Category: Blog (the archive of everything)Page 9 of 13
For years I have toiled to get bathwater out of the bathroom and into the garden to help reduce our water footprint. For many years, gravity wasn’t on…
I really enjoyed listening to the In Our Time episode on mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss this morning. As is sometimes the case with these podcasts, I hear about…
I heard this line in a BBC audio adaptation of King Lear for kids. “If I’m the fool, then what does that make you?” It struck a chord….
The daily traffic jam on my local high street has inspired me to think about a way to turn a traffic jam into an opportunity to a way…
Don’t spoil your idea with a terrible font. The environmental movement seems to be particularly prone this affliction. Once upon a time, people with the mindset that was…
Yesterday a council contractor rode up and down our street spraying weed killer on the pavements, grass and tree pits. I was dumbstruck. This is the biodiversity crisis…
On this afternoon’s walk we had the joy of arriving at a chalk stream. We had started high on the Ridgeway and descended quickly down through the Devil’s…
I drew this ash tree at Hazel Hill Wood last weekend. Though it rises opposite a bench where I like to have a morning coffee, I have never…
I had a revelation this morning as I walked down the hill to the newsagent: fear holds back my imagination. A fear of imagining the impossible; fear of…
From hospital waiting rooms to long-distance train journeys, the weather page is a great conversation starter for my daughter and me, full of questions about geography, mathematics, history,…
Planting parking spaces is a dismal affair. When you water them, the water just drains away. The rich soil underneath is capped. Parking spaces don’t flower; don’t make…
The biodiversity emergency requires us to change how we value and relate to the ecosystems that support us. Values shift when we change our habits. Habits are the…
By asking this question I make a choice about where the centre ground is. By framing the question I put the position ‘I will always own a car’…
Yesterday I was writing about what to do after declaring a biodiversity emergency. My conclusions was that the process starts with rethinking our relationship to our ecosystem. Not…
Many people I am speaking to are wondering what to do about the biodiversity emergency. The climate emergency has felt easier to understand. Crudely, we need to achieve…
This week I wrote about observing the seasons and how these might cause us to reflect on the patterns we adopt in our lives. Yesterday, I was exploring…
As someone who runs their own small business, I have to figure out how to work with fluctuating levels of client work. There are times when there is…
This week day equalled night. I see the seasons as sine and cosine waves. Peaks and troughs for different phenomena offset from one another. At the summer solstice,…
In my last post I asked how do I know if my ideas are any good? My answer was that a good idea is one that meets the…
It’s a simple question. When I ask people what they want to get out of a training course with me on design or creativity, a common answer is…
Inspired by Tom Lehrer’s The Elements, I wrote the Structural Elements Song to be an itinerary to an educational world tour of structural form. Like The Elements, it…
Today I’m sharing a principle of workshop design about how we gather feedback in workshops. But the principle also applies more widely to how we get feedback in…
For anyone attending one of my conceptual design training courses, the second question I ask is what is conceptual design*. In this post I’ll give the definition I…
One of the first questions I ask people in my conceptual design training is can you define design as a process. In this post I explore why describing…
For me the Designer’s Paradox is a key concept in helping people understand what the process of design is. The term was coined by my colleague at Think…
One way I use this blog is a jotter for ideas that I’m mulling over and discussing. By having all these musings in one place, I’m creating a…
This week’s Weekend Engineering Works post is about Ticket to Ride winning strategies. The game involves racing against other players to build a network of railway lines across…
The facilitator comes with nothing and leaves nothing The participant comes with something and leaves with much more Oliver Broadbent
I regularly ask this question on my ‘How to Have Better Ideas’ workshops (the sequel to ‘How to Have Ideas’). It’s a short question that triggers a wide…
You are in a state of flow. The next action flows from the previous. You are in the moment. Then boom, in comes an email that sets off…