Author: Oliver BroadbentPage 11 of 14
I’ve realised that quietly, in the back of my mind I am waiting. It hasn’t happened yet, so I just have to wait a bit longer. I am…
Yesterday I was feeling particularly sad about the loss of live music during lockdown and the stories of musicians who just don’t have any work at the moment….
It feels right as I take on my new role at Hazel Hill Wood to read the Hidden Life of Trees. This is an evolving post based on…
In the height of the first Covid lockdown I was invited by James Norman and the Institution of Structural Engineers to give a talk on how to maintain…
This week I ran a workshop with undergraduate students at Imperial College working in design teams at imperial. the aim was to show that it is much easier…
Yesterday my daughter and I left the house and flipped a coin. Heads for left, tails for right. Right it was, then left, then left again, et cetera….
30 minutes of uninterrupted dawn chorus Hazel Hill Wood, recorded at the end of March. Hazel Hill is woodland nature reserve and education centre helping frontline staff develop…
There used to be a sign outside a bakery in London that said something along the lines of, ‘it’s the invisible ingredients – love, care and attention –…
It is tempting to think of a design brief as wholly reliable, a document that contains all the information necessary to execute the design. But design briefs are…
When developing a design brief, it is tempting to start by constraining the problem – by clarifying, by simplifying, by cutting out. But if we want to make…
I’ve been listening the BBC World Service’s podcast ’13 Minutes to the Moon’ about the Apollo space programme. Last night I listened to the episode about Apollo 8,…
Yesterday our household returned home from an imaginary holiday. Despite being in lockdown, we realised that we could imagine going on a trip anywhere in the world. Our…
Across all the of the projects I’m involved with we are working out what can go ahead and what must be postponed. A significant factor in whether to…
It’s hard to know where to start. So much has changed in the last fortnight and there is so much that I feel compelled to write about. But…
Tabitha Pope is an architect and lecturer, with a specialism temporary structures and participatory architecture and a passion for work that sits at the boundary of art and…
Bengt is a consultant and ‘re-designer’, working in sustainability and circular design in the built environment. This year we are working together to create training in response to…
I met with a friend earlier in the week to talk about setting some life goals. It’s a conversation we had had five years ago and then did…
I’m a slow reader. The problem is I can’t seem to retain things unless I write them down or sketch them out. It means that I read very…
I just went to see The Lighthouse, an enjoyably gothic story of the descent into madness of two lighthouse keepers. I loved the visual design of this film…
I am reminded this morning of much I like working out what all the buttons do on a machine. Quite often the machines we use, be they an…
I spend most of my time designing creativity training for engineers. In this episode we flip the format. Alexie Sommer, Independent Design and Communication Director and collaborator on…
Readers of this blog will know I started a project a couple of years ago to write a book called ‘Analogue Skills‘, a re-examination of the pre-screen skills…
It will probably be very muddy. At least it was for my first visit of the year to Hazel Hill Woods. Recent rain has made the forest wetter…
I am speeding north on a train from Aix-en-Provence TGV and reflecting on what it is I like so much about this station. It sits on the southern…
My Dad and I talk about chords. How would you get from one key in a piece of music to another? To onlookers, it might seem as though…
My daughter is now seven. I have been trying to remember what being seven was like for me. Memories start to become more frequent around this time. Some…
This week I have had the feeling that I have been struggling recently to find focus on my creative work. I have lots of projects on at the…
This question came up on the way home this evening. On the back of the tandem, my daughter was experimenting with counting in French. Things were going fine…
In November 2019 I was booked to deliver the keynote address for the University of Edinburgh Engineering Faculty’s away day. It was an opportunity to explore how the…