Designing as water: a new paradigm
What would it mean to treat water as a stakeholder – one whose rhythms, requirements, and impact are considered at every step of the design process?
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Global Director, Landscape
Water has always shaped us – it shapes our landscapes, sustains ecosystems, and increasingly challenges the systems we’ve designed to manage it. Yet for decades, the built environment has approached water primarily as something to be controlled – treated as a technical issue rather than a living system.
Together with Ramboll Water we are exploring a new paradigm with design as water.
By 2050, half of the world’s population is expected to live in water-stressed regions. Already today, 90% of natural disasters are water-related, and climate change is pushing these extremes further – flooding and heavy rainfall events have increased by over 50% globally since the 2010s. These events don’t exist in isolation, they overlap and cascade, affecting infrastructure, economies, and public health.
Water as our teacher
Water is not static. It flows, seeps, evaporates, and returns. It adapts to context, resists boundaries, and connects systems. Design as Water explores how water’s distinct qualities can inform a new design paradigm – one that mirrors the movement, and complexity of water itself. This begins with asking what it would mean to design with water as a key stakeholder, rather than something to solve.
The approach identifies five characteristics that water can teach us to embody in the design process:
- Connected: Recognizing that every action influences wider systems – including hydrological, ecological, and social. Water moves across boundaries and so should our thinking.
- Responsive: Acting and reacting with intention – to challenge, to push, to transform. Designing for flexibility and resilient living systems.
- Transparent: Working transparently and embracing accountability for every line we do and don’t decide to draw.
- Ever-evolving: Learning and unlearning, adapting to new challenges and embracing change as we design for all life.
- Playful: Using openness, creativity, and imagination to rethink norms and ask questions together.
"Designing as water is not just a method, the water crisis needs a total mindset shift. Around the world, our teams are working with clients who are ready to move beyond conventional solutions and see water as a key stakeholder rather than a constraint. This guide is the result of many voices and perspectives; a reflection of how we can work with water’s flows, rather than view it as a risk. Whether it's in dense cities or rural landscapes, we know that the more resilient solutions come when we listen — to water, local knowledge, ecosystems, and one another. By recognizing ourselves as part of nature, we can design with humility and co-create conditions that support life." - Franziska Meisel, Global Director, Landscape.
Whether it's in dense cities or rural landscapes, we know that the more resilient solutions come when we listen — to water, local knowledge, ecosystems, and one another. By recognizing ourselves as part of nature, we can design with humility and co-create conditions that support life.
Franziska Meisel
Global Director, Landscape
Embracing the flow
Part of incorporating water into our processes means changing how we design – and how we approach the design process. Every intervention changes how water moves, and by extension, how ecosystems function. By pausing to ask questions, we create space for water to speak within the process: What is the brief really asking? What assumptions does it carry? Will it solve an issue or create problems? Who is defining the challenge, and who is left unheard? What if water was our client, how would that change the brief?
This also requires collaboration. Appointing a water steward, including a water specialist, or seeking a local water expert, ensures decisions are rooted in the specific dynamics of place. Without this perspective, water becomes an afterthought, confined to culverts and pipes, forced into unnatural paths.
Water must be embedded from the start as part of the project’s narrative, vision, and design logic. That means mapping its flows, understanding its context, and recognizing that no site exists in isolation. Surface or underground, slow or fast, water connects everything. To design responsibly, we must look beyond site boundaries and ask where water comes from, where it’s going, and what systems it touches along the way.
Explore our Design Guide downloadable below.
This guide was developed through a co-creative process, embracing diverse methods and non-linear exploration. External contributions, continuous feedback, and open reflection are key in shaping its evolving direction. This project was funded by the Ramboll Foundation. Special thanks to Ramboll Water and our many collaborators and contributors.
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Design as water
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