What’s this all about?
Flows Labs is an ecosystem of labs — each one rooted in life, shaped by place and built to evolve. It reflects decades of practice across design thinking, systems strategy, permaculture, biomimicry, expedition-based learning, circular economy, community work, wellbeing research, and futures thinking. Our working approach is a way of seeing systems as living organisms, capable of growing, collapsing, reorganizing and flourishing under the right conditions.
Projects are not engineered; they grow. They have seasons, rhythms, constraints, actors, tensions and feedback loops. They behave like miniature ecosystems, evolving through cooperation, friction, mutation and emergence. Flows Labs exist to help these systems take form — to give them structure, direction, health and coherence. Working together means entering a process that is both rigorous and alive.
Our Process: Dream → Map → Learn → Connect → Create
Real transformation doesn’t begin with solutions.
It begins with meaning — with the courage to name what matters, what hurts, what wants to emerge.
Dream is the phase where intent becomes visible, where intuition and clarity surface, and where the emotional foundation of the work takes shape. Like for the rest of the process, everybody is invited to put their dream on the table, from the team involved to the rest of the stakeholders. This guarantees integrity and long term participation and engagement of everyone.
Map turns the invisible into something we can work with. It reveals patterns, flows, constraints, leverage points, power dynamics, and ecological realities. Circulab tools, systems diagrams, biomimicry frameworks, and landscape reading converge here. A project cannot transform without understanding its terrain.
Learn is the sensing phase. Workshops, field immersions, interviews, prototyping, expeditions, research, and dialogue expand what the group knows and break assumptions quietly holding the project back. This is where curiosity becomes precision.
Connect is the moment when a project becomes social. Teams align, energies concentrate, stories reconcile, and the collective starts behaving like a living organism. Innovation is not the product of individuals; it is the emergent property of people who trust one another and can think together.
Create transforms insights into action. It may produce strategies, prototypes, land designs, organizational structures, regenerative systems, experiences, or long-term visions. Create is not a final step but the beginning of a new cycle, just like in nature.
This process is not linear. It loops, expands, pauses, accelerates, and adapts — exactly like any living system.
Every Project Is a Mini-Lab
Whether the work begins in Nature, Systems, Land, Health or Futures, every collaboration becomes its own Lab — a temporary organism with its own logic, needs and identity. A mini-lab is built specifically for the project: tools selected with intention, collaborators invited based on context, new methods designed when existing ones don’t fit. Some Labs last a day. Others evolve over months. Some take the form of expeditions. Others unfold through design sprints, strategic workshops, community rituals, prototype landscapes or physical spaces.
No two Labs are ever the same. Like in permaculture, you never copy-paste a solution. You observe the land — literal or metaphorical — and build with what and who is there.
Collaboration as a Living System
Flows Labs collaboration adapt like an ecosystem. It grows where there is energy and contracts where there is hesitation. It depends on diversity — of discipline, perspective, style, and culture — to avoid collapse and enable emergence. It listens to the group’s emotional signals: enthusiasm surges, bottlenecks, friction, synchronization and fatigue. It notices where meaning gets stuck and where possibilities open.
Innovation is never a moment of brilliance. It is a collective state — a temporary alignment of trust, clarity and courage. Flows Labs create the conditions for that alignment to appear.
Context Is Everything
Like in agriculture and permaculture, nothing works out of context. A garden in Sicily is not a garden in Berlin. A systems redesign in a corporation is not the same as a regenerative plan for a watershed or a learning journey for a school. What shapes the work is always the context: the land, the culture, the constraints, the relationships, the power structures, the histories, the flows already in motion.
This approach begins with listening. It honors place, people, friction and possibility.
It treats every project as a situated organism — and responds accordingly.
Tools, Methods & Lineage
Flows Labs draw from many disciplines:
design thinking for creativity and prototyping
biomimicry for functional intelligence
permaculture for contextual design; systems thinking for pattern recognition
traditional ecological knowledge for relational awareness
behavioral science for group psychology
futures thinking for long-range clarity
land-based practice for humility and rigor.
Methods are never the centre. Movement is. Whatever helps the system evolve, we use.
Co-Building with People Who Care
This work thrives on collaboration. Over the years, Labs have been built with artists, farmers, engineers, activists, corporate teams, students, designers, scientists, public institutions and local communities. The roles shift depending on what the project needs. Sometimes leadership is centralized; sometimes it is distributed. Sometimes Flows Labs hold the space; sometimes it steps aside so others can take ownership.
A Lab is co-responsibility in motion. It works when people commit with sincerity.
Who’s behind Flows Labs?
I’m Nicolas Buttin, founder of Flows Labs. My practice is shaped by a life lived across landscapes and disciplines: design studios in London and Paris, biomimicry trainings in South Africa, Sweden and Asia, years of permaculture at my own farm in the South of France, circular economy and upcycling ventures, teaching in design, business and engineering schools across Europe, consulting with global organizations, filming and documenting expeditions in nature across the globe, researching futures and geopolitical flows, learning directly from soil and ecosystems. I’m the co-author of the book Activate the Circular Economy, How to Reconcile Economy and Nature (Eyrolles, 2015), speaker of TEDx Talk and YouTube channel Reconnecting with nature.
We work as an international network of amazing people: designers, ecologists, engineers, facilitators, entrepreneurs, business professionals, educators, social workers, farmers, innovators and change makers. It’s also a network of beautiful places, regenerative farms and eco-villages. Our network is mostly based in Europe, Africa, South East Asia and Latin America.
We always work with the Global Goals for Sustainable Development as our deep mission, see them just below.
If this approach resonates with you, let’s start a conversation.
