The Nook

REGENERATIVE DESIGN | MATERIAL & SPATIAL DESIGN | MORE-THAN-HUMAN DESIGN | SYSTEMS THINKING

3rd Semester Studio Project | RMIT University | August 2024 – November 2024

Project Overview

The Nook transforms an underutilised car park on Cardigan Street, Carlton, into a dynamic third space through regenerative, system-led, place based, and material-driven design. This Melbourne project weaves together spatial and product design strategies to foster meaningful connections between transient stakeholders and urban wildlife.

Guided by More-Than-Human principles, the deep retrofit approach establishes environments where human activities harmoniously coexist with urban ecology. The design shifts away from mono-functional car parks toward spaces that enhance both community wellbeing and biodiversity.

The project culminates in an Adaptive Framework for Regeneration that surpasses traditional circular design practices. This replicable model offers systematic solutions for urban renewal, grounded in local context and place based transformation. The Nook demonstrates how design intervention can revitalise urban dead spaces into thriving ecosystems where human and nonhuman communities flourish together.

RMIT Carpark on Cardigan Street, 2024. Photographed by Jason Nok Hang Lau

Research Question

How might underused urban infrastructure be transformed into regenerative spaces that support more-than-human coexistence while remaining accessible and meaningful to local communities?

Approach & Process

The Nook’s leverage points in an adaptation of Donella Meadows ‘places to intervene in a system’, Tejas Madhusudhan Bharadwaj, 2024

Understanding Regeneration through Critique
A prior project, Reweave, which focused on informal settlements in Port Moresby, served as a critical reference for understanding regeneration beyond conventional sustainability metrics. Reweave addressed vulnerability and resource scarcity through modular housing typologies, locally sourced materials, community participation, and circular systems for waste and energy.

Critically reflecting on this work highlighted the importance of adaptive design, local resource intelligence, and self-sustaining systems—insights that directly informed The Nook’s ambition to retrofit existing urban infrastructure into regenerative environments for both human and non-human actors.

Site-based Research
The process began with an in-depth contextual analysis of the Cardigan Street car park and its surrounding urban ecology. This involved mapping human movement patterns, existing vegetation, material and waste flows, and traces of urban wildlife to identify spatial constraints, latent ecological potential, and opportunities for regenerative intervention.

More-than-human Design Lens
The design approach was guided by more-than-human perspectives informed by post-anthropocentric theory, multispecies design, and relational ontologies. This reframed the site from a purely human-serving asset into shared territory, where human and non-human life are treated as co-inhabitants rather than secondary considerations.

Spatial & Product Prototyping
Design development operated across multiple scales, combining spatial interventions—such as shade structures, seating, and water elements—with product-level components including bird and bat shelters, pollinator corridors, and modular planting systems. Together, these elements form a layered environment that supports habitation, interaction, and ecological function.

Regenerative Material Strategies
Material choices prioritised locally sourced and reused components to minimise embodied environmental impact while actively contributing to site regeneration. Materials were selected for their capacity to improve soil health, enhance water absorption, and support biodiversity, ensuring ecological performance was integral to the design.

Deep Retrofit Logic
Rather than erasing the existing site, the project adopts a deep retrofit approach that works with the existing concrete infrastructure through modular, low-impact insertions. This strategy reduces demolition and waste while demonstrating how adaptive reuse can operate as a regenerative design tactic within dense urban contexts.

Key Issues Identified in Port Moresby, Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2024

Impacts and Effectiveness of Reweave, Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2024

Reweave Material Life Cycle Analysis, Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2024

More-than-human Impact of Reweave, Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2024

Ideal vs realistic scenarios for Reweave, Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2024

An adaptation of Krone’s Levels of Work Framework and Mang & Reed’s Framework for Regeneration, Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2024

Design Outcome

The final proposal transforms the car park into a layered third space that integrates seating, shelter, planting, and micro-habitats within a compact urban footprint. The intervention introduces vertical and horizontal ecological structures that support birds, insects, and plant life while offering informal spaces for pause, gathering, and observation.

Designed as a modular and adaptable framework, The Nook can be replicated across similar sites, demonstrating how small, targeted interventions can contribute to broader urban regeneration and biodiversity strategies.

Total Performance Indices of Clay, Glass, Steel, & Concrete, 2024. Visualisation by Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj

Total Performance Index (TPI)

A novel lifecycle-based evaluation tool designed to assess environmental, social, and ecological performance beyond conventional sustainability metrics. The TPI enables comparative assessment of design decisions over time, supporting more holistic regenerative outcomes.

Adaptive Framework for Regeneration, 2024. Visualisation by Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj

Adaptive Framework for Regeneration

A transferable design framework that positions regeneration as an iterative, context-responsive process. The framework allows the core principles of The Nook to be adapted across different urban sites while remaining sensitive to local ecological and social conditions.

Key Takeaways

Existing urban infrastructure holds significant potential as a site of ecological repair rather than demolition and replacement.

Regenerative outcomes emerge when material, spatial, and ecological systems are designed as interdependent.

More-than-human design reframes success beyond human comfort to include long-term ecological resilience.

Frameworks and tools can extend the impact of site-specific interventions into broader regenerative practice.

Design Reseach Compendium

Reflection

Working on The Nook fundamentally reshaped how I understand regeneration. Early in the project, I approached regeneration as a more ambitious extension of familiar ideas like renewal, revitalisation, or rehabilitation. Over time, it became apparent that regeneration operates on a different register entirely — it is about enabling living systems to adapt, respond, and continuously co-evolve over large timespans.

This project marked a shift in my design practice toward viewing regeneration as a continuous, systems-driven process rather than a resolved outcome. Designing The Nook required thinking beyond isolated interventions and instead considering how material choices, spatial arrangements, ecological processes, and human behaviours interact across temporal scales. The car park essentially became a testing ground for relational design, where more-than-human actors co-exist.

The project also reinforced my growing interest in large-scale, systems-led strategic design. While the intervention itself operates at a micro-urban scale, its intent lies in developing transferable logics, such as frameworks, tools, and methods that could be applied across multiple sites and contexts. This emphasis on scalability and adaptability continues to shape how I approach regenerative design challenges.

At the same time, The Nook surfaced important limitations in my approach. In hindsight, I recognise moments of solutionism, an impulse to instantly resolve complexity through design rather than allowing it to evolve with uncertainty. This was particularly evident in my early attempts to quantify regeneration through performance metrics, a tendency I later critiqued more explicitly in my subsequent capstone project, BioTokenist. I also realised that portions of my material exploration were driven more by curiosity than informed ecological decision-making, highlighting the need for deeper integration between material research and systems understanding.

Ultimately, The Nook sharpened my awareness of design’s role not only as a problem-solver, but as a mediator, one that creates, shapes, and co-evolves entire events and relationships. This project did not offer definitive answers, but it clarified the kinds of questions I want my practice to continue engaging with.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Olivier Cotsaftis for guiding us through every step of this project and pushing us to explore new heights. Thank you for your invaluable insights and constant encouragement. I’m also incredibly grateful to Mohammad Enjavi Amiri for helping us think creatively about how to bring our concept to life through beautiful, tangible prototypes. Finally, a huge thanks to my teammates - Trishla Yadav and Nok Hang Jason Lau - this project wouldn’t have been the same without them. Their hard work, dedication, and energy made this journey both fun and successful.