Restorative Design Association (RDA)

The Restorative Design Association is a women-owned and -founded, global, decentralized network for care-centered design. 

We are a collective of designers, psychologists, and practitioners aligned with a shared vision of creating environments that heal and restore the individuals, bodies, and communities who inhabit them, while bringing balance to nature and the living world.

We are professionals who lead with humanity, centering those we serve in everything we do. We advocate for marginalized communities – those the industry has overlooked – and we recognize harm due to systemic injustice as the pathology to be addressed.

Built environments have the power to heal or harm. Through systemic alternatives that nurture health, wholeness, and belonging, we center and design alongside the people, families, communities, and the natural world we serve. 

Restorative Design is a direct response to the current state of individual, interpersonal, collective, and global crisis we find ourselves in. 

While the design and architecture fields use psychology to address stress at the individual level, they often overlook the very real impact of larger spatial stressors and traumas that are both reflected in and embedded in the built environment. These systemic factors cause significant harm for individuals and communities, creating dysregulation, reduced psychological safety, disconnection, and dis-ease. 

Through social and restorative justice practices, as well as evidence-based psychological principles, Restorative Design offers a framework to address the harm that has been done as a result of the current paradigm, providing a toolkit for designing spaces that restore what has been lost (through colonization, for example), as well as creating spaces in which care and vitality are built in from the beginning.  

The spaces we inhabit should restore us to our innate ways of being.

Ultimately, the purpose of the RDA is to formalize Restorative Design as a professional practice and build a network, framework, and Center focused on equitable, life-giving, and embodied design and education.

We are a community of practitioners who are values- and mission-aligned — building together toward a new paradigm in which care is the foundation of all design and education. Our primary principles include Belonging, Safety, Dignity & Justice, Equity & Affordability, & Connection.

RDA offers a formalized framework for the professional practice of Restorative Design. Additionally, we offer design consulting services for spaces, communities, and organizations interested in deepening their personal and professional practices of designing and relating to the built environment through a restorative, embodied, trauma-informed, and ecological lens. We plan to provide a membership network for values-aligned practitioners, as well as educational materials – including courses and a Restorative Design certification.  

Join our membership network - We are rapidly expanding and establishing our collective, building momentum with all of you.

- RDA Team – Desirée, Bella, Suzan, Sarah, & Dominique