Eiffel Over

Author: Oliver Broadbent

  • Start by lighting the fire

    Start by lighting the fire

    It’s the first thing we do at Hazel Hill Wood. Light the fire for everyone else. A clutch of tiny twigs, a handful of finger-thick branches, and some small logs. I can do this because other have prepared the materials.

    A year ago someone felled a tree and cut its trunk into lengths that fit the stove. Others took these logs and arranged them into seasoning stacks in the forest, where for a year or so they lose their moisture. More people have transferred the partially seasoned timber to the wood stores, where they get bone dry. Finally, someone has filled the baskets with twigs, branches and logs so that I can light it this morning.

    When the room is warm I meet people, and we talk amongst other things about how to manage the forest that provides us with this renewable source of fuel.

    There’s lots that I like about this human-natural system. Every stage is visible, which makes me much more aware of where the things I use come from. The stock levels in each of the stages are easy to monitor, providing me with feedback about how the system is operating.

    I like the long time frame. We have to make decisions now about how many trees to fell in order to meet demand in two to three years. Over an even longer time frame, we need to think about how to manage the forest to ensure there is sufficient regrowth to provide firewood in thirty years time.

    Rather than destructive, this process of carefully felling trees seems to create life: making openings in the forest canopy that form new habitats for plants, for invertebrates and the animals and birds that live on them.

    Most importantly for me, it is a brilliant example of how we can manage human-natural systems that regenerate to meet our needs with little more than the energy of the sun.

    When I start by lighting the fire, I am engaged with this human-natural system. It primes me to think, what work do I need to put into the system today to ensure it continues to regenerate.

    Photo credit: Joseph Watts

  • Carbon vs everything else: system health vs system outputs

    I’m getting this down while it is fresh in my mind following a planning conversation with Will Arnold this morning for our Net Zero Structural Design course. In the final session of this course we are helping participants think about how to weigh up carbon with other wider sustainability considerations.

    In my post earlier this morning I was reflecting on how focusing on a system’s resilience can enhance its restorative powers. My angle then, from a design perspective, was thinking about how we can shift the design brief from designing objects or outputs to designing resilience. Now I am thinking from a different angle: how we test for resilience, and how this relates to tests for carbon footprint.

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  • Think resilience to observe and enhance a system’s restorative powers

    I underlined these words in Meadows’s Thinking in Systems primer. ‘Thinking about resilience enables us to observe and enhance a system’s restorative powers.’ As with so much in this book it is an efficient sentence that carries so much meaning. This is my thinking-out-loud (not so efficiently written, but I find it helpful).

    This quote that I have pulled out is at the end of a section of the book on the characteristics on well functioning systems. The three ingredients are resilience, self-organisation and hierarchy. Natural systems are very good at using these three ingredients to build ever more complex systems that can respond to a range of scenarios in a self-organising way.

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  • Humbelievable

    Humbelievable

    Last Friday I took the train from York to Hull. Onboard I was speaking on the phone to Will Arnold about our Net Zero Structural Design Course. As we rounded a bend this epic site swung into view and I stunned into silence. Spread out before me, skimming the water like a second horizon, the Humber Bridge.

    This bridge seems improbably long. How can it be that the vertical load at midspan is supported by those towers when they are so far away? There must be some antigravity involved.

    When it opened it was the longest single span bridge in the world, at 1.6km between the towers. Of the other facts I read on the bridge’s Wikipedia page, my favourite is that the towers are 36mm further apart at the top than at the bottom due to the curvature of the earth. I’d like to think I managed to capture that aspect in my rapid-fire photo from the train window.


    Humber Bridge from Railway Line by Oliver Broadbent is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  • Where is the bus station?

    Where is the bus station?

    Seen at Turnpike Lane station.

    Both left and right lead to the buses, but why is right prioritised?

    Was there once a member of staff who got so tired of saying where the buses are that they wanted to shout the answer?

    Did someone at the train company say to the sign writer, give me the largest font you have?

    What happens if you try to catch a bus by going left?



    Bus Station at Turnpike Lane by Oliver Broadbent is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  • Storm’s coming: go to the cinema

    Storm’s coming: go to the cinema

    In times gone by, people went to the cinema to stay warm. The movie theatre offers a place of shelter from the elements and also an escape from reality for a couple of hours. Last week, when storms huffed and puffed and infrastructure bent and buckled, Great Western Railway suspended all services from London to Bristol. I was stranded in the capital amid a maelstrom of conflicting information about when services would resume. So rather than stare at the blank departure screen, I headed for the silver screen instead.

    I felt liberated. Give me a ticket for the next film, I said. The next feature was Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film ‘Parallel Mothers’. For the next two hours and three minutes I was transported away from the rain and the wind to sunny Madrid and the tale of two who give birth on the same day.

    By the time I emerged the information storm had settled down. There would be no trains today, and probably none tomorrow morning. Decision made for me: I would need to stay another night in London.

    Incompatible and incomplete information

    In a situation like this, when a system that usually runs in a steady state is knocked off course, then the information about that system is likely to be incompatible or incomplete. For instance, National Rail Enquiries showed some trains leaving Paddington, GWR said none leaving Paddington for now, others had simply crashed.

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  • Regenerative Design Lab working notes

    Sharing my working notes from today.

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  • Regenerative Design: a process not a thing

    Regenerative Design: a process not a thing

    As I continue my exploration of regenerative design in engineering, correspondents have said it would be helpful to gather examples of regenerative design. Templates that we can look at, imitate and integrate.

    From my reading of Wahl (see my recent post), I’m increasingly understanding regenerative design to be a process rather than a thing.

    Regenerative practice of any sort (in design, in education, in living…) is practice that leaves the ecosystem richer and better able to heal itself. It is practice that sees humans as a keystone species that play a unique role in helping their ecosystems thrive.

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  • When government bans protest against our projects, engineers must put down their tools

    When government bans protest against our projects, engineers must put down their tools

    The cornerstone of our democracy is the right to protest. At the moment the government is pushing through amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that would make it illegal to protest at a range of infrastructure sites.

    The Government is intending to use the latest amendment to

    introduce a new offence of interfering with the operation of key infrastructure, such as the strategic road network, railways, sea ports, airports, oil refineries and printing presses, carrying a maximum penalty of 12 months’ imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both

    George Monbiot citing in the guardian a private letter to members of the House of Lords

    This is on top of the existing authoritarian measures in the bill. For instance, named individuals can be banned from protesting. If I write a post encouraging readers to attend a protest, I can be individually banned from protesting. If I turn up anyway, under these new measures, I can be sent to prison for 51 weeks.

    Why is the government doing this?

    Well, I suspect it is because they know that protest works, as demonstrated by the success of the protests to stop fracking in the UK. A sustained campaign of protest by a small dedicated group halted one of the most illogical of engineering projects: fracking for more fossil fuels while committing to reducing our carbon footprint.

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  • Reflections on transformational innovation

    These are my reflective notes as I work through chapter two of Daniel Wahl’s ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures‘. My aim in this reading is to find clues as to what a set of principles for regenerative design for engineers could look like.

    Wahl introduces three types of innovation:

    • Sustaining innovation – that which keeps the current system working
    • Disruptive innovation – that which introduces new operating systems
    • Transformative innovation – that which is the ‘long-term innovation process of fundamental changes in culture and identity.

    He argues that if we want to achieve a transition towards a regenerative culture, it is this third kind of innovation that we need.

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  • Our responsibility: reduce carbon on projects by 7% a year starting now

    Our responsibility: reduce carbon on projects by 7% a year starting now

    Hold this figure in mind: 7%.

    In 2019 the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) published a report concluding that in order to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees, we need to reduce carbon emissions by 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. That’s equivalent to 7% per year, starting now, every year until the end of the decade. 

    That is faster than they fell in 2020 during the pandemic.

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  • Sometimes I think it needs to get really bad before people will care about energy

    Sometimes I think it needs to get really bad before people will care about energy

    In the bakery where I often go to write in the mornings they are having heating fitted. The cafe is in a warehouse and it gets cold in the winter. As I write, warm-air ducts are being installed overhead that circulate heat from a new gas-fired boiler. 

    Meanwhile, the room next door is so hot from the ovens that they use fans to vent the heat to the atmosphere. I asked isn’t there a way that they could use the waste heat from the ovens to heat the space we are in. The answer I got was that we asked and it is not possible. 

    I wonder how much more possible it would become if gas were not available. The challenge is the problem is not real enough. Sometimes I think it needs to get real bad before people will care about how much energy they are really using.

  • The Boy Who Cried Climate Emergency

    We all know the story of the boy who cried wolf. He didn’t really mean it. In the end, everyone stopped believing him. Wolf didn’t mean anything. But the danger was still there. When the wolf came, nobody helped. The wolf got him.

    What do you think happens if your organisation declares a climate emergency and then doesn’t really do anything about it? 

    In an emergency, individuals take the shortest path to a place of safety. The normal rules don’t count. People collaborate to help others in greatest danger. The situation is monitored to see if the danger has subsided. We only go back when it is safe to do so.

    If your organisation has declared a climate emergency, but most of the business is carrying on as usual, then do they really mean it? Has your work and the work of your colleagues changed substantially since declaring that emergency or not?

    If so then they don’t really really mean it. Climate emergency will stop being meaningful. But the danger is still here. 

    When the wolf came, nobody helped. The wolf got him. Except the him is all of us.

  • Why is the moon so big / when we spot mistakes

    I just dreamed up this example to explain why our mistakes show up at system boundaries.

    Have you ever noticed that the moon looks much bigger when it is close to the horizon? Well, it turns out this is an optical illusion. The moon is exactly the same size – no further or closer to us on Earth than it would be at a different position in the sky.

    The difference is that when the moon is low we can compare its size with objects on the horizon. When it is high there are no nearby reference points for comparison. It just is.

    And so to our mistakes. We can be working away, building a brick wall, working on a website, whatever and know of no error in our work. That is until we reach a boundary, and interface. Only then can we find our point of reference.

    What’s your point of reference? How can you use it to check what you are doing?

  • Updates from a regenerative system

    Updates from a regenerative system

    Our nearby allotments are my local source of food and regenerative inspiration. Sharing my thoughts from this weekend’s visit when I was helping with apple pressing.

    While Bristol is well served by local a scene of craft breweries, if you really want to get local alcohol, then cider is the hyper local choice. Whereas the ingredients for beer are gathered from around the world to be brewed in here, in Bristol you can drink cider under the tree that the apples came from.

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  • Facilitation tools for engineers (and other humans)

    Facilitation tools for engineers (and other humans)

    This post is still under construction. In this post I am linking together the best of my material on facilitation tools for engineers (and other humans). To facilitate is to render a conversation easier. Many of us are taught to present but not to facilitate. What’s the difference? Why might I want to facilitate? And how do I do it? It’s all in here. Stay tuned as I add more content (19/10/21).

    From Presentation to Facilitation

    • Oliver’s mantra for facilitation
    • What you want may not be what they need
    • From positivism to constructivism
    • Build the agenda together
    • From expert on content to expert on process

    The Four Modes of Facilitation

    • Presentation
    • Break-out
    • Guided Q&A
    • Guided Plenary

    And underpinning many of these, how to use Catalytic Style.

    Structure for different outcomes

    • Transmitting information
    • Learning about a situation
    • Helping people help each other

    Training Courses

    Facilitation training is some of my favourite training to deliver because it quickly gets into how we relate to each other. This is great stuff to explore.

    Check out the latest courses we are running on facilitation, design and all sorts of related material.

  • Sustainability is no-longer enough

    Today I am sharing more of the thinking that went into my vision question for Hazel Hill Wood: what if we became a centre for regenerative practice?

    It is my view that sustainability has been captured by mainstream industry and politics as a smokescreen for business-as-normal. We now know that our efforts to sustain our ecosystems for the benefit of future generations has not been enough and that we now beginning a process of climate and ecosystem breakdown. 

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  • Setting a vision question rather than a vision statement

    It is my role as Chair of Hazel Hill Trust to be the ‘vision holder’ for the project. There are lots of ways you can interpret what this means. It could be to write the vision. Or it could be to facilitate the process from which the vision emerges. I have chosen a middle path, which is to ask a question.

    My question is, what if Hazel Hill Wood could become a centre for regenerative practice? The challenge I am faced with is being consultative and facilitative about longer-term decision-making at the same time as providing direction while we bring on board new Trustees and make some important operating decisions.

    Asking a question rather than providing an answer sits more comfortably with my constructivist, problem-based learning practice. Yes, I am setting a question, and that question tells us in which direction to head. But the answer gets decided by the people on the journey.

    Read my post setting out this vision question on the Hazel Hill Trust website.

  • Analogue Skills for Design at the University of Bath

    Analogue Skills for Design at the University of Bath

    Today at the University of Bath I am running a workshop on Analogue Skills for Design. This workshop fuses material from my conceptual design teaching with my observations from the Analogue Skills project, my attempt to collect and curate less digital ways of doing things in case we need to use them again.

    Creativity and design as human skills

    A key thread that runs through my design and creativity teaching is that these are very human processes, which are deeply impacted by individual’s connection to themselves, each other and the environment which supports them. 

    At the individual level, creativity is hugely influenced by our emotional and physiochemical state, the relationship between our conscious and subconscious and our unique combination of lived experience. At a group level, how ideas emerge in a collective consciousness and become the work of many is influenced by relationships, accessibility and the many facets of working culture. And of course we all live in the physical world, the world that we are trying to shape. How we move through and experience that physical world – not in our heads but as moving inhabitants of space – influences how we respond to and act in that space.

    All of these factors are features of how we design, not as purely rational, reason engines, but as emotional, physical human beings.

    Analogue Skills

    Another ability of humans – although not unique to humans – is the ability to create tools. Taking a lever as both an example and a metaphor, our tools enable us to multiply our efforts. The tools we use shape our perception of what is possible, and so influence how we perceive the world. 

    Over the last five years or so I have become increasingly interested in how our tools, and in particular our newer, digital tools influence how we think and live. Because while we have always been influenced by our tools, the rate of introduction of new, digital tools has become so rapid that in less than a generation, our tools have transformed the way we think, feel and behave. 

    I experience this personally because I am a Xennial, someone from a sub-generation that grew up without internet enabled computers but who has spent their whole working life with one. Xennials are halfway between digital natives and digital immigrants. I feel this timing of my up-bringing gives me insight into two different ways of thinking, what I loosely call the more analogue and the more digital. These two ways of thinking can be very different. Take the simple example how to organise information. In the analogue world, information is carefully indexed and prized because it may not be possible to find it again. It is a paradigm of scarcity but also care. In the digital world, the natural assumption is the information is searchable and always available and so information itself is de-valued. This is a paradigm of abundance but also of less care. 

    From this perspective,  individuals become more and more dependent on these new technologies, I see that what once was a tool that served us, these technologies have become a tool to manipulate us. From user to used. With dependency comes fear. How could I ever live without it? But so ubiquitous is our internet-enabled world that we risk forgetting the ways we could live and flourish without computers in our pockets.

    The Analogue Skills Project is my attempt to record less-digital ways of doing things before they get forgotten so that we can use these to evaluate what technology we do and don’t want. It is an attempt to build resilience and reduce dependence on technology that may not always be there to help us. It is my hope to find a more human balance between the analogue and the digital.

    See my collection of analogue skills so far.

    Human operating system

    I see each analogue skill as a way of liberating ourselves from digital dependency and to discover something that it turns out we can do ourselves as humans: each one is a clue to the workings of the human operating system.

    To accompany the growing list of skills I have also created the Analogue Skills Manifesto, which is an invitation to resist the digital pull and rediscover what you can do as a human being:

    • Don’t delegate autonomy to the machines
    • Resist a mediated experience
    • Resist life as content
    • Re-discover old tech
    • Much less is much more
    • Welcome uncertainty
    • Don’t get things done
    • Share, swap and learn from others
    • Relish company
    • Seek nourishment in time alone
    • Embrace friction, embrace inconvenience
    • Forget the unimportant and remember the valuable
    • Ground yourself and find your bearings
    • Use your hands and your senses
    • Concentrate
    • You have everything you need.

    Analogue Skills in Design

    Bringing these two themes of work together, what are the analogue skills that we bring to design that we risk forgetting if we don’t use them, and are worth rediscovering if they have already slipped away?

    Looking through my design teaching deck, there are many concepts which are already analogue, and so I am putting them together here:

    These are skills that we are going to experiment with today. These are things that you can do because you are human. There isn’t going to be a software upgrade. You don’t have to pay a license fee. You can share these tools with whoever you like, and when the internet goes down, you will still be designing. I should also add that these tools don’t stop you from using digital tools – they are here to help you choose.

  • What happened when I tried to use an old iPod

    Once upon a time the offer of 1000 songs in your pocket – the slogan for the iPod – was so enticing. But in 2014 Apple discontinued the iPod Classic. Today the zeitgeist is all the songs in your pocket, courtesy of streaming services. So what happens when you try to boot up some old tech, like a discontinued iPod? I have found it to be a lesson in interesting lesson in feeling how our expectations are set by tech companies, and appreciating less is more.

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  • Notes from a systems design workshop at Hazel Hill

    On Saturday at the Hazel Hill Autumn Conservation weekend I ran a systems design workshop as a wet-weather activity. Here are my notes and observations from the session.

    Theatre of activity

    The wood, being a place that people travel to and the leave again, is the perfect place to get people thinking about inputs and outputs to systems. You can ask people to think about what they bring with them, what they take home and what they leave behind. You can also ask, is the system richer as a result. And, what happens to that richness?

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  • Act, advise, advocate in the climate crisis

    Act, advise, advocate in the climate crisis

    On the surface I feel like it is business as usual in the construction and engineering industry. Like a polluting ferryboat travelling full speed ahead towards the storm while no one on the bridge as the courage to turn the ship around. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, I see numerous individuals and groups swimming the other way. Each finding ways to build and engineer differently. How can these mutineers gather enough critical mass to form a viable fleet to take us to safety? I have three words: act, advise, advocate.

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  • Changing the key system to generate new ideas

    Changing the key system is a technique I teach to help people develop new ideas when their thinking has become stuck. It’s one of my techniques for ‘turning the Kalideascope’. In other words, it’s a way to find new creative connections between all the inputs we have gathered.

    What is the key system?

    Design is creating something new. If it already exists, it isn’t design: it’s shopping (for more on this see my post on the Designer’s Paradox). I usually find that the overall shape of that new thing is defined by the answer to a few key questions.

    For example, the overall shape of a city master plan might be defined by the answer to the question: how do we manage surface water. In a tall building, the key question is how do we manage lateral loads. For a song, it might be the rhyming structure or the chord progression.

    In each of these situations, the key system, then, is the flood water system, the lateral stability system, the rhyming structure or the chord sequence.

    The answer to these big questions has such a dominant effect on the solution space that, once they are set, the rest of the ideas develop within these parameters.

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  • What if you could present only using questions?

    What if you could present only using questions? Why might you want to? Well, do you want your answer to listen or to think? What is the most thought provoking presentation you went to? What makes you think more, facts or questions?

    Do all the questions need to be long? Surely not?

    Is it possible to introduce facts using only questions? Did you know that stewardesses is the longest word you type with the left hand using standard typing? Can you introduce case studies? Have you seen Daniel Pink’s presentation on how to pitch?

    See what I’m doing?

    But I’d say these questions are more grammatical tricks to make sure I’m genuinely only asking questions, wouldn’t you? If we want to move beyond trickery to something more profound, what questions can we ask that have impact?

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  • What does regenerative design mean for engineers?

    What does regenerative design mean for engineers?

    As I wrote in my last post, this summer I have been thinking about regenerative design, and what it means for engineers. 

    In the context of climate breakdown, the dominant paradigm in design is sustainability: design that seeks to sustain the quality of our existing ecosystem for the benefits of future generations. But as the latest IPCC report makes clear, our planetary systems are so depleted that even if we stopped putting carbon dioxide into the environment now, there is sufficient carbon dioxide in the environment to trigger significant temperature rises and ecosystem destruction. What we need now is to go further than maintaining the status quo and start regenerating our planetary ecosystems through our actions – this is regenerative design. 

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  • Towards Regenerative Conceptual Design

    Towards Regenerative Conceptual Design

    I have had the great fortune of having spent three weeks in France, a good portion of it cycling. Touring is a great way to leave behind your pre-occupations and to think about the future – in my case, the themes for my training and writing in 2021-2022.

    This year, all cycle paths point towards regenerative design – design that is win-win-win for individuals, society and the planet. I hear echos here of the triple bottom line of sustainable design, but sustainability, with it’s promise to protect the environment for the benefit of future generations is no-longer enough. This is a keep-things-the-same model. But as the latest IPCC report confirms, keeping things the same will lead to the breakdown of the carefully balanced ecosystem on which we depend. What we actually need is design that builds back the abundance, diversity, complexity and resilience of the ecosystem that quite literally gives us life.

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  • Find the disputable brief in your project

    Find the disputable brief in your project

    The disputable brief is a term I’ve coined to describe the bits of the brief that make your project worthwhile and different. It is easy to write a really long brief for your project. But what is going to make the difference between your project and the next one? It’s the part that isn’t necessarily a given, the part you need to fight for, the part that’s disputable. 

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  • Keynote: Rigorous creativity (for engineers and other humans)

    Keynote: Rigorous creativity (for engineers and other humans)

    On 2nd June I was invited to give the opening keynote of the American Institution of Structural Engineer’s annual conference. I used the opportunity to make the case for:

    • Why we need creativity in our profession more than ever, 
    • What the dampers might be to creativity 
    • And how to build creativity into our work in a way, that is, like our analytical work, careful, thorough and conscientious. In other words, rigorous creativity. 

    In my mind, there is no doubt that the climate and ecological emergencies are going to need some urgent creative thinking, and so this was the starting point for my talk.

    At the same time, I am as ever conscious that there are on-the-ground barriers to address to creativity in organisations. One in particular caught really seemed to capture the attention of my audience: project management culture.

    Having set the scene, I used the second half of the keynote to share strategies and tools for building creativity and an individual, team and organisational level.

    This is what the person who booked me said about it all:

    Your keynote was just OUTSTANDING. I had high hopes and expectations for you keynote and you exceeded them. A great message that we all needed to hear.

    Glenn Bell

    If you’d like me to come and deliver a keynote for your event or come and speak to your organisation, then drop me a message on LinkedIn.

  • From great to transformative: training and workshops that stick

    From great to transformative: training and workshops that stick

    How do you run a great workshop or training day that really makes a difference to the way people work? The keys are ownership and reflection. 

    In my view, great workshops, training days and away days need to do two things. They need to help people solve their own problems. And they need to help people work reflectively towards fixing them. 

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  • Analogue Challenge 001: look for the time

    Analogue Challenge 001: look for the time

    On other people’s wrists, on clock towers, outside the jewellers, inside shops, at the station, on the scrolling news, from the position of the sun. Ask someone or make do not knowing, leaving plenty of time not to worry.

    Here’s the challenge. Spend a day getting by without checking the time on any device of your own. Of course the more analogue way is to use a watch, but the aim of the challenge here is to sharpen a range of other analogue skills that will make you more comfortable with be more self-sufficient and less reliant on devices to get you through the day.

    What are analogue skills?
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