Author: Oliver BroadbentPage 4 of 14
In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between the scale of design team and the connection with the places they are working with. Today I’ll…
There are advantages to scale in design teams. NASA estimates that 400,000 people were involved in the Apollo space programme. This scale of operation allows a degree of…
I’ve just invented a game, called ForEdge to explore the concept of how the amount of ‘edge’ in different sizes of systems affects their efficiency. This game is…
At some point in my childhood, Pizza Hut introduced the stuffed crust pizza. The idea was simple: stuff the crust with a ring of gooey cheese. It was…
As Rob Hopkins points out in his wonderful book From What Is to What If, the climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the imagination. If…
A few days ago, Parkrun turned 20 years old. What started as a simple community gathering, launched by Paul Sinton-Hewitt on October 2nd, 2004, has grown into a…
Desertification = a real word that refers to the process where fertile land becomes desert, typically due to drought, deforestation, or poor land management. It can also be…
Somehow the topics of my posts have returned to the subject of the sea. It is apparently a rich subject to trawl. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun,…
Yesterday’s post on the fish écluses on the Île de Ré speaks to the idea of creating straightforward connections between the resources that humans need to live and…
Hundreds of years ago, the inhabitants of the Île de Ré, just off France’s Atlantic coast, developed an ingenious way to catch fish. At low tide, they built…
This little refrain is my version of Aristotle’s three artistic truths for making a convincing argument. Aristotle proposed three things were needed to win people over. The first…
This post has moved. It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version → Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and…
This post has moved. It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version → Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and…
This post has moved. It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version → Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and…
My song Arthur the Lawn Mower is about our relationship with machines. In it, Arthur describes how he takes ‘a random path across the garden terrain’. It turns…
This post has moved. It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version → Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and…
This is a post for the cycling decision-makers among you. It may resonate even if you don’t cycle. Variations on the question of whether, if it starts raining…
This post has moved. It now lives on the Constructivist website: read the updated version → Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and…
This post has moved. It now lives on the Constructivist website: read the updated version → Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and…
This post has moved. It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version → Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and…
This post has moved. It now lives on the Constructivist website: read the updated version → Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and…
If the client knows exactly what they want at the start of a design process, then it isn’t design – it’s shopping. Shopping for the answer that you’ve…
I read on a fact sheet that guinea pigs have 340-degree vision. On a horizontal plane they can see almost all around. Imagine! Their only blind spots are…
Are you excited about the possibilities of your next project? Or worried about the unknowns? Do you see the possibility for competition or collaboration? There is not a…
I am sharing today a schedule I use in my work every time the noise from distractions gets too much and/or I don’t actually think I am making…
I was taught to start my music practice by playing my scales. Starting with your scales: Starting with your scales doesn’t just apply to instruments. It applies to any…
The wind was getting up. The waves were starting to blow in from different directions. The sea scape seemed to be changing at random. The day before, the…
Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s theme of riding the waves of human energy in our work. The idea is to create a cycle of working that tunes…
Jim Crace’s book Harvest provides fascinating portrait of rural life in England just before the start of the Industrial Revolution. What is so striking is the way the…
One of earliest childhood memories of travel is riding in the back of the car driving along a motorway in mountains in the north of Italy. To traverse…