future. And I’d say COVID has created change, that I’m not sure we fully know.
But my hope is that it’s an awareness of mental and physical health. In the start of COVID there was so much focus on masks, and hand sanitizer, and 6 feet distance, and a lot of the logistics. There wasn’t enough support placed on mental health. As someone who works with college students - did we ever see that fall out! We saw all those band-aids not being strong enough to support the mental health system. I would hope that the turning point from that would be more of an investment and changing the conversation about how we approach mental health. Those would be my moments of intense change - world travel, having kids and COVID.
RZ: Those are all life changing experiences! You are never the same, you are forever changed and there's no way back.
RBE: I think maybe to return to one of your earlier points, those are very dramatic experiences but in a way we experience things every day. I really appreciated your idea about experiencing something before you can use it. Every day is an experience, but it might not be as impactful from day to day. Every day you experience something, and you use something. Really kind of being reflective about that is part of our jobs as regenerative designers.
RZ: Yes!
 | A guest post by
|
I have just discovered you both through this conversation. I am totally in sympathy with your endeavours. Hope we can find an opportunity to have a conversation
I have uploaded some stories on Earth Regenerators