Category: BlogPage 3 of 9
Where I live, coal was so abundant near the surface that you could have dug a hole in your garden and found it lying there. This coal was…
I have nothing to say but lots to show you – Walter Benjamin. I heard this quote this morning on In Our Time and it really struck me….
Work on regenerative thinking progresses on all fronts. Book writing with my friend James on Monday (read his excellent blog on this process), developing regenerative practice at Hazel…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Sharing my working notes from today.
On a recent trip to the Alps I took Robert MacFarlane‘s breathtaking ‘Mountains of the Mind‘. In it I found this delightful tale about Mark Twain taking his…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Sunday morning we cycled through Bristol and up to Leigh Woods. We took the ‘high route’, choosing to climb up through the wealthy streets Clifton. Everywhere oozes money…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
‘Act it Out’ is my favourite technique for shifting creative thinking from the mind to the body. This post is another in my series on Turning the Kalideascope,…
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…
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….
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…