Category: The daily blog – For Engineers (and Other Humans)Page 1 of 3
My daily blog on creativity, regenerative design and practical philosophy drawn from across my teaching, writing and collaborations. Sign up for my weekly digest by clicking here and choosing the appropriate button.
Having spent his whole professional career performing and recording symphonic music, my father, Nigel Broadbent, is a font of knowledge about composers’ creative methods. For engineers (and other…
Design is a continuous, looping process. It is a loop that begins with observing a situation, then establishing a brief for your work, developing ideas, and testing those…
Some conversations go quickly. Some conversations go better. I wrote on the 21st October about the difference between a kinetic and a thermodynamic product in a chemical reaction….
The renowned scientist fiction writer and futurist Arthur C Clarke said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. I think the same can be said of well…
Imagine a system of design team communication that supplies the right level of information and enables the appropriate level of understanding within a suitable timeframe. A way of…
This week, world leaders are meeting in Azerbaijan for the COP 29 climate negotiations. Meanwhile, in the construction industry, we are marking World Quality Week. What is world…
I suffer from sunk-cost fallacy. This is the phenomenon whereby you remain committed to a previous choice because of what you have ’sunk’ or invested in it, even…
Standardising decision-making enables companies to save money. A standardised process allows more junior staff to make decisions without needing to consult a more senior member of staff. Why…
I am fascinated when artists manage to capture something of the world-building of construction. One such artist is the painter Frank Auerbach, who died this week. He is…
An objective decision is one that is independent of the decision-maker, as long as that person knows what they are doing. A subjective decision is one that is…
Shall we go to the Italian or the Mexican restaurant? Shall we go to the Mexican or the Italian restaurant? Shall we go to the Italian or the…
This week I am writing about how we make decisions in design. I’ve written before about David Snowden’s way of describing systems using a games analogy (see reference…
Design is full of decisions. Which client? Which supplier? Which materials? What location? Whether to build or not to build? Which idea best suits the brief? Shall I…
I heard these six words yesterday on Seth Godin’s podcast to describe the way that ideas become accepted in political discourse. Ideas can shift from being unthinkable, to…
This came up in a recent training course. I always ask people what they want to get out of a training programme. To set themselves some learning goals….
Yesterday I wrote about my remarkable journey southbound across Switzerland via the breathtaking Bernina Express. For the homebound journey we opted for a faster itinerary: the Milan-Zurich express….
I recently traveled to Italy and back overland, seeking an alternative to the usual high-speed Paris-Milan service, which had been blocked for many months due to a landslip….
In yesterday’s post, I explored the difference between kinetic and thermodynamic products in chemistry. The analogy was about allowing change to unfold more slowly, giving the system a…
I used this example for the first time at the Regenerative Design Lab and so I am sharing it here. It is about how time and conditions shape…
Earlier this week I wrote about designers needing to understand the conditions for change. What enables change and what blocks it. If we understand organisational culture as how…
…here’s the Tauros. I read last week that Aurochs were the third heaviest mammals to wander Europe, after woolly mammoths and their sartorial companions, woolly rhinoceroses. Aurochs were…
Design is about making change. Our aim is to turn an existing situation into a better situation. Sometimes that might be about designing a new thing. But other…
This has become one of my catchphrases in regenerative design*. To think of design as being for ‘where we make but also where we take’. The role of…
Sometimes humour serves best to highlight the ridiculousness of a situation. In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between designers and the ecosystem they draw…
More and more people are asking: how do we move from sustainable design to regenerative design? In these conversations, we often talk about system change. We talk about…
In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between the scale of design team and the connection with the places they are working with. Today I’ll…
There are advantages to scale in design teams. NASA estimates that 400,000 people were involved in the Apollo space programme. This scale of operation allows a degree of…
I’ve just invented a game, called ForEdge to explore the concept of how the amount of ‘edge’ in different sizes of systems affects their efficiency. This game is…