Category: The daily blog – For Engineers (and Other Humans)Page 3 of 4
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.
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…
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…
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…
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 = 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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…