Category: Blog (the archive of everything)Page 2 of 10
Yesterday at a workshop I am attending (more on this soon), I was given a slip of paper with a question to reflect on. It said: How do…
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 week we updated the Regenerative Design Lab reading list and included five books that we think are a good way into regenerative thinking for engineers (and other…
This is my catchphrase for the start of workshops: ‘You only learn when you do difficult things.’ It is a reminder to expect things to be difficult when…
In conversations about regenerative design I draw heavily on Bill Sharpe’s Three-Horizons Model because it allows us to make sense of a complex situation. For in any group…
In the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics…
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 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…
I spent most of yesterday afternoon up to my middle in waves learning to surf. (I’ve got a long way to go). So it is no coincidence that…
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…
My favourite board game is Go. A 19 by 19 board. White stones versus black. You win by surrounding your opponent’s stones before they surround yours. The game…
Inputs Outputs KPIs Tools Models Performance Quantitative analysis Scaling up Accelerator Dashboard Timesheet Human resources Bottom line When we think of our work as the work of a…
For two minutes we sat there on Zoom and said nothing. We had just concluded a period of intense conversation. Thrashing out details. And then words escaped me….
Do you work with metal? Wood? No, I work with knowledge. I mine it, I process it, I chop it up into tiny pieces, I study it, I…
At the start of my how to have ideas workshops, I ask where do people have their best ideas. People often say things like running, taking the dog…
Engineers have announced today some astounding new breakthroughs in their latest version of i. This technology is completely free and open-source.
Dear reader, Thank you for following my writing. It means a lot to me. To mark my 18th year of blogging, I am writing 100 posts in 100…
Whenever I enter a period of calm, a quietening, I instinctively want to turn to reflective writing. Writing like this. It feels like I am speaking to an…
When it comes to regenerative design, it’s not just where we make but also where we take that matters. For the last two decades, engineers (and other humans)…
Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the launch at Parliament of Building Blocks to Transform the Built Environment – a manifesto to turn the climate emergency into…
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While it is possible to go direct from Bristol to Edinburgh, and from Bristol to Glasgow with one change, it is a long route and involves spending a…
It’s a funny question. How much does my website weigh? Is it heavy? It is light? I have no way of knowing. But I like the question, because…
Having ideas can be hard, especially when we already have a first idea. How do we trick our brain into thinking that we should go in search of…
It is a simple question. What if every time we built something the world got better? Not just in the places we construct but in all the places…