Category: The daily blog – For Engineers (and Other Humans)Page 1 of 2

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.

My new game: ForEdge

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…

Stuffed crust geometry

At some point in my childhood, Pizza Hut introduced the stuffed crust pizza. The idea was simple: stuff the crust with a ring of gooey cheese. It was…

Seeing the latent potential

As Rob Hopkins points out in his wonderful book From What Is to What If, the climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the imagination. If…

From no run to park run

A few days ago, Parkrun turned 20 years old. What started as a simple community gathering, launched by Paul Sinton-Hewitt on October 2nd, 2004, has grown into a…

Desertification versus dessertification

Desertification = a real word that refers to the process where fertile land becomes desert, typically due to drought, deforestation, or poor land management. It can also be…

No more fish in the sea

Somehow the topics of my posts have returned to the subject of the sea. It is apparently a rich subject to trawl.  Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun,…

Plenty more fish in the sea

Yesterday’s post on the fish écluses on the Île de Ré speaks to the idea of creating straightforward connections between the resources that humans need to live and…

Stone circles on the beach

Hundreds of years ago, the inhabitants of the Île de Ré, just off France’s Atlantic coast, developed an ingenious way to catch fish. At low tide, they built…

I’m an engineer, I feel your pain and I have a plan

This little refrain is my version of Aristotle’s three artistic truths for making a convincing argument. Aristotle proposed three things were needed to win people over. The first…

Think of a world without any email

This came up in a workshop yesterday so I am sharing it today. There will be a time in the future for a longer set of posts on…

Designers as insiders

Yesterday I said designers are outsiders. Here’s the tricky part: we are also insiders.  That’s because we need to earn the right to work with the people we…

Designers as outsiders

As designers we are outsiders. The norm is the middle lane. But we want to make things better. To change the direction of travel. To advocate for something…

Zig zag zig zag zig zag zig

My song Arthur the Lawn Mower is about our relationship with machines. In it, Arthur describes how he takes ‘a random path across the garden terrain’. It turns…

The signal and the coincidence

Yesterday at a workshop I am attending (more on this soon), I was given a slip of paper with a question to reflect on. It said: How do…

The wrong (moment to put on your waterproof) trousers

This is a post for the cycling decision-makers among you. It may resonate even if you don’t cycle. Variations on the question of whether, if it starts raining…

Five books for getting into regenerative thinking

This week we updated the Regenerative Design Lab reading list and included five books that we think are a good way into regenerative thinking for engineers (and other…

You only learn when you do difficult things

This is my catchphrase for the start of workshops: ‘You only learn when you do difficult things.’ It is a reminder to expect things to be difficult when…

The past, present and future at the same time

In conversations about regenerative design I draw heavily on Bill Sharpe’s Three-Horizons Model because it allows us to make sense of a complex situation. For in any group…

On the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and teaching design

In the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics…

Design versus Shopping

If the client knows exactly what they want at the start of a design process, then it isn’t design – it’s shopping. Shopping for the answer that you’ve…

340-degree vision

I read on a fact sheet that guinea pigs have 340-degree vision. On a horizontal plane they can see almost all around. Imagine! Their only blind spots are…

Mindset leverage

Are you excited about the possibilities of your next project? Or worried about the unknowns? Do you see the possibility for competition or collaboration? There is not a…

Some things you might not know about the Regenerative Design Lab

In the coming weeks I’m going to be talking quite a lot about the Regenerative Design Lab because we have a new cohort starting next week. Some of…

The Schedule

I am sharing today a schedule I use in my work every time the noise from distractions gets too much and/or I don’t actually think I am making…

Start with your scales

I was taught to start my music practice by playing my scales. Starting with your scales: Starting with your scales doesn’t just apply to instruments. It applies to any…

Field notes from chaos

The wind was getting up. The waves were starting to blow in from different directions. The sea scape seemed to be changing at random. The day before, the…

Harnessing waves in our work

Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s theme of riding the waves of human energy in our work. The idea is to create a cycle of working that tunes…

Riding the wave

I spent most of yesterday afternoon up to my middle in waves learning to surf. (I’ve got a long way to go). So it is no coincidence that…

The Great Flattening

Jim Crace’s book Harvest provides fascinating portrait of rural life in England just before the start of the Industrial Revolution. What is so striking is the way the…

Smoothing things out

One of earliest childhood memories of travel is riding in the back of the car driving along a motorway in mountains in the north of Italy. To traverse…