Eiffel Over

Author: Oliver Broadbent

  • Begin design with observation (Part 2)

    Yesterday, I wrote about how starting design with observation allows us to take a broader, more holistic view of the systems we’re working within. Another reason to start design with observation stems from the final part of the goal of regenerative design: for humans and the living world to survive, thrive, and co-evolve.

    This isn’t a goal that can be achieved within our current extraction-based economy. Instead, it serves as a guiding “north star,” helping us think about how to shift our economy towards a more holistic way of operating.

    From that perspective, we see ourselves as collaborators with the rest of the living world—humans living and working in partnership with ecosystems, and humans collaborating across communities.

    As I’ve written before on this blog, collaboration requires both interest in the other party and assertiveness for our own ideas.

    Starting design by writing a design brief is an act of assertiveness—it focuses on what we want. Starting design by observing and investigating the needs of others—both the needs of other humans and those of the living world—means we begin the process with interest.

    Given humanity’s historic tendency (and that of certain groups within humanity) to over-assert ourselves on the rest of the living world, there’s no question: we need to increase our interest in other parties.

    Starting design with observation ensures we begin by understanding and addressing those needs first.

  • Begin design with observation (part 1)

    We often think of design as starting with a design brief—a set of requirements outlining what we want.

    But when seen through a regenerative lens, design begins differently. The goal of regenerative design is not just to meet human needs but for human and living systems to survive, thrive, and co-evolve.

    This shift in focus changes the design process in significant ways.

    The first difference is that our goal is not simply the creation of a building. Instead, the building itself must contribute to greater thriving within the system it inhabits.

    This leads to a different starting point. Instead of asking, “What building do I need?” we ask, “What is the overall state of the system I’m working within?” Part of that system might include the immediate need for a building. But in this framing, we also consider the broader system needs.

    • What is the health of the ecosystem? Where is it thriving, and where is it depleted?
    • What is the health of the community? In what ways is it flourishing, and where are there unmet needs?

    By starting from these wider perspectives—and including many other factors we might observe—a more holistic design brief emerges. One that has the potential to address far more than our own immediate needs.

    But there’s another important reason to start design with observation. More on that tomorrow.

  • Re-inventing the wheel(ie bin)

    Yesterday, I wrote about improving how we manage poo at Hazel Hill.

    One particular challenge our staff face is dealing with three of our most “productive” toilets. These are indoor composting toilets, designed so that the waste drops directly into wheelie bins in a bay beneath the building. The idea is that the wheelie bins can then be wheeled out and tipped into composting bays.

    The problem? During the design phase, nobody checked whether it was actually possible to tip out a wheelie bin full of poo.

    Originally, the plan included a fleet of wheelie bins, so some could be left full for a while to allow the waste to break down, making for much pleasanter work. However, during procurement, these extra bins were “value engineered” out of the project. We now have just one set of bins in use, which means they must be emptied fresh.

    As part of our Plan for Poo, we want to improve this wheelie bin system. The easy fix is to buy more bins, allowing for a proper ageing process. But even with well-aged “vintage” contents, tipping the bins remains a challenge.

    So we have a live design brief: to create a method or mechanism for safely and effectively emptying wheelie bins of poo.

    Here are the constraints:

    • We’re an off-grid site. While we have some power on-site, we prefer low-energy, low-tech solutions that align with our ethos.
    • The system should be operable by one member of staff.
    • Ideally, we’d like to use materials we already have on-site to stay in line with our preference for self-sufficiency.
    • The bins need to be tipped into a composting bay for continued breakdown. The design of this bay can be part of the solution.
    • The system should be up and running by the summer holidays.

    We’re inviting suggestions from our community. Designs on a postcard, please! Ideas will be displayed on a board near the outdoor composting area for everyone’s consideration.

    Watch this space for updates.

  • Story of poo

    Some context. When people started visiting Hazel Hill Wood for respite and educational weekends in the early 1990s, there were no buildings. I believe the first structure to be built housed a pair of composting toilets. These were wonderful creations, with hide-like windows that let you gaze out across the wood from your perch high above the long drop—without anyone seeing in.

    By the mid-90s, we began constructing off-grid buildings to accommodate larger and larger groups. With this expansion came more toilets. Today, three of our four accommodation buildings contain indoor composting toilets, each with a different design. Altogether, we now have nine toilets on site. We’ve become a veritable museum of composting toilet design.

    But while our capacity has grown, we haven’t developed a cohesive plan for dealing with all this “output.” Back when only small groups visited occasionally, a pair of long-drop toilets worked perfectly. Between visits, there was plenty of time for the poo to break down.

    As the charity has grown, though, so has the intensity of toilet use. With less time for natural decomposition, we now have a mounting problem—literally.

    Staff must increasingly deal with shifting shift —unpleasant, hidden work that highlights a gap in our design and planning.

    But here’s the thing: our story of poo could be so different. Poo is, after all, one of the clearest examples of a waste stream that can be transformed into input nutrients for new growth. This is a fundamental principle of self-sufficiency, permaculture, and regenerative design.

    What if we could close the loop on poop, turning it into a productive part of our nutrient cycle? And what if the process—given how beautifully it illustrates these principles—were well-designed, pleasant to manage, and something visitors could learn from?

    So, my ambition is to rewrite the story of poo at Hazel Hill. It starts with improving the design of our most unpleasant-to-operate toilets and refining the process of transporting “humanure” to the composting bays.

    As for what we’ll do with the composted material? The leading idea is to use it as manure for a fruit tree orchard—which doesn’t exist…yet. But hopefully, one day, we’ll be able to enjoy the literal fruits of this labour.

  • Free body conflict/a vector joke

    A final thought on conflict. This time, how the different modes of conflict (competition, accommodation, avoidance and collaboration) can be thought of as free-body collisions.

    Avoidance – the two bodies miss each other, and also miss the chance to influence each other

    Competition x Acceptance – This is essentially a dominant collision, where one particle’s direction overpowers the other.

    Collaboration: This behaves like a vector addition, where the resultant trajectory reflects the combined contributions of both particles.

    Maybe the best answers are the product of differences. Whether it’s a cross product depends on how angry you are feeling (sorry couldn’t resist the vector gag)

  • Clunch

    You read that right. No it is not an abbreviation of pack lunch. Clunch is a type of limestone, and one of the wonderful pieces of vocabulary I learnt this week from Mark, the stonemason who is renovating the front of our house.

    I asked Mark where he thought the Bath stone used in the surrounds to the windows and doors on our house came from. He pointed to a window jamb (another great word) and said which quarry he thought it came from, and not only that, but also whether it came from the top of the quarry of the bottom. All from the way the rock feels and can be worked.

    Here I am in my office writing about localising supply chains. And outside is someone who lives and breathes (literally I suspect from the dust) local supply. Who knows where rocks came from. Who can tell a story about why a block was placed one way or another. Who can find new uses for old pieces (a broken lintel has become a keystone elsewhere on the facade).

    He laughs at me and my Zoom calls. Fair enough. Thank you Mark for all your local wisdom, and your amazing work.

  • Conflict and collaboration

    The fourth mode of conflict is collaboration.

    In this mode we are interested in the other person but also keen to assert our own view. I want you to know what I think but I also want to know what you think. Knowing that we are disagreeing I become interested in the difference rather than getting stuck into the offence-defence plays of convincing each other who is right and wrong.

    Collaboration is the opposite of avoidance, wherein there is no interest and no assertion.

    In design, we are engaging in change. The aim of the designer is to taking existing situations and improving them. Since the situations we inhabit usually involve other people, we are likely to discover our views are in some ways in conflict with another’s.

    To avoid engagement is to avoid change. To compete is to overrule. To collaborate is to discover the shared interest and create a new way forward. All of which I think can be shown with a free-body diagram – tomorrow.

  • Avoidance

    My job today is to convince you that avoidance is a mode of conflict, alongside the others we’ve considered this week: competition and acceptance.

    I could try to convince you. I really could. But, you know what? I don’t want to. You’ve probably got your own views. Maybe they’re strongly held. That’s fine. I’m not particularly interested.

    And while I do have a clear and well-articulated model of avoidance in my head, I don’t feel especially compelled to share it with you.

    So, let’s just avoid the discussion altogether.

  • Acceptance in Design

    This week, I’ve been posting about conflict in design. By conflict, I simply mean two people with different perspectives. What happens next, when they discover their differing views, depends on their level of assertiveness and their interest in the other person.

    Yesterday, we met the competitive person. We all know the type (we may even be one ourselves): assertive in their own views and uninterested in the other person’s perspective.

    Often, the “dance partner” of the competitive person is someone who is acceptant. An acceptant person shows a high degree of interest in the other person but is not assertive about their own view.

    In this pairing, the acceptant person ultimately accepts the view of the competitive person.

    There’s no judgment intended in these descriptions. What’s valuable is noticing which modes we—and others—are adopting, and whether that behavior is helpful in the context of the design process.

    If, after considering the arguments, one person genuinely accepts the other’s view, that’s fine. But if one person is consistently forced into accepting the other’s perspective, that might be less fine.

    In such cases, there might be work to do with the competitive party: encouraging them to show more interest and perhaps less assertion. Equally, there might be work to help the acceptant person become more assertive and, perhaps, less deferential.

    More combinations to follow—stay tuned.

  • Dealing with competition in design

    • “I don’t care what you think; you’re wrong because…”
    • “They didn’t ask what I thought; they just told me what to do.”
    • “I raised objections, but I was told we’re sticking to the schedule regardless.”

    In this series of posts, I’m exploring conflict in design, which, for these purposes, is what happens when two people have different views on a subject.

    In each of the scenarios above, two people disagree. And in each case, one person asserts their view without showing interest in the other person’s perspective.

    This is the definition of competition in the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Instrument model: high levels of assertion, paired with low levels of interest in the other person’s view.

    In my experience, competition is a very common mode of operation in construction.

    Some people thrive on competition. Others prefer to steer clear of it entirely.

    How we deal with conflict depends on both our preferences and our goals. But first, we need to explore the other modes of conflict. More on that tomorrow.

  • Approaching conflict in design

    Some people like conflict. Other people stay away from it.
    Some people attempt to engage constructively in conflict. The opposite is also true.

    For me, conflict is simply when two people discover they have different views on a subject. The key is what happens next. How do they engage with one another?

    It’s important to think about how we engage in conflict in design because disagreeing is a crucial part of the design process. It’s part of taking an idea from ‘mine’—an idea in my head—to an idea that exists in the world and fits well within the ecosystem it inhabits.

    Without conflict, the ideas we have risk only serving our own needs.

    In his excellent ‘Leading and Influencing’ course, Nick Zienau teaches four modes of conflict, based on a model called the ‘Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Instrument.’ I now teach these modes to engineers (and other humans) as part of managing a design process. The modes are: competition, avoidance, acceptance, and collaboration. These will be the subjects of my next four posts.

  • Kinetic versus thermodynamic conversations

    Some conversations go quickly. 

    Some conversations go better.

    I wrote on the 21st October about the difference between a kinetic and a thermodynamic product in a chemical reaction. The kinetic product is the fast result; the thermodynamic is the slower, more stable result. 

    As designers we may feel we need to have fast, productive conversations so that we can show our value. 

    But if we go quickly, we risk producing a fast but unstable, kinetic result. An answer crystallise that we can point to and get paid for, but it might not be the best, most stable, situation appropriate result. 

    Better conversations take time. We need to listen. Then we gain trust. Then we can get to the heart of the issue and start to do work that is more appropriate to the unique specificities of the complex situations are clients are working in.

  • Indistinguishable from magic

    The renowned scientist fiction writer and futurist Arthur C Clarke said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. 

    I think the same can be said of well functioning public transport infrastructure. 

  • When WhatsApp is great for design team communication

    1. For high fives and mutual support
    2. For things that might interest someone in the team
    3. For thoughts of kindness and consideration (but don’t assume they’ve been seen)
    4. For anything that it doesn’t matter that you miss, so you can dip in and out without feeling the need to read the previous 200 unread messages.
    5. For genuinely urgent information (but remember point 4 still stands).

  • Lowest common denominator design team communication

    Imagine a system of design team communication that supplies the right level of information and enables the appropriate level of understanding within a suitable timeframe. A way of communicating with our work colleagues that is effective. A process that doesn’t overwhelm us.

    With the digital and analogue tools at our disposal, such a way of communicating is entirely possible. But it takes time to propose, implement, and improve.

    As Cal Newport argues in World Without Email, what usually happens is we don’t make time for this work, and so we revert to the lowest common denominator – in the case of his book, it’s email. However, I think that the lowest common denominator of communication, email has been surpassed by WhatsApp.

    Now, WhatsApp works so well because of its ubiquity – setting up a shared channel is quick, and communication can start almost immediately. But by my counts for successful design team communication, it falls short because:

    • The quality and quantity of information shared vary wildly.
    • There is no checking of understanding (the blue ticks just confirm receipt).
    • Information can arrive at any time (including in the middle of the night or at the weekend).
    • There is rarely any protocol agreed about how the information should be shared, organised, and responded to.
    • Messages come in a stream along with updates from a dozen other projects – not to mention the four other corners of your life. And as it is vastly easier to send group messages than to read them all, we have a recipe for information overwhelm.

    At the start of a project, the quick answer to the question of how to communicate is to set up a WhatsApp channel.

    However, probably the more effective answer is to spend time thinking about and testing a good process for communicating – in other words, designing your design team’s communication.

    If, as a result of that design process, you discover specific cases when a team WhatsApp is a good answer (see my post tomorrow), that answer should be the result of a design process, rather than the default.

  • COP29 x World Quality Week

    This week, world leaders are meeting in Azerbaijan for the COP 29 climate negotiations. Meanwhile, in the construction industry, we are marking World Quality Week. 

    What is world quality? 

    For me, in construction, it is a world that is thriving, both where we make and where we take. 

    Given the buildings and construction sector contribute 39% to global carbon emissions (according to the World Green Building Council), it feels like we need to think more about World Quality in construction

  • Beware of sunk-cost fallacy

    I suffer from sunk-cost fallacy. This is the phenomenon whereby you remain committed to a previous choice because of what you have ’sunk’ or invested in it, even though new evidence suggests a different option would cost you less.

    It shows up for me when I have made a plan to do something, and then plans change, for example when travelling or making plans for the weekend. I remain psychologically committed to the original plan even though it might not make sense any more. I suffer from sunk-cost fallacy because I am a human, and this is a common bias that we suffer. 

    Sunk-cost fallacy also shows up in design. It is when we remain committed to one option which we have invested time, resource and psychological energy in, even when a better answer emerges. If our priority is to get our job done, then making decisions purely on the basis of sunk costs might be sensible. But if our priority is getting the right design, then the sunk-cost is a poor guide, as it fails to account for the total cost of having the wrong answer. 

    Where money is concerned the distraction is how much you have already spent, when the real concern should be how much you still have to spend. For major projects, where we routinely, systematically underestimate the future costs, the risk of sunk-cost fallacy affecting judgement is even greater. 

    Whether we are making plans for the weekend or plans for a new railway, look out for sunk-cost fallacy!

  • Standardising decision-making in design

    Standardising decision-making enables companies to save money. A standardised process allows more junior staff to make decisions without needing to consult a more senior member of staff. Why might a more senior member of staff be required? Because subjective decisions require experience, perspective, and judgement, all of which take time to develop. It is therefore natural for a company seeking to increase profitability to look towards standardising its decision-making processes.

    However, we can also recognise the limitations of this approach. We encounter them when the service provider we rely on can’t make an exception in our case because their system won’t permit it, even though all that’s required is for someone to use judgement and say, ‘this is acceptable.’

    Our aim in construction should be to build far less that is new and to work much more with what already exists. Building new structures lends itself well to standardised processes. Working with existing structures is a much subtler art, requiring observation, analysis, and careful decision-making. Standardised decision-making will become significantly harder, and there will be no shortcut to careful judgement.

  • Frank Auerbach

    I am fascinated when artists manage to capture something of the world-building of construction. One such artist is the painter Frank Auerbach, who died this week. He is known for his style of quickly building up very thick layers of paint on the canvas. His portraits took many sittings as he added and removed layers of paint.

    But what sticks in my mind is his large canvases of construction sites. Twenty years ago, I saw an exhibition of these construction site paintings at the Courtauld in London. One was of the hole in the ground that would become the Shell Building behind the Southbank Centre. A second was of another large modernist construction, the John Lewis Building on Oxford Street.

    His style of thickly applied paint lends itself so well to capturing the scale, the volume, the cleave, the texture, and somehow even the smell of deep excavations. For most of the life of a city, a building is either not there or there. But this incredible, transforming, transient moment – when it is half there, being excavated and then built up – is fleeting, even for large projects.

    Frank Auerbach captures something special about this ephemeral moment.

  • The subjective in the objective

    An objective decision is one that is independent of the decision-maker, as long as that person knows what they are doing.

    A subjective decision is one that is dependent on the decision maker.

    In my experience, engineers (and possibly other humans too) tend to love an objective decision-making process. Objectivity seems to remove fallibility.

    An objective-sounding way of making a decision is to carry out a multi-criteria analysis, in which the different factors are objectively assessed and then the different factors are given a weighting. The best answer then drops out of the process.

    But even if the assessment of different factors is objective, the establishing of the weighting is subjective. Our objective process has become subjective.

    That is fine, as long as we have the skills for making a subjective decision. Subjective decisions take time, require the application of judgement, draw on experience and values. These are factors that are not easily short cut.

  • Framing Design Decisions

    Shall we go to the Italian or the Mexican restaurant?

    Shall we go to the Mexican or the Italian restaurant?

    Shall we go to the Italian or the lovely Mexican restaurant?

    Shall we go our usual Italian or try out the Mexican place?

    Shall we go to the Mexican for main course and then go to the Italian for ice cream? 

    Shall we go to the Italian or the Mexican, or shall we look for somewhere else along the way?

    Shall we go to the expensive Italian place or the cheaper Mexican and spend the money we save on drinks beforehand?

    Shall we try one this time, the other the next, and use the experience to inform future decision-making.

    The last one may be unrealistic, but you get the picture. How we frame the question influences the decision we make. How is the design decision you are making being framed? 

  • Playing poker by the rules of noughts and crosses

    This week I am writing about how we make decisions in design. I’ve written before about David Snowden’s way of describing systems using a games analogy (see reference below). To recap:

    • A simple system is akin to a game of noughts and crosses. You know the rules and you can quickly work out the answer. 
    • A complicated system is like a game of chess. There are lots of rules, but given enough time you can work out all the options and choose the best one. 
    • A complex system is like a game of poker. The rules are one factor, but the game is made much more difficult by the interaction between the players. This is the domain of unknown unknowns. It is not possible to determine the best course of action from the start – the best approach emerges. 
    • A chaotic system is like a game with children in which they are constantly changing the rules. Here it is very difficult to make sense of what is going on as the ground keeps shifting. 

    Let’s look at decision making through these lenses. 

    A decision might appear to be a simple question of A versus B. But many factors might begin to complicate the process. For example, opportunity cost of one option over another. Or competing priorities that don’t make one option clearly better than another.

    When we start to include human factors, the picture becomes much more complex. First, there are the vast array of factors that push and pull our own decision-making – not all of them conscious; not all of them we want to admit to. And then there is how the groups of people around the poker table of design (whose interests might not necessarily be aligned) show up and play the game.

    The complexity grows when we we start to consider the interconnection between lots of the factors that we might consider in design: the long-term versus short-term business model, community wellbeing, ecosystem wellbeing, etc.

    Finally, we have a chaotic decision-making environment when the rules of the game start changing. This could be the case when, say, in a major project one part of the team starts shifting the goals of the project without informing the rest. No one is clear anymore about the conditions in which they are trying to make a decision.

    All of this is to say that decision-making is often much more complex than a simple A versus B. So we need to prepare ourselves for decision-making in complex environments. 

    As ever, our guiding principles can be: to work iteratively, and to look for the emergent patterns. 

    Playing poker by the rules of noughts and crosses is a losing strategy.

    References

    Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November 2007 Issue.

  • Design decisions – who decides?

    Design is full of decisions. Which client? Which supplier? Which materials? What location? Whether to build or not to build? Which idea best suits the brief? Shall I challenge the brief (yes!)?

    The journey through design is a process of decision making. The ability to make well-informed, ethical and insightful decisions is the mark of the professional. And so it is worth spending a bit of time thinking about how we arrive at decisions.

    So let’s start here — with the question of who decides. Here are four answers.

    • I decide – through some process to be unpicked, I am doing the decision-making
    • Someone else decides – we are merely informed of their decision.
    • A decision emerges – through a series of interactions between people, possibly without anyone necessarily knowing how, a preferred decision reveals itself.
    • A decision evolves – this is the living world’s mechanism for decision-making. 

    You can see all of these at play in a design team. 

    • I might make a decision about what material to specify 
    • The client decides they want to reduce the budget –  I am not consulted, merely informed.
    • In a design team meeting, we review various options together, and through the interaction of people and ideas, a particular option wins out as the most popular.
    • And I might not be aware of it, but our decision is informed by and part of a long-term evolution of design which, for example, has seen greater emphasis placed on end-of-life design.

    Understanding who decides is a first step to figuring out the decision-making mechanism, where we have agency and how we can help make better decisions.

  • Mullions to Overton’s Window

    I heard these six words yesterday on Seth Godin’s podcast to describe the way that ideas become accepted in political discourse. Ideas can shift from being unthinkable, to radical, to acceptable, to sensible, to popular, to policy. But, as this process works on both sides of the Overton Window (the range of politically acceptable ideas), I think it is more helpful to see these words as a mirrored progression.

    Unthinkable > Radical > Acceptable > Sensible > Popular > Policy < Popular < Sensible < Acceptable < Radical < Unthinkable

    Mullions are the vertical dividing bars or columns in windows. I therefore think of this sequence as the mullions to Overton’s Window.

    Dreamers shift the centre ground by imagining the unthinkable. So do extremists. The extremists probably think of themselves as dreamers and the dreamers, extremists. 

    But who wins depends on which ideas are listened to, become accepted and eventually start to sound sensible. Aristotle had a theory about who wins that debate: the person who is trustworthy, who shares in the audience’s pain and who has a clear enough idea.

    As ever, it is not enough to dream: we have to relate too.

  • Setting learning goals vs. seeing what happens

    This came up in a recent training course. I always ask people what they want to get out of a training programme. To set themselves some learning goals.

    But how do you know what you want to get out of a training course before you start? 

    An alternative, more emergent approach might be to attend the course, be open-minded, and see what you can take from it. By setting goals, aren’t you shutting down possibilities that you hadn’t foreseen?

    I think the best course is somewhere in the middle: to set out on the training with some intentions, but to be open to what comes up. This requires us to be iterative in our learning. We need to set goals, take some action, and then see what happens. 

    We may discover along the way that there is something else that we wanted to learn. Fine — then adjust your goals.

    But, as my mentor, Prof Søren Wilert once said to me, if you don’t know where you were trying to get to, you can’t assess the success of your actions.

  • Remarkably unremarkable – the longest tunnel in the world

    Yesterday I wrote about my remarkable journey southbound across Switzerland via the breathtaking Bernina Express. 

    For the homebound journey we opted for a faster itinerary: the Milan-Zurich express. Midway through the journey, drinking a coffee in the restaurant car, I noticed that we seemed to have been underground for quite a long time.

    A while later, still underground, thinking this is a very long tunnel, I sought out a map. To my delight and surprise I realised we were zipping along the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which, at 52km, is the longest rail tunnel in the world.

    What was so striking is how unremarkable this remarkable tunnel makes the journey. It is the opposite of the Bernina Express in so many ways, it is fast, straight, flat and has no views (at some point we will have crossed the watershed between the Po and the Rhine, but I was none the wiser).

    In a sense, the immense effort to build this tunnel has made the journey effortless. A flattening that smooths the flow of goods and people between northern and southern Europe. The Milan to Zurich journey time shortened by an hour.

    In their own times, both the Bernina and the Gottard routes were faster than what went before. Both a remarkable feats of engineering.

  • Bernina Express

    I recently traveled to Italy and back overland, seeking an alternative to the usual high-speed Paris-Milan service, which had been blocked for many months due to a landslip. But fortunately (like a more positive version of the poem ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’), when looking for alternative ways to cross the Alpine massif, then there definitely are other ways to go over it, under it and around it.

    The ‘around it’ route in case would have involved to the south of France and then along the coast to Italy. But French holiday travel precluded us from getting tickets on the fast French sections. And so we opted for going outbound ‘over it’ via the Bernina Express, and homebound ‘under it’ via the Gotthard Base tunnel.

    The Bernina Express really is the scenic way to cross the Alps. From the eastern Swiss town of Chur, the train corkscrews up inside mountains, zigzags across steep slopes and leaps over more than a hundred viaducts. This narrow-gauge railway turns impossibly narrow curves so that you regularly see the trailing end of the train out of the windows when you sit at the front. At the top of the Bernina Pass, over 2000 metres up, glaciers hang overhead in valleys above, and mineral water in lakes reflect the mountain-scape in technicolor. The descent begins where we cross the watershed between the Danube (leading to the Black Sea) and the Po (heading to the Adriatic) – two very different destinies for a raindrop. The descent feels steeper than the rise, with our destination of Tirano tantalisingly close in the valley below but the switchbacks and spirals taking over an hour to complete.

    Crossing over the border into Italy at the very end of the line feels like an achievement. And even though we have spent the last four hours sitting down, travelling this way you really get a sense of what an awesome barrier the Alps are right in the middle of Europe. How over the centuries trade might have travelled along these passes, and the advantages to the people able to make the route faster. 

    Top tip – the Bernina Express terminus and the Trenitalia station, for onward travel, are on two sides of a town square. The other two sides are occupied by cafes that will do you a delicious meal of pasta and leave you plenty of time to make your connection. 

    Tomorrow – ‘going under it’, via the Gotthard Base tunnel. 

  • You don’t say very much

    One of my favourite moments in Barbara Kingsolver’s book Flight Behaviour is when one character says to a scientist at dinner, ‘you don’t talk much, do you’.

    The scientist responds, ‘when I’m talking, I’m not listening.’

  • Taking time to find the right fit

    In yesterday’s post, I explored the difference between kinetic and thermodynamic products in chemistry. The analogy was about allowing change to unfold more slowly, giving the system a chance to find a state of greater harmony.

    The “system” can be anything—a masterplan, an organisation, or even a supply chain. But the principle holds true: quick change might give us rapid results, but finding the best fit for the system takes time. What’s key here is iteration—testing and adjusting to discover if a better solution can emerge, whatever “better” might mean.

    So why should we care about the best fit? If the goal is just to get the job done, then a fast solution might seem sufficient. But if the goal is long-term success and the thriving of all the system’s parts, finding the best fit helps avoid hidden cracks that could lead to failure, and it reduces built-in stresses that could cause damage over time. Fixing those issues later costs time, energy, and money.

    Best-fit design, enabled by iterative processes and informed by local feedback, takes time—but the reward is a more harmonious, lower-energy system.

  • Kinetic versus thermodynamic designs

    I used this example for the first time at the Regenerative Design Lab and so I am sharing it here. It is about how time and conditions shape what we create. It is about finding the best fit.

    If you take a super saturated solution and cool it down, at some point, crystals will start forming in the solution. If you cool the solution quickly, the crystals appear suddenly. They are small and jumbled up. In chemistry this is called the ‘kinetic product’. 

    But if you cool the solution very slowly, the crystal formation is very gradual. If you are very careful you can even create one single giant crystal. This slower version is called the ‘thermodynamic product’.

    In the kinetic product, because the solution is cooling quickly, the crystals just form from the ions in whatever location they happen to be at that moment. It is a product of convenience, but is full of internal stresses and fractures. 

    In the thermodynamic product, because the solution is cooling slowly, the ions have time to arrange themselves into their ideal equilibrium position in the crystal. There are fewer internal stresses and fractures. The ions exist in greater harmony.

    And so to design. When engineers (and other humans) develop a design, are developing a kinetic answer, that is quick and convenient? Or a thermodynamic answer, that allows the elements of the system to find their best fit? And which approach creates a design that brings greater harmony to the parts involved?