Eiffel Over

Category: Creativity

  • Divergent poem

    Two days ago we had the Convergent Poem, full of ways of working that engineers (and other humans) tend to get praise for. Here is its awkward sibling, the Divergent Poem. Full of the things that aren’t necessarily valued by the professional system we are in, but are no less important, and could be more important.

    Shake it up,

    Tear it down,

    Breathe it in,

    Break it out,

    Multiply,

    Ask, what if I,

    Take random paths,

    And photographs,

    Pin up, collate,

    Re-conbobulate,

    Find time to explore,

    And imagine more.

    Choose the right poem for the job. Because, there’s no point in aiming for the summit if we are climbing the wrong hill.

  • Start with your scales

    I was taught to start my music practice by playing my scales. Starting with your scales:

    • Grounds you in the practice. The basic relationship between you and the instrument and the sound you can make
    • Reinforces and enhances the automatic movements that become how you play.
    • Takes you through the full range of motions of play.
    • Removes the barrier to knowing where to start because where to start is always the same. You pick up your instrument, you play a scale and you have begun.

    Starting with your scales doesn’t just apply to instruments. It applies to any work where you develop a practice, be that a practice of design, facilitation or performance. 

    In the technique I call Professional Palette in my conceptual design training, I encourage participants to warm up to a design exercise by quickly drawing through all the common typologies for the project they are working on.

    It applies whether you are designing a bridge span, an investigation, a workshop or a dance performance. 

    Make it your default to start with your scales: go through the range of motions, get all the pens out and put them on the table, familiarise yourself with the full breadth of your tools, and then begin.

  • Having a second and third idea

    Having a second and third idea

    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 another and another, when as far as our brain is concerned, the first one will do the job?

    Here’s a technique I call ‘using your professional palette’. I taught it today in a workshop on conceptual design for engineers, but I think it works for other humans too. The method is to remove the mental block by quickly sketching out five different ways of solving the problem from our palette of standard approaches. The approach forces us to consider options that we might not even have noticed we have discounted.

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  • Using ChatGPT to generate ideas

    Using ChatGPT to generate ideas

    In this post I share some initial thoughts on how using ChatGPT to generate ideas changes creative thinking for engineers, and other humans. 

    My simple model for idea generation is that an idea is simply a new connection between existing elements in the mind. It’s a practicable model giving us two things to think about in creativity. The first is what information do I have in mind when I am having my idea. The second is how do I form connections between these bits of information to create something new – to create an idea. 

    As James Webb Young describes in ‘A Technique for Having Ideas‘, the process is akin to using a kaleidoscope. The elements of information are the bits of glass at the end. Multiple shapes, colours and sizes. Turning the kaleidoscope causes the elements to rearrange. The new patterns we make are ideas.

    I call a kaleidoscope for having ideas a kalideascope. The process of building, filling and turning the kalideascope is a metaphor for designing an idea generation process.

    Using a kalideascope for generating ideas

    The first thing I get people in my training to think about when having ideas is what information they are putting into the process. I call this ‘filling the kalideascope’. There are two kinds of information we put into the kalideacope.  The first I refer to as ‘information in the moment‘. It includes information from a design brief, from site, from stakeholders, from colleagues and from precedent projects.

    The second kind of information we put into the kalideascope we can think of as information gathered over time. In other words from experience. From experience of living in the world, seeing it and thinking about it. Experience includes things we have done professionally. I also emphasise all the experiences we have had outside of work. The things that are unique to us. 

    The second part of the process is the forming of new connections. This is looking at things in new ways. Acting it out, asking what if and using your professional palette are three of my favourite techniques to teach. 

    These two processes – filling and turning the kalideacope – provide a simple framework for thinking about our idea generation process. 

    How does using ChatGPT to generate ideas change things?

    None of this creative process I described above needs a computer. But of course we have been using computers to enhance our creative process for decades. The internet gives us access to endless new information. And through our interactions online we can find a similarly endless stream of prompts to help us form new connections. 

    So how does using ChatGPT to generate ideas change things? Here are my initial thoughts.

    Availability versus accessibility of information

    When you forget someone’s name and it suddenly pops into your mind, that information suddenly becomes accessible. It was always there. Someone didn’t whisper it in your ear. The name was tucked away somewhere in your brain. In other words, the name was available. But something changed in that moment and all of a sudden it became accessible.

    ChatGPT uses the text-based content of the internet as its source of information. Via search, this information has always been accessible to us, but if we don’t know where to look, it is not available. ChatGPT has vastly increased the amount of accessible data. This does not mean that all information is available to us. But information on topics commonly published online is now much more accessible. 

    This means that whole new data sets can be brought into the creative process. It is as if the number of pieces in our kalideacope suddenly become many orders of magnitude bigger. 

    The potential for new patterns has vastly increased.

    New connections

    Gathering information is one part of the idea generation process. The other is forming new connections or associations. Humans are pattern-spotting animals, with a prefrontal cortexes especially evolved for the task. But just because we can spot patterns and have new ideas, doesn’t mean we can do it all the time. 

    Lots of my creativity training focuses on what to do when you have had one idea and can’t think of another. Various cognitive biases mean that we tend to prefer thinking about the ideas we have already had rather than think of new ones. My ‘ask what if’ technique is explicitly intended to overcome this creative tiredness. 

    But ChatGPT never gets tired. You can keep asking it generate new possibilities in response to a question.  

    Introducing the kalAIdeascope

    I think we need to rethink the kalideacope for the AI century.

    I am calling an AI-powered kaleidoscope for having ideas a kalAIdeascope. The process of building, filling and turning the kalAIdeascope is a metaphor for using artificial intelligence to help us generate ideas. This tool is available to currently available to everyone who has a decent internet connection. We have lots to learn about how to use it. 

    The process of building, filling and turning the kalAIdeascope is a metaphor for using artificial intelligence to help us generate ideas.

    Some final thoughts

    Judgement – None of the above says anything about how decide if an idea is any good. And that is how I teach creative thinking. Start with ’no’ turned off, and generate ideas. Then test the ideas for how well they work. How AI can support in the testing is a topic for another post.

    Spotify effect – I think my relationship to music degraded when I got Spotify. Suddenly the availability of most of the world’s recorded music on my phone at any time numbed my curiosity. What will be the impact of the accessibility of so much more information and ideas?

    What would Proust say? (see my previous writing on Proust) – his view was that the role of the artist is to express their inner world to the outside world. If more of our ideas are ‘externally’ generated, then I find myself even more drawn to what is going on in people’s inner worlds. 

    Finally, my thanks for Mary Stevens and Nick Francis for the many conversations over recent months on this topic that have prompted this post.

  • Notes on building local

    This month I am writing an article on that explores what if we restricted construction material use to those from a local catchment. Rather than a global supply chain of materials that is disconnected between source and use, what if we could use materials that were a more locally relevant, resilient and regenerative resource?

    Today at the third of James Norman and my sessions exploring regenerative design with Buro Happold in Bath, we heard about the example of the machine shed at Westonburt Arboretum that was built only timber from the site.

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  • Too many emails – the Eiffel Over guide

    Too many emails – the Eiffel Over guide

    I am a connoisseur of email-reduction strategies, so I share this for friends and colleagues of mine who I know are struggling with this at the moment. The best way of dealing with having too many emails is never ‘answer all the emails’. Email overload is a systems problem. It manifests itself as an overflowing inbox but it is rooted in the way the system is set up. Answer all the emails and new ones will appear. We have to fix the system.

    I will start by saying that I still have too many emails. But I don’t feel bad about it because I am trying to work on the system. And some of my system changes have been helpful and I can see are working. This post is not supposed to be a definitive guide but a few things to get you started.

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  • Recognise the desert to return it to life

    When renewable systems are over exploited they fall into a desertlike state. In this state the system population is too low to support regrowth and the system structures break down. But given the right conditions and encouragement, regrowth can return. The seeds are all there. The self-organising ecosystem can return to recreate resilience, complexity and diversity associated with rich life.

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  • Nothing to say but lots to show

    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.

    For me it says you don’t have to have the answers in order to bear witness.

    There is so much that I see in the world that makes me smile. Things that when I see them make me despair.

    I can’t necessarily find the exact narrative to rationalise these sensations. But that shouldn’t stop me from sharing them. Because when I do, I am creating the pieces from which a pattern can form.

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  • 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.

  • Act it out – embody your ideas

    ‘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, ways to form new connections in the creative process.

    Engineering has important roots in Enlightenment thinking. The Enlightenment put us firmly in our heads, as abstract, rational thinkers. We take inputs from the outside world, process them and develop a reasoned response. Through this approach, humans have made great progress on some fronts. But this separation from our bodies and our environment comes at a cost. We forget that we are not apart from but in and part of a physiology that itself is situated in an ecosystem.

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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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  • Inspiration from balance : when the day = night

    Inspiration from balance : when the day = night

    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, the hours of day light peak, but the rate of change of day light is zero. Nothing much seems to change.

    At this time of year the hours of daylight are only half way between their winter and summer extremes, but the rate of change is at its maximum.

    For an instant everything is in balance, when day equals night. But there is no pause. This is also the time of maximum change. We are now moving away from balance at the highest rate of the year.

    Close up it is moving rapidly but taking the longview there is dynamic equilibrium.

    I find lots I can draw inspiration from in my creative and design work at this time of year.

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  • Turning the brief into requirements we can test

    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 requirements of the brief. In this post I turning the brief into requirements we can test – and how the process can be surprisingly creative.

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  • How do I know if my ideas are any good?

    How do I know if my ideas are any good?

    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 ‘greater confidence that my ideas are good’. But how do I know if my ideas are any good? In this post I provide an answer that is simple, but that has deeper consequences.

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  • From would you think to what do you think – avoiding hypothetical feedback

    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 design.

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  • What is conceptual design?

    What is conceptual design?

    This post has moved and along with my other conceptual design teaching tools is now hosted on the Constructivist website here.

  • How describing design as a process helps teach design

    How describing design as a process helps teach design

    This post has moved and along with my other conceptual design teaching tools is now hosted on the Constructivist website here.

  • The Designer’s Paradox – the key to unlocking the brief

    The Designer’s Paradox – the key to unlocking the brief

    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 Up Ed McCann.

    The Designer’s Paradox states that the client doesn’t know what they want until they know what they can have

    Ed McCann – see Think Up (2018). Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers (online) – notes and resources. Available here [Accessed: January 2021].

    In this post I’ll explain why I think this observation is so useful and how we can use it.

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  • Thinking book mark: handedness

    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 sort of written Kalideascope. This weekend I’ve been thinking a lot about left-handedness.

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  • How do you know if your idea is any good?

    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 range of answers. But the one I am looking for is this:

    ‘A good idea is one that meets the brief’

    My aim is marrying up the brief and the idea. I want to emphasise that the two should match. If the idea doesn’t meet the brief, then we have three consequences:

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  • The email that knocks out creative surplus

    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 a chain reaction of anxiety and worry. At least that’s what just happened to me. Your creative surplus – time and attention – gets burned on managing your personal response to that email. You are back to zero. What do you do next?

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  • Merely create something today instead of worrying

    Merely create something today instead of worrying

    When then there’s too much going on to do your creative work then merely create something. I picked up this term ‘merely’ concept from Seth Godin in this interview with Tim Ferris.

    Sometimes not doing something takes up more effort than quickly doing it. As Godin explains, there’s a voice that says what we might produce might not be good enough. We spend time and direct our attention towards worrying about not being able to do something good.

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  • Apply the OOOOOO

    In my second post on building creative surplus – the time and energy we need to invest in creative thinking – I describe the OOOOOO, an approach for overcoming organisational overwhelm and takes away our creative time,

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  • Creative surplus and how to get some

    Creative surplus is what you invest in order to create new ideas. Like operating surplus – or profit – it is what is left over when an organisation or individual’s basic operating needs are met, which is available to invest in growth of the next project. Rather than pounds and resources, creative surplus is the mental space and energy available to you to think creatively. Unlike profit, I see that creative surplus is something that most organisations spend little time thinking about.

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  • Does your project need a creative boost?

    Here’s four things you can do straight away to give your project a creative boost.

    1. Write down the brief. What are you trying to do? Who are you serving?
    2. Write as many things as you can about the project in a big piece of paper. I recommend using the following three headings as prompts: Information, Questions, Ideas. Stick it on the wall near where you work.
    3. Talk through your ideas with someone. Ask them just to listen and not say anything until you are done.
    4. Try to ignore the project for a day (I bet you can’t), and then the next day, write down five new ideas that will inevitably have emerged.
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  • Start building daily creative habits today

    You are a world class performer at living your typical day. No one else has practised the precise set of habits, in the same precise sequence that makes up your typical day and with same ease as you. From how you wake up to, to how you speak to family or friends, to the first thing you think when you arrive at work to what you do in the evenings.

    Our experience of life is what we do every day. Habit, developed over time, adds terrific momentum to our routines until they become a hard-to-stop force in our lives (I might need to do a dimensional analysis on that statement).

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  • Seneca says don’t be scruffy – trawling this blog for sales advice

    Today I’m preparing for a session I’m giving at the University of Cambridge tomorrow on how to sell ideas. To help prepare, I’m going back through old posts to gather materials on the art of selling. Here is the best of what I have found.

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