Eiffel Over

Category: Engineering

  • Surface travel – London to Münster, Westfalia

    Surface travel – London to Münster, Westfalia

    Overview

    • London – Harwich – Hook of Holland – Den Haag – Enschede – Münster
    • Six trains, two buses and a ferry.
    • Leisure
    • 365 miles.
    • £90.

    When I first imagined doing this journey I thought it would be a straight-forward case of taking the Eurostar to Brussels, a fast train to Köln and then a slower train to Münster. That is indeed is a feasible route but becomes expensive when you leave booking to the last minute, especially for a trip on the first day of the half term holidays, so I had to find an alternative plan.

    Then I remembered the Dutch Flyer, a rail and boat service that goes from London Liverpool Street to Harwich, then on a ferry to Hook of Holland, and then, included in the ticket, to any station in the Netherlands. It’s a great overland (and sea) route if you are heading anywhere in Northern Europe.

    Londond Liverpool street to Harwich

    I take two empty local trains to get me to Liverpool Street for the 6:30am train to Harwich, only to realise that I could have had an extra half-hour in bed had I picked up the Harwich train from Stratford on it’s way out of town. Travelling this way is always an experiment though and you work out travel hacks like this as you go for use next time.

    The Harwich train leaves from a dimly lit platform in the upper teens at Liverpool Street. It looks like any other shabby commuter train; nobody onboard seemed to realise they were on the first leg of the Dutch Flyer – or if they did they were concealing their excitement as clattered through the Essex countryside.

    Darknesses gave way to an overcast morning. The train made a strange ticking noise when it stopped at stations.We reached beautiful Dedham Vale and as we rolled along the estuary the horizon on the other side was punctured by occasional steeples.

    Harwich International is not as glamorous as it sounds, and it doesn’t even sound that glamorous. But the station couldn’t be more convenient for the ferry port: you climb the stairs from the platform and walk straight into the terminal building – integrated transport!

    The building seems oversized – presumably designed for some long passed heyday of the ‘Dutch Flyer’. It has six check-in desks but only one booth was open for the three customers I was among. We went on through passport control, with a similar booth count redundancy of five, and onto a bus that drove me 50m from the shore, up a ramp and onto the ferry.

    Harwich to Hook of Holland

    The boat trip is a good seven or so hours at sea. I installed myself in the lounge and settled in for a day of writing. Around me people were settling in for a day of drinking. It was 8:45am and the bar was open before breakfast was even being served. The onboard drinking was a bit alarming as the majority of passengers seemed to be drivers. It now struck me that they were getting their pints in early so that their bodies could process them before we got to the other side.

    The sea between Harwich and Hook of Holland is a busy place. There are container ships everywhere. We are following another ship eastwards, and there is another on our tail in the shipping lane. And all the while we are avoiding the impressive arrays of wind farms in the sea. Storm Brian is whipping up in the UK and strong tail winds are sending big rolling waves past us.

    Eventually we arrive at the port at Hook of Holland, an industrial spot complete with flaring oil refineries in the distance. The ferry passenger terminal is slick and modern. It has an exhibition of models of old Stena Ferries in the waiting area that make me think of the Science Museum.

    Crossing the Netherlands

    Included in the Dutch flyer ticket – which is only £55 – is a rail pass to anywhere in the Netherlands. But before you can get anywhere you have to find the trains. A new rail link is being built between Hook of Holland and the nearby rail hub of Schiedam Centraal, and so I waited twenty minutes on the windy dockside for the bus.

    This leg of the journey is a cross-section through industrial flower production. There are acres upon acres of glass houses, some lit up, many apparently heated, filled with flowering plants, there are huge processing and packing factories, and then eventually we reach snazzy looking management buildings and distribution centres. I’ll never look at a cut flower for sale again the same.

    For me Dutch railways are about good modern design rather than high-speed, although they are fairly rapid too. The large stations I travel through are modern with a restrained elegance. Take Schiedam Centraal, from where I picked up a train to Den Haag. It has six platforms covered by an elegant roof that cantilevers out on both sides from a central spine. That central spine runs the length of the middle platforms, and while it necessarily an imposing structure because of all the load it carries, has large opening in it to let in lots light.

    Spectacular roof at Den Haag Centraal

    I change trains at Den Haag Centraal, a magnificent rail terminus, with towering steel columns that splay out at the top to support a distant roof. By now it is dark again, and as I take my next express train, I can no-longer pick out any features of the countryside I am travelling through.

    From the border to Münster

    At Enschede I change trains one last time. I am now on a Deutche Bahn service. Somewhere along this leg we cross into Germany, although there is of course no evidence of the border. The only difference is I can understand a small amount of the announcements, which I couldn’t in the Netherlands.

    Finally, at 22:45, some seventeen hours after I left the house, I arrive in Münster to be greeted by my host at the station. This has felt like a long journey it has also been very satisfying; I was able to get a day’s work done on the ferry, and read the newspaper cover to cover on the train; and for the first time I feel I have a mental map forming of how the Netherlands and North West Germany relate to each other, and where major cities in this area sit with respect to one another. I look forward to discovering further this corner of Europe.

  • Beware of Shwaa! – (re)learning to read and write

    Beware of Shwaa! – (re)learning to read and write

    Today I went to a phonics briefing meeting at my daughter’s school. I joked beforehand that we were going to a phonetics briefing session, liking the idea of working out what all those symbols you see in a dictionary mean, the ones that look like thermodynamics equations. But when you stop to think about it, spelling in English must be equally incomprehensible to the unititiated. I’ve realised that beyond spelling out simple three-letter words and stringing them together to create dull scenarios involving recumbant felines on carpeting, I simply don’t understand how to help my daughter spell out most words.

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  • #8 – Eiffelover on tour in San Francisco

    #8 – Eiffelover on tour in San Francisco

    This is the first of two episodes of the Eiffelovercast recorded in San Francisco earlier this month. I was in the city to run some Think Up workshops, and so talk the opportunity to recorded some thoughts, interviews and sound bites related to my regular themes of engineering, creativity and practical philosophy.

    “News from San Francisco: We are all part of the cloud”

    In this episode I visit the Golden Gate Bridge (my favourite bridge in the world?), find out about experiments down in Stanford about what makes us collaborate better, try out as many modes of transport I can, learn about extended cognition and our relationship with the cloud, and experiment with ditching Google maps in an attempt to understand the city better.

    The second episode from San Francisco will be on line later this week. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy listening.

    To listen you can:

    • Click play on the player above
    • Subscribe by RSS
    • Listen on iTunes
    • Download the episode here
    • Access all episodes online here

    Did none of those links work for you? Or do you access podcasts from another source that I am missing? Then please let me know in the comments below.

  • Eiffelovercast #6 – Riding the Northern Line Ghost Train

    Eiffelovercast #6 – Riding the Northern Line Ghost Train

    In this episode of the podcast I attempt a sonic recreation of a part of the London Underground that never got built, a stretch of the Northern Line that would have run from Moorgate to Alexandra Palace. En route I reflect on the transport infrastructure shapes our experience of the city and the difference between what engineers plan and what actually gets built. I really loved making this podcast – it features my mother, Anne Soutry, as Northern Line announcer, making the most of her skills as a continuity announcer for BBC Radio Manchester many years ago. Also, as part of my research, I got a ride in the cab of a Northern Line train with my friend Stuart McGee – thanks Stu. So, have a listen, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

    If you liked this podcast then you’d definitely enjoy:

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  • Analogue skills: fogotten powers

    Analogue skills: fogotten powers

    We live in a time of rapid and accelerating technological change. It is the age of digital, big data and smart technology. The digital zeitgeist is presented with a benign face: faster, more connected, more megapixels, do more, see more. But over the last couple of years I’ve had a feeling that in the race to embrace these new digital tools we are forgetting pre-digital ways of doing things which might turn out to have been more useful, more sustainable and better for us. Things like how to communicate face-to-face, how to communicate in written long-form (even the long email is a thing of the past), how to read a map, how to spell, how to sketch, how to make an appointment and keep to it, how to concentrate, how to make things, and even how to take notice of our physical environment.
    The name I am giving to this pre-digital ways of doing things is ‘analogue skills’. As an on-going project, I plan to explore what analogue skills it would be worthwhile keeping hold of, and to interrogate the digital tools at our disposal to see how to make good use of those without detriment impact to our well-being or to the planet. I hope the outcomes of this project will be to produce some suggestions for how we can use the tools at our disposal, both analogue and digital to improve our experience and quality of life.
    Of course, there are many ways in which digital tools empower us: wide-spread and long-distance communication; access to information and knowledge sharing; access to an almost unlimited range of media; online commerce and sharing economies; increased connectivity through social media – and I benefit from all of these.
    But there are also costs. More screen time means less time experiencing the physical environment.The flip side to the benefits of social media is the social anxiety in can cause, fear of missing out – so called FOMO. The huge choice of media that the Internet offers can lead to a sense of being overwhelmed and lower levels of engagement with the content. Digital consumption is dependent on technologies over which consumers have decreasing amounts of control – no longer are we necessarily the masters of our tools – and with built-in obsolescence, these technologies have a large environmental impact.
    Around me, I increasingly see the signs of digitial discontent. Friends talk about digital detoxes and commit ‘Facebook suicide’. At Hazel Hill Wood, where I co-lead conservation weekends, there is no mobile phone reception. Most participants are relieved for this enforced time offline. But there are usually one or two users per group who anxiously spend time at the one spot in the wood where they can get a feint signal and wave their handsets around in the air, like some ritual dance to the digital deity, in a desperate attempt to connect.
    At this point I need to make a full disclosure: I write this post on an laptop, using notes that I made while walking along the street on the memo app on my iPhone, cross-referencing that with notes that I made in Evernote almost a year ago, which I will post to a website, which I will then share on social media. So yes, I am fully-signed up user of digital technologies. But there are plenty of digital things that I don’t use. For example, for the last year I have been trying to minimise the distractions of social media by removing notifications from my phone, and by limiting my screen time. For certain, I’ve been sceptical for some time about the digital panacea. This project is an attempt to martial these thoughts, to change my skills and habits and hopefully to help other people along the way.
    I am fascinated by really cutting edge technology, the innovation that goes into it and the possibility it offers. But I do think that older technologies allow us to interrogate the new; indeed one of the most fascinating things about older technologies is finding out how the engineers of the day were using great ingenuity to extend what was possible within the limits of the technology of the time.  Of course, digital technologies are here to stay, and in many ways for the better. What I think is important is making sure that is us who are smart and not just the technology.

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  • Eiffelovercast #5 – Nick Cobbing: photographing the Arctic

    Eiffelovercast #5 – Nick Cobbing: photographing the Arctic

    Photographer and photojournalist Nick Cobbing talks about photographing the Arctic, what happens to photographic equipment at minus 38 degrees, using drones to take photos, the role of the audience in the creative process, being reduced to tears by the beauty of the planet, the best places to swing dance north of the Arctic, life hacks for creative people working on their own and whether penguins tango or waltz.

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  • Eiffelovercast #4 – Crossing France very very fast: a paean to TGVs

    Eiffelovercast #4 – Crossing France very very fast: a paean to TGVs

    Ever since I saw my first one zoom past as a boy I’ve loved TGVs. In January I travelled from one side of France to the other and back by high-speed train to get to a conference, and used the chance to try to capture some of what I love about fast trains in France. It’s a mash up of travel diary, interviews and engineering history, all stitched together with familiar SNCF noises. I hope you enjoy.

    If you enjoy the interview then please let me know in the comments thread below.

  • Eiffelovercast #3 – Andrew Scoones – is there is such a thing as engineering culture?

    Eiffelovercast #3 – Andrew Scoones – is there is such a thing as engineering culture?

    We are trying to define the heritage of the future – the creativity and ideas in engineering that people will look back on – Andrew Scoones

    Andrew Scoones is a filmmaker specialising in the built environment. Andrew seems to have interviewed or met almost all of my engineering design heroes, and so I was equally delighted and nervous when he agreed to let me interview him! In this podcast we explore one of Andrew’s passions, the identification and celebration of engineering culture. Along the way way we get in to some great stories about designers, what they design and how they do it.

    Andrew is director of the Engineering Club, set up over twenty years ago to host events about the broad culture of engineering in an informal setting. In this podcast he shares some of his favourite stories from Engineering Club guests, which illustrate different aspects of engineering culture.

    En route we get into bicycle design, designing trainers, whether there engineering culture includes creativity, and whether there is room for creativity in industrialissed systems. We talk about some great engineers and their projects. And we talk about building your own dishwasher.

    Please enjoy this interview with Andrew Scoones and let me know what you think in the comments below.

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  • Pre-stressed concrete: lessons for swing dancers

    Pre-stressed concrete: lessons for swing dancers

    TGV Bridge at Avignon by John is available under CC 3.0
    TGV Bridge at Avignon by John is available under CC 3.0

    Recently in beginner’s swing dancing classes I’ve described the connection between lead and follow when dancing side-by-side Charleston as being a bit like how pre-stressed concrete works. I promised a longer explanation. Here it is.

    Starting with reinforced concrete

    To begin we need to understand how reinforced concrete works.

    When you build a beam in a building and you stand in the middle of it, the beam sags, albeit ever so slightly. To understand what is happening, you can simulate a simple beam by interlacing your fingers in front of you, palms down. Now imagine what were to happen if someone were to balance a bag of sugar on your knuckles: your hands would sink down, the skin on the underside of your fingers would stretch, and the skin on the top would pucker up. That’s because the skin underneath is going into tension, and the skin that is on top is going into compression. This tension-compression couple is what supports the load resting on the back of your hands.

    For a video illiustration of this deomonstration, see this video I helped to script a few years ago at Think Up.

    Now let’s imagine what happens if we were to build that beam out of pure concrete instead. Concrete is strong in compression, and so would have no difficulty in resisting the compressive force in the top side of a bending beam. But it has virtually no tensile strength, and so as soon as the underside of that beam starts to stretch it would suddenly crack and catastrophically fail.

    So for about 130 years now, engineers have been embedding reinforcing steel in the bottom of concrete beams to carry that tension which arises when a beam bends. Steel is strong in tension (think of the steel cables in a suspension bridge). In a beam reinforced with steel, the steel rods act like stiff elastic bands which resist the tensile loads that are generated when the beam bends.

    The importance of depth

    Reinforced concrete is a popular building material. To work, the beams need to have a certain depth to them. To illustrate we can think what happens when we bend a 30cm ruler. If you hold the ruler out in front of you flat side facing down, and try to bend it downwards, it bends easily. But if you hold the ruler out in front of you edge-downwards, and try to bend it downwards, it is almost impossible. What’s the difference? It’s the difference in distance between the top and bottom fibre that determines the stiffness.

    So, deeper beams are stiffer, and can span further between supports.

    Pre-stressed concrete

    The problem with deeper beams is that they require a deeper floor void between the ceiling of one level and the floor the level above. Building designers usually want to minimise the floor depth so that they can fit in as many levels as possible within a given height. More levels means more rent.

    Pre-stressed concrete is an evolution of reinforced concrete which enables shallower beams and slabs to be used in buildings. In pre-stressed concrete, the steel bars of reinforced concrete are replaced with steel cables which run through the middle of the beam and are attached to a plate at either end. When the concrete is set, this steel cable up is tensioned up squeezing either end of the beam, putting the entire thing into compression.

    The effect is similar to when you pick up a row of books simply by squeezing from either end. If you squeeze hard enough, you can pick up say 15 paper backs without any of the middle ones slipping out.

    For an illustration of this principle, see another video that I helped to make a few years back at Think Up:

    Now imagine you were picking up a row of books in this way, squeezing from either end, and someone were to put a bag of sugar on top in the middle, as long as you were squeezing hard enough, you could probably support the weight of the bag of sugar.

    So what is happening here? In fact, the same thing is happening here as when the sugar was placed on our interlaced hands. The top of the books are squashed together, and the bottom split apart a bit. The difference is that because these bending forces are applied to a set of books that is already being compressed together from either end, the bottom edge never goes into tension: it is just a little less compressed. Similarly the top of the books are more compressed because of the sugar they are supporting.

    Putting pre-stressing cables into a concrete beam puts the whole thing into constant compression, making the whole thing stiffer.

    What’s that got to do with swing dancing?

    In teaching beginner swing dancing classes there often seems to come a point where we have to move learners from simply dancing a choreography to leaders leading and followers following. The key to that is the connection between them, which works in different ways depending on the dance.

    When dancing side-by-side Charleston, the leader has their arm around their follower’s waist. The follower needs to sit back into this arm slightly, and the lead needs to push against their follower’s back. This creates a slight compressive force between them, which is equal and opposite.

    To signal to the follower that the leader wants to move forwards, the leader moves forwards themselves, and in doing so, increase the compression in the connection, which causes the follower to accelerate forwards.

    To signal to the follower that the leader wants to move backwards again, the leader moves backwards themselves, and in theory, this reduction in compression should cause the follower to accelerate backwards.

    In practice, what we see is leaders moving backwards, and become disconnected from the followers. This disconnection reveals that they never had that matched compressive force in the first place: the pre-stress was missing.

    If that compression is there to start with, if one person reduces the compression by pulling away, the other starts moving towards them. If there is no compression, and one person reduces the compression by pulling way, the two simply separate from each other.

    So, to get the connection right, get the pre-stress right.

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  • The Margherita Principle for decision-making

    The Margherita Principle for decision-making

    Pizza
    Pizza (altough not quite a Margarita)

    I’ve been promising friends this post for some time, especially those that have eaten in a restaurant with me recently. In the season of good will and consumption, this rule of thumb helps us make better menu choices. But as a decision-making tool, it goes much deeper, helping us (re)discover the real value in things.

    The principle is simple: the best value pizza in a restaurant is the one at the top of the list, usually the Margherita.

    This realisation first came to me last year at a pizza restaurant by the Canal St Martin in Paris. The 6€ Margherita offered: a delicious and filling meal – the prototypical pizza; a nice warm place to sit; the atmosphere of the restaurant; banter with the waiter; a view over the canal; a small basket of bread and a bottle of tap water; and chilli oil.

    The next pizza on the menu was the Fungi. At 7.50€ I was getting everything the Margherita offered plus a chopped mushroom. At 1.50€ that’s a bad value-for-money mushroom. And from there on down – Fiorentina, Vegetarian, Quatro Staggione – the value just keeps on going down.

    The cheapest thing on the menu usually gives you the most, the rest are opportunities to spend more money with diminishing returns. (Incidentally, as Tim Harford explains in his book ‘the Undercover Economist’, menus are usually structured in ways to give customers the opportunity to spend as much money as they want to.)

    The benefits of the principle

    • By applying the Margarita principle not just to pizza but also drinks and coffee, I was able to have a pizza, a glass of house red and a shot of espresso for 10€ all in.
    • It’s a training in simplicity, which as Thoreau argues in Walden, is the route of happiness.
    • It’s a training in looking for the real value in things.

    What about non-linear effects?

    My colleague David pointed out to me that the principle may not be applicable if the combination of extra ingredients amounted to a taste that was greater than the sum of it’s parts – a sort of non-linear taste progression.

    I concede that this sort of topping alchemy may be possible, but in reality it would have to deliver significant extra value to be anywhere near as valuable as the initial Margherita. Besides, another colleague of mine, who is also Italian, claims the Margarita is the best tasting pizza anyway – so why add anything more?

    Broader application

    The Margaherita Principle is a sort of mix of the Pareto Principle and the Law of Diminishing returns, and has applications beyond pizza choice. It helps get greater clarity of thought when making decisions.

    For example, I was recently agonising over the order in which to publish various blog posts. But then a realised that the greatest value outcome was just to get the post published. There may be some marginal benefit to publicising them in a certain order; however that was much less than the value of just getting the material online and circulated. Worse, the time I was spending worrying about the order to publication was time that I wasn’t spending writing – and I might have ended up publicising nothing at all.

    Another example related to the branding of a training course that I am involved with developing. At this stage, we are not sure how the course is going to evolve, and so it was difficult to decide what direction to take the branding. But, applying the Margarita Principe, I realised that the most important thing is to at least get something published, which we could then revisit as started to run and iteratively develop the course.

    The fallacy of menu choices

    As I write, I realise that we often have less control over our experiences than we think. A restaurant is probably quite a high control scenario: we choose what we want to eat and drink; choose our company; and with care, the topic of conversation; and things usually go to plan. In reality, we often have less control over the projects that we manage than we think. The branding example above illustrates this. It is very hard to know what the best way to describe a training course is until you run it and see how the content evolves in practice. With this sort of thing, the best approach is make quick decisions, see how they work in practice, and then re-evaluate along the way.

    In a restaurant situation, this is akin to not ordering your main course until you have finished your starter, and then waiting until later to order dessert. This is decision making on the basis of feedback – literally!

    The horror of advanced menu choices

    Given all of the above, the worst possible decision-making scenario with regards to menus is when you are sent dinner options for a conference or a corporate meal a month in advance and you have to choose then. How on earth are you going to know what you want to order that far in advance?

    In these situations, Margheritas are rarely available, so here I apply the Tiramisu principle: always choose the first option as long as it is vegetarian, and along is it isn’t Tiramisu, which is the food of the devil and should be avoided at all costs.

  • Sorting out your lego – the Eiffelover guide

    Sorting out your lego – the Eiffelover guide

    image

    If you own a big pile of Lego, then sorting it into separate boxes for different sorts of parts makes it much quicker for you to build anything you want to. I have found that the creative potential my haul of lego is multiplied manyfold by the simple act of separating it out. All of a sudden, when I can see what types of pieces I have, the ideas flow much more quickly, and the time lag between having the idea, and it manifesting itself in physical form is much reduced.

    The question is knowing where to start. There are so many types of pieces, it doesn’t work to have a pot for every single type. I’ve probably completely sorted my Lego three times in my life (so far), and I think the categories that I have now are pretty effective. So to save you thre trouble, here they are.

    Helpfully, since the first time I sorted  my Lego, the Internet has been invented, and so it is now much easier to find commonly agreed names for pieces. In the lists below I’ve included some links to to photos of the pieces that I am talking about. I’ve organised the following list according to the size of tub I needed for each part. It’s the relative size that’s important here.

    8L tubs

    Base plates

    • Lunar landscapes
    • Road pieces
    Miscellaneous
    • Train buffers
    • Rigging
    • Pirate ship hull
    • Pirate ship sails
    • Pirate ship masts
    • Monorail track and pylons
    • Train track

    4L tubs

    Bricks
    These are your standard building bricks. You would think that the protypical lego brick would be the most common, but compared to other bits I have relatively few of these. 2 by X bricks (X>1)
    Wheels and tyres
    This is for wheels of all shapes and sizes, their tyres and the plates with axle stubs attached onto which little wheels and wagon wheels can be fixed. This is the biggest tub of all.
    Large plates
    For those large base plates that are at least 4×4
    Narrow long bricks
    These are like beams. These are 1 bx X bricks where X>3, but with no side holes
    Narrow long bricks with holes
    As above but with holes in so you can push through axles.
    Small bricks
    This is probably the modal category of my lego bricks. You are much more likely to find one of these than a standard 2×2 brick. Includes:
    Wide plates
    I think of these as planks 2 x X where X>1
    Narrow plates
    These are thin plates – 1x X where  X>3

    2L tubs

    Automotive paraphernalia
    Space paraphernalia
    Pieces for making space rockets and space stations, such as

    1L tubs

    Little plates
    These are among the smallest pieces
    Slopes and arches
    There are lots of variations of arches and slops, and the nomenclature can become a bit confusing.
    Round bits
    There is some ambiguity as to whether some of these pieces should really go under space paraphernalia.
    • 1×1 cones
    • 1×1 round brick
    • 2×2 cone
    • 1×1 round plates
    • 2×2 round plates
    • 2×2 round brick
    • antenna
    • 2×2 curved brick
    • 4x4x2 cone
    Hinges
    When I was a kid, hinges were my favourite part. Now I have a whole box full of them. They include:
    People and their accessories
    A box full of Lego people is always fun just to play with on its own. I throw in all the accessories too such as:
    • Shield
    • Spear
    • Sword
    • Cutlas
    • Lance
    • Torch
    • Knight’s helmet flame
    • Musket
    • Pistol
    • Oar
    • Spanner
    • Hammer
    • Broom brush
    Pirate/medieval 
    • Horse harness
    • Flag with 2 clips
    • Streamer (type of flag)
    • Barrels
    • Treasure chest
    • Treasure
    • Canon
    • Castle panel sides
    • 3×3 angled corner brick
    Windows and doors
    • Includes hinges for windows and shutters too.
    Town
    Parts for building suburbia
    • Mailbox with door
    • 2×4 winch
    • Street furniture
    • Car wash pieces
    • Long fencing
    • Petrol station parts
    • Emergency services parts
    • Roadworks parts
    Flora and forna
    • Small tree
    • Conifer
    • Flowers and stem
    • Palm tree leaf
    • Sharks
    • Monkeys

    0.5L tubs

    Holders
    Pieces for clipping things too, like personal accessories
    • 2×3 curved plate with hole
    • 1×1 plates with vertical clip
    • 1×1 plate with horizontal clip
    • 1×2 plate with vertical bar
    • 1×2 tile with top bar
    • 1×2 plate with handled bar
    • 2×2 brick with ball joint
    Wall elements
    • These are the pieces that make up the walls of castles and the sides of vans and trucks
    Lattice fences
    • 1x4x1 lattice fence
    • 1x4x2 lattice fence
    Lights
    • Transluscent pieces usually used for making headlights and tail lights
    Light holders
    • 1×1 brick with 1 side stud
    • 1×1 plate with side ring
    Small tiles
    • 1×1 tiles
    • 1×2 tiles
    • 2×2 tiles
    Long tiles
    • 1xX tiles where X>2
    Angle plates
    • 1×2/1×4 Angle plate
    Turntables
    • 2×2 turntable
    • 4×4 turntable
    Axles
    • Cross Axles
    • Threaded cross axles
    Things that go on cross axles
    • Gears
    • Right angle axle connector
    • Collars
    Pins
    • Half pin
    • Grey pin
    • Black pin
  • Use these 5 apps to create distraction-free time.

    Use these 5 apps to create distraction-free time.

    We need distraction-free time to make progress on our creative projects. At the same time, we rely on online networks and information to nourish our ideas. The trouble is, spending time online is rarely distraction-free. So, is it possible to get the best of both worlds?

    The short answer is yes. In this post I share the strategies that I have adopted to maintain distraction-free time while working online. These include five apps that I regularly use to manage what information I see and when.

    This post follows on from my previous post 9 ways to build creativity in your organisation, focusing on steps that individuals can take to manage their own creativity. Expect more from me on this theme in coming posts.

    Principles

    There are four principles that underpin my approach:

    1 – Know your mode

    In his book ‘Getting Things Done‘, David Allen tells readers not confuse time when you are processing actions with time when you are completing an action. The same is true for working online. Be clear about whether you are meant to be processing emails/tweets etc, completing an action or, importantly,  spending time reading.

    2- Avoid the inbox

    Enter the inbox, get all the information you need out of there, and then leave. If you return when you are in the middle of something else, don’t be surprised if you get distracted.

    3- Reduce the back-and-forth

    Just because we can respond instantly, doesn’t mean we have to. Instant responses lead to communication inflation, and erode time to ourselves.

    4- Remove notifications

    Until the last 100 or so years, toothache must have been the bain of adults lives – always nagging, never leaving us in peace. Today, in the age of modern dentistry, what nags us instead, what disrupts our peace, are social media notifications. If we set regular times to look at our various feeds, we don’t need notifications.

    5 apps

    I am being generous with the definition of ‘apps’, here to mean both ‘app-lications’ and ‘app-roaches’.

    1 – Task management – use Bullet Journal

    The first app isn’t an app at all, it’s an instead-of-an-app. For years I’ve been playing around with lots of different apps for managing tasks. My favourites are OnmiFocus and Trello. The trouble with even the best of these tools is that they allow you to create never-ending lists of tasks that you could never get done.

    Bullet Journal is different. It is no more than a set of rules for using a paper notebook to manage your tasks. It’s simple, and it works. Each day you write down the tasks you need to complete. At the end of the day, you either forward incomplete tasks to the next day, by physically writing them out again, or your forward it to a page for the week or even month ahead, again physically writing down the tasks. It works because every time you re-write something you end up saying to yourself, ‘come on, am I actually going to do this?’

    I’ve been using it for four months now and I’m hooked. Here’s a great intro video for using Bullet Journal.

    2 – Information storage and online workspace – Evernote

    Evernote is a great tool for storing information and for working online. Here’s how I use it to minimise distractions.

    1. As I am processing emails, if I find something that I need to refer to later for a particular project, I forward it to Evernote (which you can do straight from your email), adding meta tags in the subject line so that Evernote can file it for me.
    2. When I am working on a project, I can then look through the notes filed in Evernote that have that project tagged. It’s a great way to get to the information without being distracted by something new in the inbox.
    3. I do all first drafts of longer emails in Evernote – I can even send them from Evernote without having to go back into my inbox.

    One really neat feature of Evernote is that as you use it more and more, it starts to recognise when something you are writing is similar to a previous note – this has the added bonus of making connections that I hadn’t otherwise seen.

    3 – Online reader – Instapaper

    Until I discovered Instapaper, I had basically stopped reading the articles that people were sending me online. This happened as a consequence of being rigourous about not spending more than two minutes processing any email that someone had sent me. If a correspondent had sent me something to read, I would forward it to a folder called ‘browsing’ where it would then languish unread.

    And then I discovered Instapaper, an app that you can forward reading informaiton to. When you open the app, all your articles are there but with the formatting stripped away. What’s left is really clear to read.

    Since then I usually make at least one time a week when I sit down with a cup of coffee and read my articles for the week on Instapaper. It is really refreshing to spend time reading longer articles from end to end.

    If I like what I read, I forward it to Evernote, tagged for appropriate interests. If I want to share it with other people, I forward it to Buffer – see below.

    4 – Schedule social media posts using Buffer

    I know from looking at the analytics that most of the people that follow me are online at times when I’d rather not be. To get round this I use Buffer to schedule some of my social media posts to maximise the chances that the people I want to see the post do. Buffer allows you to set up daily posting schedules for all your social media channels. You can save time by posting to several channels simulataneously. Buffer will tell you what times your audience members are interacting with your contact, and can adjust your posting schedule to suit.

    5 – Clear yesterday’s messages today

    This is a great rule of thumb that I only came across recently in the Guardian (thanks Jenny for the recommendation!). I’ve long abandoned the idea of having an empty inbox – as a strategy it takes too much time and I think can actually lead to more email traffic. In this approach, on any given day, you should only aim to deal with yesterday’s emails. You are still responding within 24 hours, which is a reasonable timeframe, but your response has to be carefully written as you have to empower your correspondent to act without hearing from you againfor 24 hours.

    Conclusion

    My Dad once quoted the following to me (I am hoping he can remember where it came from and can tell us in the comments to this post): getting information from the internet is a bit like trying to take a sip of water from a fire extinguisher.

    Yes, we need access to online information and networks for our creative projects – we just need to manage the flow.

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    Image credit: Fire Extinguishers by Claudio González is available under CC-BY-2.0

  • Podcast Episode 1 – Engineering, creativity and practical philosophy

    Podcast Episode 1 – Engineering, creativity and practical philosophy

    I’ve been thinking about creating an Eiffelover podcast for over a year. Last week at Port Eliot festival I saw John-Paul Flintoff (@jpflintoff) give a great talk on creativity in which he challenged us to name one creative project that we want to do, and commit to taking the first step…

    And so this is it, the Eiffelover podcast, the first of what I hope will become a regular digest of matters engineering, creative and practically philosophical garnered from the people I meet, the workshops I run and the material I read. I hope you find it useful.

    To kick off, I created my first episode here at Electromagnetic Field camp, a non-profit UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.

    In this podcast I meet some of the fantastic people here at EMF camp and their imaginitive creations, I dig around to find out what makes these creative people tick, and I get into a fascinating conversation with Richard Sewell about ‘Thingness’, a term he and his colleague coined to talk about the power of making things. Listen now to learn more.

    People mentioned

  • HS2, Seneca and the art of persuasion

    HS2, Seneca and the art of persuasion

     

    Persuasion is an important skill for designers: to convince the audience of an idea is it to allow it take root and evolve. Unfortunately, I never have been convinced of my persuasive powers, which is why I am always on the look out for useful tools of persuasion. The following two approaches from very different sources caught my attention this week. Add them to your thinking toolkits if you think they are of use.

    The case High Speed 2 and the Overton Window

    I first read about the concept of the Overton Window in Owen Jones’s excellent book, ‘The Establishment’. The Overton Window is the range of ideas that the public will accept. This range is not necessarily fixed and can be stretched or shifted one way or the other. Jones argues that the UK ‘establishment’ has successfully shifted the Overton Window in the UK by supporting pressure groups that consistently present in the media opinions to the right of popular acceptability. Over time and exposure these once-extreme views become more acceptable, shifting the Overton Window to the right. In this article from the US National Review the author claims the Overton Window in the US is moving the other way, although I can’t say I agree.

    From an engineering design point of view, it is interesting to see how the high-speed rail Overton Window has shifted, as described by Simon Jenkins in his article ‘HS2: the zombie train that refuses to die’. When the first enthusiasts started proposing high-speed rail in the 80s, the railways were in decline – it was an extreme view. Then, little by little, things nudged the terms of the debate towards acceptability: the construction of the channel tunnel; the lack of high-speed line to the tunnel; the eventual opening of the first high-speed line to the tunnel; how high-speed rail could see off the need for a third runway at Heathrow. Eventually, the terms of the debate shifted from whether or not to have a high-speed line, to which route it would take.

    And so, there we have persuasive tool number one. It is possible to shift an audience to your way of thinking by consistently and repeatedly advocating ideas that are just beyond acceptability and looking for small wins that slowly shift the Overton Window in your favour. Think of it more as a stopping train than a high-speed approach.

    Seneca says don’t be scruffy

    My second persuasive tool is not so much a technique but a starting point and comes from Seneca’s ‘Letters from a Stoic’. In his fifth letter he advises his correspondent to

    “avoid shabby attire, long hair, an unkempt beard, an outspoken dislike of silverware, sleeping on the ground and all other misguided means to self-advertisement”

    The aim of his advice is to make his friend, a fellow philosopher, more acceptable in appearance to his audience so that he may may have more influence over them. He goes on,

     

    “Let our way of life be not diametrically opposed to, but better than that of the mob. Otherwise we shall repel and alienate the very people whose reform we desire”.

    And so there we have our second tool of persuasion: don’t be so extreme as to put people off. Be of them, be recognisable to them so that they might accept you.

    Acceptable unacceptability?

    I encountered these two approaches in the same week, and initially thought them opposed: one is to champion views from the extremes and draw people towards them; the other is to champion views from a position of acceptability. So which is better?

    Seneca anticipates and resolves this paradox for us by recommending that,

    “one’s life should be a compromise between the ideal and the popular morality. People should admire our way of life but they should at this time find it understandable.”

    So perhaps where these approaches meet, and where designers should aim for is acceptable unacceptability.

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  • 3 safety valves for high-pressure decisions

    3 safety valves for high-pressure decisions

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    One of the things that I’m learning through the design and creativity coaching sessions that I am running with engineers is that it is not a lack of design skills but rather other factors which impede their ability to do good design. One such factor is making decisions under pressure. So I’ve put together this three-part process to help relieve the pressure. It is written with engineers in mind but as you can see this approach is much more widely applicable.

    Decision-making, of course, is an important part of design: a designer has to continually choose between multiple options; to decide whether an idea is an appropriate response to a brief; to decide whether or not to proceed. But beyond the design process itself, our decisions also affect how much time we have to do design, or do to do anything else we want to spend our time on.

    In the workplace, we are often forced to make decisions under pressure: “Can you make a quick decision for me so that we can move ahead?” “I know it’s not what we originally agreed, but could you just a spend a bit of time working out how to do this for me?” “This situation has arisen, I need you to quickly decide which of these two options to go for. If we get this wrong, we will be pouring money down the plughole, blocking sewers and causing effluent to back up and flood streets with a tide of… ” Sound familiar?

    So here are three pressure valves to try. They won’t work all the time, but hopefully something in here will serve as a reminder to help you buy more time.

    1. Change the rules of the game in your favour

    This is the pre-emptive bit. Is there anything you can do to avoid being put into a situation where you have to make high-pressure decisions in the first place? Here are some things to think about.

    • Create the rules – in many organisational contexts there are usually rules in place to dictate how much time you have to respond to a query. These are there in part to ensure quality of service, but also, to make sure you have the time to think carefully about your response. Is it always necessary to respond straight away?
    • Be clear about response times – you can often look ahead in a project and see when people are going to be asking you make decisions. Pre-empt the process by being clear about how much time you will need to respond to queries, and perhaps even set a time after which you won’t be able to accept any more.
    • Limit access – are you being asked to make the decision because you are the most available person? If you were less available, would the people asking you to make a decision actually figure out the problem for themselves? When I spent a year working in a research laboratory for my Masters degree, as hand-in time loomed, the leader of the research group made it very clear when he would be answering queries and when we wouldn’t, and we made very sure we carefully prepared our questions for him before his door would shut.
    • Avoid making decisions altogether – decisions are hard work. Maybe if we made fewer of them, we might have more energy to make the important ones correctly? For more on this theme I highly recommend Tim Ferris’s post ‘The Choice-Minimal Lifestyle: 6 Formulas for More Output and Less Overwhelm’

    2. Unload the emotional baggage

    We are not fully rational beings. Our brain functions evolved in a very different environment. (Sometimes I wonder how we might have evolved had natural selection taken place in the modern open-plan workplace – maybe a blog post for the future?). Naturally, emotions influence our decision-making.

    As Daniel Goleman explains in his book Emotional Intelligence, the part of our brain which engages with higher level thinking is also the part that has the job of suppressing our more deep-seated emotional reactions. If that pre-frontal cortex is busy surpressing that little voice in our head that is telling us we are in trouble, then it is not available to work on problem solving. He suggests that this is the original of the phenomenon of not being able to think straight. Here’s some things to try out to help unload the emotional baggage that is stopping us from thinking straight.

    • Is this really your problem? – before you start exercising your decision-making faculties, ask if this is even your decision to make in the first place. Sometimes all the person asking needs is someone to talk to about the situation, afterwhich they can make the decision themselves.
    • Be upfront about the emotional angle – sometimes it is best to be upfront about the emotional consequences of being asked to make a decision. For example, when a client asks you to make a difficult decision on a job, you could just say, look, this decision is going to be difficult for me because I feel this or that. Your interlocutor may have had no idea about the way you were feeling about the situation and may easily be able to offer much more clarity or even change what they are asking.
    • Is the decision reversible? – If it is, then don’t get stressed over it, especially if it frees up your mind to think about the things that really are important to you (see again the Tim Ferris post mentioned above).
    • Talk through your concerns with someone – talking through the situation with someone can help you more objectively assess the issues at hand and perhaps diffuse some of the emotional content of the decision. I often find that when I have a mental block about a decision, it is often because I am scared of consequences that I have conjured up which, on talking it through, I realise are imaginary.
    • Is it just bad luck that the decision has landed on your desk? – sometimes, despite the best planning, fortune is not smiling on you and you have to make a difficult decision. This realisation can at least remove the guilt factor so that you can get on with thinking about the right solution.
    • Perhaps there is no right answer, and that’s not your fault – I have just started reading Senneca’s Letters from a Stoic, and it immediately reminds me that we are sometimes faced with situations which are just outside our control. It takes emotional discipline, but if we can recognise when we are faced with such a situation, we can get over the emotional reaction and try to think about what the best, or least worst, solution is.

    3. Open the decision-making toolbox

    Unnecessary decisions avoided, emotional baggage checked in, here are some of my favourite tools to help with making decisions.

    • Ask someone else what they would do – this sounds obvious, but something that I have observed recently is that this technique helps even if you disagree with what they propose. I recently had a difficult work decision to make regarding a customer. I had a roughly formed view, and wanted a second opinion. My colleauge argued a different course of action, but when I heard their reasoning, I was more convinced that my own approach was the right one.
    • Go back to the brief – the brief or the project objectives are there to provide guidelines on how to make decisions in the project – use them.
    • How would you feel about this in the future – this comes straight from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Decisive, which has a range of great decision-making tools in it. They suggest trying to take the long view on a decision. Thinking how you might regard your decision in ten years’ time helps to remove you from your daily milieu and encourages you to think about broader factors which might influence the decisions.
    • Invert the problem – Ask yourself what decision would lead to the worst possible outcome for everyone. Sometimes thinking about problems from the opposite way round can give you insights which you never saw from the other side.

    If you have any suggestions of your own about how to take the pressure out of high-pressure decisions, then please share them with other readers by commenting below.

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  • 9 Ways to Build Creativity in your Organisation

    9 Ways to Build Creativity in your Organisation

    Creativity doesn’t happen on its own, it happens in a social context. So if we want to build creativity in organisations, we need to focus not only on the individual but also on the overall system within which creativity takes place. So argues leading creative thinking psychologist Mihally Csiskzentmihalyi in his article ‘The Implications of a Systems Perspective for the Study of Creativity’, which appears in Robert Sternberg’s Handbook of Creativity. I’ve been working on a longer post in which I extend his systems model to explore design as a whole. That post is becoming a bit theoretical, and so I offer up this post as a series of practical suggestions that can be applied by anyone who would like their organisations to benefit from more creative thinking.

    The systems model of creativity contains three elements: the creative individual; the domain, which is the pool of existing ideas; and the field, which is the people who decide whether or not an idea is a good one. Using this model, the individual creates new things by adapting ideas that have gone before (things in the domain). These novel outcomes are then judged to be acceptable or not by a third party (the field), say colleagues, a client, a design jury etc. If the idea is judged to be good then it enters the domain – that is, it becomes recorded somehow and can then become the seed of another idea.

    This model is useful from an organisational development perspective because it offers three areas to focus on for stimulating more creative outputs. I have seen that in practise, certainly in engineering, Csikszentmihalyi’s terms ‘domain’ and ‘field’ can be confusing, so I propose ‘database’ and ‘audience’, respectively.

    The following is a series of practical suggestions for how to develop each of these components of the creative system in organisations.

    Building the creative database

    1) Seek out innovation

    If you want to your organisation to be at the creative forefront of a particular domain, then make sure your people have ready access to the latest thinking in that domain. Contact with the existing thinking on a topic can promote thinking about the next iteration.

    I recently vistied a school where the principal wanted to encourage his staff to start thinking creatively about how to furnish their classrooms. To seed their thinking, he ordered in some innovative new chairs designed to improve the way children study in classrooms. He just put them out in his office. When members of staff asked about them he said try them out. Staff members then started experimenting with these chairs in different configurations. In the end, they ended up using completely different models that they’d researched in configurations that suited their own needs. This creative thought had been stimulated by allowing them to dip their toes into the domain of chair design – which then prompted them to dive in.

    2) Become a hub for different ideas and ways of thinking

    As Csikszentmihalyi points out in his paper, cities that have been trade hubs have commonly been centres of innovation because ideas and ways of thinking from completely different domains can come together.

    Find ways to turn your organisation into a hub for different ways of thinking. Invite people in with completely different backgrounds and areas of expertise to talk about their work, what innovation is in their domain, and how they approach problems. Doing so will widen the available categories in your database from which ideas can be drawn.

    3) Record your existing ideas

    It’s hard to make a change to something which isn’t already described.

    For example, so much of what we do in organisations, particular in knowledge-based organisations, is not written down. Doing so doesn’t feel very creative. But doing so is a necessary starting point for creating new approaches to how we might work.

    Recently I was worried that I wasn’t being very imaginative about the way I spent time with my daughter. So I started by writing down all the things that we already do together that we particularly enjoy, and quickly, starting from this list, I was able to create a load of new suggestions.

    Get the existing thinking down on paper so that it can seed the next creative iteration.

    Building creative individuals

    4) Collate

    This is about the creative individual engaging with the database; about building a palette from which they can paint their ideas. Song-writers collect lyrics and interesting chord progressions. Chefs collect recipes.

    I collect facilitation techniques by always asking people I know after they’ve attended a workshop what techniques they enjoyed. I write them down in Evernote, and refer to this list when I am designing a workshop.

    The thing about the process of collation is that it requires attention, more than just a passive engagement with the content. I believe this attention makes it easier to recall useful information in the moment of creation.

    Identify the area in which you want to be creative, and build your scrapbook.

    5) Create distraction-free time

    There are times when we need to focus our attention on generating ideas. There are other times when we let our mind wander, when the subconscious chews on the problem, and then the idea spits up. Both of these thought processes can be jeopardised by distraction. But in the modern workplace, distraction is everywhere: from notifications on every screen we use, to the interruptions that ensue from open-plan offices.

    In the coaching conversations I have with people about developing design skills, the lack of distraction-free time is one of the commonest barriers to creative thinking.

    For individuals, creating this time has two components. The first is mastering the technological distractions, getting rid of the notifications that keep us flitting from one place to the next. The second component is identifying and persuing activities that let your mind wander.

    Organisations that want to create distraction-free time for their staff should consider developing work processes that don’t rely on staff being permanently plugged in. They should also allow their staff to work at the time and places in which they are most creative.

    6) Generate and communicate

    The creative process works through interaction between the creative individual and the audience. It is a dynamic relationship.

    To start with, the individual needs to be creating ideas. There are a range of techniques for stimulating this divergent thinking, which will be the subject of another blog post.

    But having the ideas alone is not enough, they need to be effectively communicated to the field. Draw ideas, write them down, pin them up where they will be seen, talk to people about what you are thinking, and you will give your ideas the chance to grow.

    Building the creative audience

    7) Produce surplus energy

    This comes straight from Csikszentmihalyi. If a group of people are spending all their energy fighting for survival then they don’t have the energy for creative activity.

    Most organisations could probably prioritise their activities in such a way as to make more energy (time, money) available for creative thinking. Creativity is a social affair: everyone has a role to play, either as the conceiver of ideas, or as the audience. Therefore it is important that everyone feels there is enough fuel in the tank to justify time spent on creative pursuits.

    8) Build a culture of listening

    It is through dialogue with the relevant audiences that the creative individual can assess the merit of their ideas.

    As Nancy Kline describes in her book ‘Time to Think‘, we often do our best thinking in conversation with others, but this requires careful attention on the part of the listener, letting them develop their thoughts without interruption.

    Talking about ideas should be a hallmark of creative organisations.

    9) Build a culture of challenge

    There is a lot of evidence for intrinsic motivation supporting creative thought (a summary of this to come in a future blog post, no doubt).

    One way to build intrinsic motivation is through identifying in conversation challenges that need addressing. If the challenge feels like their challenge then they are more likely to be intrinsically motivated towards tackling it.

    Another technique for building intrinsic motivation is to challenge individuals to reach further in their thinking, and helping them to remove hurdles which may have been holding them back.

    To conclude, creativity doesn’t happen in isolation in people’s heads, it happens in a context. To create more creative organisations, we need to work on the context as well as the individual.

    Related posts

  • Hazel vs. Hornbeam (the fate of best-laid plans)

    Hazel vs. Hornbeam (the fate of best-laid plans)

     

    Cutting back the Brambles at Hazel Hill Woods

    A recent weekend of conservation work Hazel Hill Woods has revealed to me another woodland analogy for the struggles of daily life, and how we might overcome them. I am calling the analogy, Hazel vs. Hornbeam (the Fate of Best-laid plans).

    It emerged when a team of us at the woods were cutting back an area of regenerating hornbeam trees in a clearing. In this patch the hornbeam had shot up to a dense crowd of 6ft-tall finger-thick stems, knitted together with a head-height mat of bramble. Our conservation aim had been to cut these back to chest height to stop them from encroaching on an important butterfly corridor through the woods.

    As we slowly cut our way into the dense thicket we started to discover small trees in protective tubes that were being crowded out by the hornbeam and strangled by the bramble. As we uncovered more hidden trees in tubes, we realised that there was a whole array of them that had once been planted. We found hazel, oak, ash, holy and blackthorn struggling to grow in their protective tubes. They had been planted on another conservation weekend years ago but had been forgotten about, and were now being smothered by the naturally regenerating growth.

    The woodland context

    There is a hundred-year plan at Hazel Hill to transform the forest ecosystem from that of a commercial wood, in which just a few species grow, into a much more biodiverse environment, which is much more likely to be resilient to changes in climate. The area in which we were working had previously been occupied by sycamore trees. This undesirable species had been cleared with a grant from the forestry commission, and in the clearing created, a range of broadleaf species had been planted (the hazel, oak and ash), along with shrubs (the holly and the blackthorn) to create ground-level growth, which had been absent in the commercial forest.

    Left to its own devices however, naturally regenerating hornbeam and bramble had quickly grown up and overtaken the planted trees. The former were on the way to winning, the battle for light, already killing some of the latter , and leaving the others struggling. In the short-run there is nothing wrong with hornbeam and bramble, but their short-term success was putting at risk the long-term resilience of the wood by preventing the development of a diverse tree species.

    Best laid plans

    For me, those broadleaf trees in their little tubes represent best laid plans that were being left unattended because of short-term factors. There are competing conservation priorities in the woods, and these planted trees had been left unattended. Our attention is the light that enables our best-laid plans to flourish. But too often we are forced to direct our attention towards short-term priorities: the deadlines that need to be met, the clothes that need to be folded, the colleagues that need to be briefed, the clients that need to be satisfied.

    In the short-term these more immediate matters flourish as they benefit from our attention, but they don’t necessarily lead us to where we want to be. As you wade into the thicket of regrowth, all is lush and green at the top, benefiting as it does from the light of the forest clearing, but underneath, all is brown – there is no diversity. Down there is where our best-laid plans languish.

    The feeling of being surrounded

    At one point, four of us were working simultaneously and in close proximity in the same thicket. Though we were probably only a few metres apart we couldn’t see each other for all the hornbeam branches and briars that surrounded us. At times, our repeated cuts didn’t seem to be making a difference. I’d turn around and the path that I had driven would have closed in behind me.

    This is what it can be like when we feel overwhelmed with matters competing for our attention. After some struggling, my strategy became to just to keep going in one direction. After a sustained, focused effort the lattice of branches and brambles would suddenly give way. A sense of being surrounded turned into a sense of direction; of liberation: I felt freer, able to pause and choose where to go next.

    Cutting back our brambles

    As I type, I still have some small scratches on my arms from cutting back the brambles. Clearing away some of the things which grab our attention can hurt. There is the pain of letting someone down, or the fear of getting into trouble. But what I noticed as I cut through barbed branches was that they fell away to nothing; untangled and trampled they lost all of their strength, freeing a way through to the trees in tubes.

    Personal conservation strategies

    Conservation work gives you time to think, and so I set my mind to thinking up strategies for protecting our best-laid plans.

    Log what you planted

    It sounds simple, but creating a map of what trees we planted where might help us to remember to tend to them every so often. During conservation weekends in which we are planting trees, getting the trees in the ground is a big achievement. It seems unnecessary to create a map of where we planted them. Surely we won’t forget? Inevitably we do. Simply noting down our plans gives us a fighting chance of remembering what we intended.

    Regular tending

    Once we know what we planted, one strategy is to make time to regularly tend our saplings. It would only take a small amount of systematic attention to keep the hornbeam and brambles in these area in check.

    Occasional clearouts

    Sometimes though, we don’t have the luxury of being able to provide these things with regular attention. The alternative is to do what we did this weekend – every so often, go in there and cut back all the distractions and bathe our best laid plans with the totality of our attention. In daily life this might amount to a digital detox. Or, for a more substantial clear out, we might consider taking what Daniel Pink calls ‘Sagmeisters’ – regular sabbaticals interspersed in our working lives.

    Get real

    Our aim wasn’t to clear out all the hornbeam and bramble. Hornbeam regeneration is a natural part of the woodland ecosystem, as are the brambles that weave their way amongst them. We just need to create a bit of space for those slower-growing but ultimately very beneficial species to establish themselves. Similarly, short-term matters are part of the humdrum of daily life – we just need to carve out enough time to give our long-term plans the attention they deserve.

    Get things established

    Ocourse, the aim of all this cutting back is to enable the hazel, ash, oak, holly and blackthorn to establish themselves. As they start to mature they can look after themselves, and the hornbeam and brambles will subside. This is the point that Steven Covey makes in his book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People’ when he talks about what happens when we prioritise the important over the urgent. If we make time for the important things, we should see the number of urgent things we need to deal with reduce.

     

    One day, decades after the scratches on my arms have healed, we’ll be able to sit under the shade of these broadleaf trees and know that our efforts to tend to them were worth it.

  • Does going for a walk improve design?

    Does going for a walk improve design?

    Taking a walk at Port Eliot Festival

    I have just read an interesting piece on the Stanford university website, ‘Stanford study finds walking improves creativity’ (article found via this news piece on the Hazel Hill Wood website). The article describes research that has for the first time investigated the impact of ‘non-aerobic walking on the simultaneous creative generation of new ideas and then compared it against sitting’. I had an intuitive idea that going for a walk improves the quality of my ideas – an example that springs to mind is a catchy tune I wrote on short walk back from the library at college. This research shows that ‘creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.’ What’s more, they stayed high for a short period after sitting back down again.

    But the striking thing revealed by this research is that the walking environment doesn’t seem to make a difference. I had assumed that going for a walk outdoors in the woods would be good for my creative thinking, but this study shows that the boost to creative thinking is just as powerful when you take a walk on a treadmill in a featureless indoor room!

    This result has obvious implications for how we set ourselves up to do good design, but there is another significant finding reported further down in this news article that also has important implications for design. While walking helps to boost divergent thinking, it is shown in this study to impede ‘more focussed thinking, characteristic of insight’.

    So how can we use these findings when think about how we do design work?

    In the design training that we have been developing at Think Up, we describe design as a process that starts with identifying a need and establishing a brief, that moves through idea generation and testing, and moves on to choosing the best ideas. These stages are linked by iterative loops which take you back through the process many times.

    The obvious place for divergent thinking is in the idea generation phase, but there are others. Right at the start when we are identifying the need, we often need to think around the problem to check if it has been framed properly. We also need to have an open-minded view of the client brief if we are to unpick the unwritten and implied elements of what the client wants. We also need to apply some divergent thinking to enable us to think of all the factors that are going to determine whether our ideas are good ones, rather than simply relying on the usual tests we apply.

    There is also an obvious place for convergent thinking: at the part of the design process where we are refining our ideas, and when we are testing them for adequacy against the brief. But there are other places where we need insight: when we are trying to choose the factors in the brief that are going to dominate the design; and when we are trying to make a decision based on hard-to-compare factors.

    So there is a place for walking and a place for sitting in design.

    Unfortunately, from what I have observed in design offices, we tend to do too little of the latter and not enough of the former. What we could learn from this research is to be more mindful of the type of thinking that is required at any one time and to move or stay still as appropriate.

    We should also beware of metaphorical trip hazards. There’s no use in going for a divergent thinking walk if we are distracted by our smart phone en route. Turn it off! And our creative reverie stands a good chance of being extinguished if when we return to our desks we find a set of monthly sales figures demanding our attention. In other words it is probably a good idea to think about that environment you will be returning to at the end of your walk.

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  • Choppin’, loppin’, circus and swing – notes from Hazel Hill Autumn Conservation weekend 2015

    Choppin’, loppin’, circus and swing – notes from Hazel Hill Autumn Conservation weekend 2015

    Last weekend 38 people came down to Hazel Hill for our annual Autumn Conservation weekend for two days of woodland conservation and human restoration. We design the weekend to be a mixture of invigorating outdoor conservation work and relaxation in the woods, with a dose of entertainment thrown in too.

    Building on what we learnt from last year, we began the conservation work on the Saturday with a series of activities that would make an immediate and visible difference in the woods. An on-going conservation priority at Hazel Hill is the creation of butterfly rides, which serve two purposes. The first is to create the sort of wide path through the woods that enable the many rare species of butterflies that inhabit the surrounding fields to pass freely through the foerst. The second is to allow light in to the lower levels of the wood in order to increase the biodiversity.

    Widened butterfly ride leading to the Forest Ark

    This year we began our work by significantly widening the ride that runs from the forest ark to the southern cross, which had become significantly encroached upon by regenerating hornbeam. In the process we uncovered and liberated around twenty-five broadleaf trees in tubes that had previously been planted and which were being smothered by the hornbeam. I remember planting some of these trees myself on my first conservation weekend six years ago, and so I am pleased to see them being rescued. Any of this weekend’s participants returning to this spot in the wood in ten years time are now much more likely to find ash, oak and hazel trees maturing, thanks largely to their work this weekend.

    (more…)

  • Designers: turn off your phone – harness the wandering mind

    Designers: turn off your phone – harness the wandering mind

    Fireside reflection at Hazel Hill wood. Photographer: Peter Clarkson
    Fireside reflection at Hazel Hill wood. Photographer: Peter Clarkson

    I recently read Daniel Goleman’s excellent book Focus, and I have been thinking about how our ability to focus affects our ability to design. This thinking was the basis of a workshop session that I recently wrote about harnessing ‘wandering mind’, that mode in which the brain roams freely and forms new associations which are the basis of creative thought. I piloted this material as part of Think Up workshop on creativity that we ran at Hazel Hill wood in July, which seemed to go down well, so I am sharing it here.

    Below is a modified extract from some of the course materials associated with this activity. I’d be interested to know if anyone reading recognises these phenomena or tries the approach I am recommending.

    In his book Focus, emotional intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman explains that the brain can really be understood as having two distinct sets of circuitry: the lower brain and upper brain. The lower brain whirs away in the background working on solving problems without us even noticing. Its activity only comes to our attention when it produces an idea as if from nowhere. The upper brain by contrast is the seat of self-control and is the part of the brain that we actively focus on a problem.

    In evolutionary terms, the lower brain is the older part. The lower brain is the source of our impulses and emotional reactions. The upper brain can repress these impulses, but at the cost of diverting our attention from the design challenge on which we want to actively direct our focus. In this instance, the lower brain circuitry is causing a hindrance to creative thinking.

    However, the lower brain does have a crucially important role to play in design. Research shows that in the moments before people achieve creative insight, their lower brain has been in a state of open awareness. In this state, the mind wanders freely, widely and without judgment to create new associations. When these new associations are made, the upper brain then locks in on them and fishes them out into our active attention.

    In order to harness our wandering minds as part of the design process, our upper brain needs to be ready to spot a good idea when it emerges. To do this we need to do two things. The first is to make time in which we stop actively thinking about things and let out thoughts come to us, for example, going for walk or even going on holiday. The second is to minimise distractions, which divert our active attention away from spotting new ideas as they emerge from the lower brain. In other words, making time we when turn off our smart phones and blocking out interruptions.

  • What makes a good conceptual design statement? – working notes

    What makes a good conceptual design statement? – working notes

    Gateshead Millennium Bridge
    Gateshead Millennium Bridge

    Today I am working on course material related to defining what is a good conceptual design. I think, in construction at least, it is quite difficult to identify good conceptual design from the finished project. One can judge a finished project on the basis of the final outcome, but unless you have had an overview of the whole design process, it is hard to know how much the final project resembles the original concept design.
    One clue is in competition sketches, if they are available. It is tempting to suggest that if a simple early-stage sketch exists that closely resembles the final project, then we have a good conceptual design. Good examples might include Paxton’s sketches on a napkin for Crystal Palace or the Utzon’s competition sketches for the Sydney Opera House. But (and I’m not suggesting it was the case for these two examples) it is not beyond designers to create a post-rationalised concept diagram. And while this idea of the simple sketch is also beguiling, it is much more appropriate for projects that resemble a sculpted object, rather than a complex system.
    From a training perspective, if we were to stand in front of a building and seek to judge the quality of the conceptual design without knowledge of the early-stage design process, I think we’d be on shaky ground. The approach we will adopt instead is to spend time defining what a good conceptual design statement looks like so that designers can judge the quality of their conceptual designs at the start of the project.
    There are lots of definitions of what a good conceptual design statement is. My colleague Ed McCann has pointed me towards a helpful description from the world of interior fit out. In his book Shaping Interior Space, Rengel describes the three elements of a good conceptual design statement as:
    1. Talking more about the solution than the problem
    The place for the statement of the problem is in the brief.
    2. Selective
    Here he means it talking about the dominant factor which is going to define the design approach. Is it a question of how a long span is going to be achieved, huge forces are going to be resisted, or what the human experience is.
    3. Economical
    Careful use of words to pack the most into the fewest words.
    These three elements are something I can work on with a group of learners. We might begin by asking them to compare different conceptual design statements, and get them to elucidate these rules; and then get them to create their own statements.
    One key modification I will make to this set of rules to make them equally applicable to sketching as to words.
    If you are reading this and have either your own definition of good conceptual design statements that you use, or particularly good examples of conceptual design that you’d like to share, then please comment below.