Regenerative Design as an Energy System

Regenerative Design as an Energy System

  • 30 Sep 2026
  • 11:30am - 02:00pm
  • FREE
  • RMIT Living Spaces Exchange, 36–40 Cardigan Street, Carlton
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Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed. This immersive session invites architects to ask a bigger question: transformed toward what?

Moving beyond extraction, grids and technology, this sessions explores the ecological, embodied, cultural, and systemic flows that regenerative design can redirect from depletion to nourishment.

Allen Kong, First Nations collaborator and director of Allen Kong Architect, will open the session with an acknowledgement of Country, framing energy as relational and reciprocal.

Nadine Samaha and Cristina Hernandez Santin will explore five regenerative design dimensions, exploring how they empower the built environment to support humans and beyond humans, so that energy is transformed toward nourishing life, us and the ecosystem that supports us.

Participants will rotate through three hands-on tables, exploring the cultural and embodied energy of materials, physical building models embedded in a site context, and ecological corridors and habitat nodes, working with interactive props throughout. Applying these ideas to hypothetical building scenarios, participants leave with practical tools to rethink how design decisions ripple outward, from material to building to city.

A communal lunch of seasonal, locally sourced food is provided and the session closes with a shared discussion of insights across all three tables.

Don't miss this rare chance to rethink energy, design, and what it truly means to nourish life.

Presented as part of the RMIT Regenerative Futures Events Season, this session offers 2 formal CPD points for attending architects.

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Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

Learn more about our commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples