Prof. Dan Hill, Director of Melbourne School of Design and lead on our UK 2040 Design Labs, walks us through the second edition hosted in South Devon and Plymouth.
The South Devon Design Lab took place 17 – 19 March 2026, following November’s Sheffield Design Lab, and continuing the UK 2040 project by Future Observatory and Dark Matter Labs, supported by UKRI’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
These labs explore how a strategic design studio-like process might shed light on the often abstract yet transformational challenges facing the UK: the volatility induced by ecological breakdown, institutional fragility, civic distrust, diminishing public health, technological disruption and extractive economies. As design helps transform societal ideas into things, experiences and settings to encounter those ideas, taking a place-based design-led approach might help with the reverse, revealing the complexity and richness of broader challenges embedded in the infrastructures of everyday life. This allows Future Observatory to meaningfully refine its emerging research agenda whilst offering insights and opportunities for places. The process recognises that South Devon is unique, clearly, yet many of the questions that emerge may well apply to other coastal towns or similar ecosystems across the country.
“How do we compost defunct institutions to grow new ones?”
Framing meaningful, evocative yet open questions is harder than simply grasping the easy answers lying around. Yet there are few things more dangerous than answering the wrong questions well. The questions that emerge from design labs should expand civic options, and create space for possible futures. As with Sheffield, South Devon’s questions may feel incomplete, open-ended, and drafty, particularly to anyone who was not involved in their creation.
The questions that emerged in the synthesising workshop on the final day included: “How do we compost defunct institutions to grow new ones?”; “What does it mean to connect moor and sea?”; and “What [will] we mean by ‘security’ in 2040?”. These questions could be unfolded by any reader to reveal entire bodies of potential research, starting points for pilot projects, place-based prototypes and civic experiments.
About the process
Myself, Indy Johar and the Future Observatory team built on a modified version of the strategic design ‘studio’ process created by Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA’s Helsinki Design Lab. Within the strategic design toolkit, the goal of a lab or studio is not to produce a strategy—yet—but to identify a set of open questions that might inform subsequent research agendas, highlight collaboration opportunities, and outline starting points, each attuned to our shared context of complex systems. Its emphasis is on beginnings rather than endings. It takes a collaborative approach to constructing these questions, which also begins to build a network, an emerging consensus and collective motivation, an engine for change.
Iterated upon many times since Helsinki Design Lab, the studio process typically involves a core team tackling a ‘big picture’ strategic challenge over the course of a week, moving from expert presentations and forms of fieldwork through to synthesis sessions, before presenting strategic trajectories to a group of key stakeholders. The version deployed in Sheffield and South Devon was shorter—three days rather than five, and with three months’ set-up rather than a year—and oriented around the practice of designing questions rather than the thematic actions of the Helsinki format. For Sheffield, the City Council were the stakeholders for the final presentation; for South Devon, the larger bioregional scale meant that this aspect was skipped, in favour of more time with the core group.
We found a space at Plymouth’s Royal William Yards, and worked with local contributors Isabel Carlisle and Gemma Mortensen, to curate a set of participants and places that the team could encounter and work with. Originally the Royal Navy’s victualling yards in the 1820s, Royal William Yards embodied some of the core themes of the workshop—the long-termism of defence; the possibility of locally-sourced building materials and food; adaptive retrofit and regeneration. The location for a workshop is part of the workshop’s design.
The first two days involved a curated set of inputs, moving from presentations to places. On day one, guests led presentations and discussions, where day two was all field trips. The team unpacked thoughts over shared dinners. For day three, the core team worked these diverse inputs into a draft set of around strategic questions.
About the lab
Day one consisted of a series of ‘downloads’ of insights and perspectives, from projects, practices and places across aspects of South Devon, from Plymouth to Dartmoor and beyond. This first day was designed to be a relatively intense, almost dizzying experience: eight different perspectives across a wide range of topics, ranging from bioregions to defence, new housing developments to water utilities. The morning started with Isabel Carlisle outlining the work of the Bioregional Learning Centre, carefully folding together historical, cultural and scientific dimensions. Isabel was followed by Sam Manning of the Woodland Trust discussing the South West Rainforest Recovery project, within the broader context of local and global relationships. Isabel and Sam’s presentations helped set the bioregion as a key perspective for the lab—for more on ‘bioregioning’, see Future Observatory Journal issue 1. In particular, Sam’s introduction of the ‘flowscape’ concept stuck with many participants in the room, as a core concept that helped frame numerous subsequent discussions and many of the eventual draft questions.
‘Flowscapes’ describes the symbiotic relationships between forest and seas, connecting ocean climate to tree growth to the movement of rivers, the impact of forests on fishes and vice versa, and the need to reimagine and regenerate the movement of water across the ‘drained landscape’ of the UK. Flowscapes gave the group a shorthand for concepts that move beyond a static, property-based understanding of landscapes and towards systemic and intersectional relationships based around systems of flows, extending one of the six key themes that had emerged in the initial UK 2040 workshops.
Continuing day one, Ed Whitelaw described the community-building work of Real Ideas across multiple key sites in Plymouth and Devonport, which was usefully complemented by Plymouth City Council’s Patrick Knight, describing the efforts to foreground complementary thinking and practice around regenerative systems within local government.
The second half of day one was held at the University of Plymouth, courtesy of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business, and started with Alex Ely of Mae Architects describing the early work on the urban development of Plymouth, based on incoming ‘new town’-based investment. Alex expertly wove his way through the complex urban fabric of Plymouth, and his diagrams of the pre-war town overlaid onto the 1944 Plan provided another form of flowscape image for the core team. John Gane, Managing Director of Babcock International Group's Devonport facility, described the potential of the ‘defence dividend’ for Plymouth and beyond, in South Devon Design Lab terms of jobs, skills, manufacturing and technologies, as well as urban development. The military’s ability to plan for up to 70 years ahead was particularly interesting, across these potential spillover effects. Carolyn Cadman of South West Water spoke next, on the water utility’s shift towards nature-based solutions amidst the challenges of the region’s hydrological systems, not least from the tourist industry. Finally, Prof Katharine Willis outlined some of the research and engagement work of the University of Plymouth, joined by her colleagues Chris Bennewith and Alejandro Veliz Reyes.
Day two started with a highly memorable visit to Porsham Farm, a regenerative dairy farm in the Tamar Valley, which was almost an embodied experience of flowscapes in action. Will and Tanya Luke outlined not only how dairy farming might enable the stewardship of healthy soil as well as healthy food, but also carbon sequestration, biodiversity regeneration, floodwater mitigation, reforesting, education, culture, and more besides. John Hunt of Westcountry Rivers Trust reinforced this idea, with a demonstration of systemic approaches to water management that might be able to transform hydrological systems at watershed scale, by working with farms and farmers. The team minibus then rolled on to Sole of Discretion, a collective of ethical sustainable fishers. We heard from Caroline Bennett, who talked us through the plans to reinvigorate the old fish market in Plymouth. More flowscapes. The afternoon was spent exploring imaginative community-led retrofit projects, across spaces in Plymouth and Devonport. Wendy Hart and Hannah Sloggett of Nudge Community Builders took the team through a series of previously empty buildings on Union Street, each at various stages of transition into their next lives as community infrastructure. We found underground mushroom farms, African kitchens and a vast auditorium, The Millennium, vacant for 17 years and now slowly emerging once again. Finally, we arrived at the renovated Market Hall, where Real Ideas CEO Lindsey Hall took us through the story of the redevelopment, and of its setting in Devonport, and their various other projects across the city.
Day three started with the team individually synthesising their reflections, a ‘quiet time’ in order to begin forming questions and ideas before sharing their thoughts with the wider group. Subsequently, the team regrouped to work through the draft set of strategic questions, which included: “How can 10,000 new homes help regenerate the soil of South Devon?” and “How can tourists help regenerate South Devon’s natural systems?”
The design lab group carefully framed each question in order to sidestep short-term solutionism. As a result, they are frequently located outside, or adjacent to, current developments for places like Plymouth or South Devon. Yet they are clearly related to these things too, and lines might be drawn from these questions to those projects, events, and organisations. Questions invite us to imagine beyond the present, to legitimise the not-yet-known. Each attempts to expand the space for options, and to suggest a grounded entry point into the place—a person or project that might be a partner in design—with which these questions could be pursued.
Further updates will be shared on the Future Observatory website about the UK 2040 research strand as work progresses.
