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A New Design for Life: The Paradigm We Can’t Avoid designing

Our way out of a dying system

8 min readMay 9, 2025

There’s a quiet revolution underway — not on Wall Street, not in Silicon Valley, not even at the U.N. It’s happening in how we see. Because if the 20th century was about reshaping the world outside, the 21st is about rewiring the world within — changing the very lens through which we view reality. Call it a cosmovision, a paradigm, a shift in consciousness. Whatever the name, it’s becoming clear:

The future isn’t something we engineer. It’s something we become.

We are, quite literally, designing our way out of a dying system. But as anyone who’s tried knows, you can’t build a living future with the logic of a failing past. The tools that served the industrial age — control, predictability, separation — now undermine our ability to navigate complexity, foster resilience, or even preserve our humanity.

We are being asked to design in alignment with life itself. And that demands a different kind of intelligence — not just technical, but ecological, emotional, systemic, and spiritual.

This is where the emerging practice of regenerative design enters — not as a silver bullet, but as a scaffolding. A framework not just for solving problems, but for…

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Ernesto van Peborgh
Ernesto van Peborgh

Written by Ernesto van Peborgh

Entrepreneur, writer, filmmaker, Harvard MBA. Builder of systemic interactive networks for knowledge management.

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