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 waiting for things to return to normal.
(more…)Category: Blog (the archive of everything)
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Chamber music in the woods
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. And then, because this how my brain works, I thought, how can we put on some live chamber music at Hazel Hill Woods?
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Book notes – The Hidden Life of Trees
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 notes I take as I read through the book.
From the foreward: ‘The author’s deep understanding of the lives of trees, reached through decasdes of careful observation and study, reveals a world so astonishing that if you read his book, I believe that forests will become magical places for you too.’
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Working notes on feedback as a design tool
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 to give feedback when you a working from a common set of expectations. But this feedback approach can go much further than supporting good team dynamics – itself very important – it can be used as a tool for creative thinking and exploring new ground. Here is a summary of the ten most common points that came up during my conversations with students.
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The left-right game – experiments in navigation, embodiment and control
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. A random journey along the roads, cyclepaths and alleyways of our neighbourhood ensued. It became a fun home-schooling lesson in probability. It revealed to me the habits that stop me from noticing so much of what surrounds me. And it was a fascinating experiment in not having a plan.
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Unreliable briefs – finding the deeper design narrative
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 rarely as reliable as that. In fact we should expect them to be unreliable to start with. Our job as designers is to make our briefs more reliable. To help, I have been playing with the literature concept of the unreliable narrator to help characterise types of unreliable briefs.
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Developing a design brief: asking the bigger questions
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 sure we are answering problems that matter, we need to step back from the brief and ask some bigger questions.
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Apollo 8 | What do you do with your computer?
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, the perhaps forgotten daring mission that enabled the moon landings to happen. I woke up this morning thinking just what an incredible achievement it was.
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Imprisoned with the infinite – the philosophical implications of an imaginary visit to Sweden
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 daughter suggested our Sweden. Too far to easily get to under normal circumstances without flying, with that constraint removed we thought, why not? Now back home, I have been using this visit as an opportunity to explore some philosophical arguments about how we deal with choice and how this affects our creativity.
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A click of the ratchet from physical to virtual
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 proceed is whether the activity can go ahead virtually. While the ability to move online is a blessing for business and job continuity, I think it represents an irriversible step for industry and society away from the phyical to the virtual – a click of the ratchet – that will have long-lasting impacts on our freedom and how we interact with other people.
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The horizon of existence | surveillance capitalism | the return of analogue skills
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 now that our house has also become a remote workplace, a homeschool and playground and locus for all entertainment and time-passing activities, it is hard to find the time to write in an ordered way, so I will capture things as they emerge and look to see the patterns over time. I hope you will bear with me, reader. On my mind today:
- The shrinking horizon of existance
- Surveillance capitalism and Analogue Skills
- Everyone is the same distance away
- Mourning friction
- A great slowing
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An action learning template for reaching any goal
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 nothing about, but this time I came prepared with the Eiffel Over Action Learning Template.
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Reading fast and slow
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 few books each year, but it also means those ones I do read I know really well. This is great when you want to be able to recall a concept while standing in front of a workshop, but it is not so good for reading new content. The pile of books I now want to read is now far greater than I’ll ever get through. The smartest stuff I’ve read about productivity tells me that doing things quicker is a fool’s game. So maybe I need a different aproach.
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The Lighthouse: film review + engineering notes
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 – black and white and square, with high-contrast shots of machinary and bleak landscapes. And there is a haunting, almost mechanical soundtrack, which recalls for me Johnny Greenwood’s soundtrack for There Will Be Blood.
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The satisfaction of learning what the buttons can do
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 oven, a sports watch or a computer, have many more functions than we realise. Not all of these devices have the levels of user interface design that you might get from say a modern phone. While I’m a fan of good user design, I quite enjoy pouring through manuals to discover these more obscure functions… or better still, trying to discover them for myself.
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From self-help to help me.
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 that relied on to get through the day. I’ve always intended it to be part philosophical, part self-help. When I’ve stalled in my writing, one of the barriers has been not knowing how much of an authoritative voice to take. There is a well-troden self-help author path in which the writer spends a period of time – usually at least six months, sometimes a decade of a career – living the chosen lifestyle, and then writing about it. But that doesn’t sit well with me. I feel the Analogue Skills project to be much more of an experiment.
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Clash of the sign writers
Spotted in Swindon. I don’t understand how this sort of thing happens -
If you go down to the woods today
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 than anyone can remember. Water is reanimating forgotten courses that we hadn’t even noticed existed.
Today was my first day in post as the Deputy Chair of Hazel Hill Trust, the charity set up by Alan Heeks to run the wood and to provide a place where people can learn about wellbeing, resilience and sustainability.
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In praise of Aix-en-Provence TGV
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 section of the high-speed line from Paris to Marseilles. The original line built in the 1970s went as far as Lyon. In the 1990s, as part of President Mitterand’s ‘grand projets’ the line way extended to the Marseille.
The extension feels like an unapologeticly bold statement of the importance of high-speed rail. All the stations and many of the bridges have a monumental quality to them. No doubt the line was built with huge controversy – it seems to pay little reverence to the villages and countrysides it blasts through other than to say this is a piece of national infrastructure to be proud of.
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From Dminor to F#minor – new adventues in chord transitions
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 we are playing a game of Mornington Crescent. But it makes sense to us.
This evening I put on the second movement of Ravel’s String Quartet in F, which I love. It’s a plucky effervesecent number, with a soaring, bowed second phrase in a completely different key. I sat down at the piano to work it out. The first section is in D minor, and the second part is in F# minor. The common note that allows the connection is A. But in all my years hammering things out on the piano I have never noticed this as a possible transition, in any key.
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Memories of seven – a diary for my daughter
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 major changes were going on for me around then, moving house, moving school, parents divorcing. Until recently I would have said I could clearly remember when and in what order these big events in my childhood happened. But when I tried to write these down, it seems my hard drive is more fragmented than I had realised.
So I started to recreate my picture of seven on a piece of paper, and in conversation with family, started to fill in the gaps. This is what I’ve managed to piece together.
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Olafur Eliasson at the Tate + reflections on my own work
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 moment, and I am not satisfied that I am being able to draw a cohesive thread between them. I think this is important because I subscribe to the idea that to have impact on your work, you need to be regularly adding to it in a disciplined way – always adding momentum to the fly-wheel, as Jim Collins puts it.
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Why do they say ‘sixty-ten’ in French?
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 until we got to sixty-nine. And then I explained that French for seventy is soixante-dix, literally, ‘sixty ten’. Without turning round, I could feel the look of bewilderment on her face.
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On traffic
Drivers, please don’t complain about the traffic: you are the traffic
Broadbent, O. (2019). Internal monologue everytime I hear a driver complain about the traffic. Bristol. -
Performance versus reflection
A key part of problem-based learning is reflection. But how do you get people not interested in reflection to start thinking critically about the decisions they take over their learning. The answer could be to think about performance.
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The end of trying harder and being nicer
Over the last few weeks I’ve been talking to engineers about they can do in response to the climate emergency. For those that are engaged with the topic, I am picking up a sense of deep frustration, which seems to come in two flavours.
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Creative Surplus
Creative surplus is the time we have to invest in thinking creatively, just like a financial surplus allows us to make financial investments. I like the term because it implies both that it is a quantity that you have to create and it is something that you can invest for greater benefit later.
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A reminder about the imminent climate catastrophe and how we should educate engineers to prepare for it
[The following text is adapted from the after-dinner speech I gave at the University of Edinburgh Engineering Faculty’s away day. It was originally titled ‘How problem-based learning can save the world and make you happy too’. But I have renamed it ‘A reminder about the imminent climate catastrophe and how we should educate engineers to prepare for it’]
Tonight’s engagement is my first since I took a summer sabbatical, which I planned to use to work on a book. Those plans changed in my first week away when I got involved in the Extinction Rebellion summer uprising in Bristol. That experience of direct action and the reaction it caused prompted me to read much more about climate breakdown, models for political change, the implications of societal collapse, the role of engineers to help minimise impacts and deal with upheaval in our own communities and the role of the people that teach engineers.
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Bubble surface
This afternoon I headed to We The Curious with my daughter for a summer holiday treat. The highlight was the giant sheet of bubble you can make there by dragging a sort of rollerblind contraption through a soapy solution. The result is a vertical bubble surface that flows and swirls with irridescant eddies. When you blow at the surface is distorts out of plane, like a bullesye from a spun pane of glass, or a portal to another dimension.
And then without warning, ping, it disappears without a trace.
