Irrigation reservoirs/ocean plastic cleanup robot/fingerprint recognition keyfinder/light-up bicycle/anti-drinkdrive steering/air-conditioned tie/plant-based academic gradebooster… a maelstrom technology, ideas and solutions proposed by school children who made the final of the Primary Engineerand Secondary Engineer Leaders Award.
In this competition, children interview a practising engineer to find out about problem-finding, problem-solving and creativity in engineering. They then go home, find a problem of their own to solve, and create solutions, answering the question, if you were an engineer, what would you do?’ An astonishing 37,000 pupils entered the competition, from as young as recetpion-age. (more…)
We planted a hedge of lavender on our estate to revitalise a barren patch of soil near our front door. This sunny morning, the enthusastic lavender stems were bobbing up and down laden with bees. There must have been between 20 and 30. I went to count, as part of the Great British Bee Count. And so it was that I had conversations with several of my neighbours about bees, and I was depressed by what I heard.
One complemented me on the lavender, but said the only problem with lavender is that it attracts bees.
A second reported hatred for bees, having been repeatedly stung by that very flower bed, before conceding they had been wasps.
The third, having been complementary about the flowers, reported a bee had dive bombed from twenty metres above delibrately to sting him and concluded they must be evil.
Over the last 9 months at Think Up I’ve been invovled with an engineering education project that has had a really deep philsophical impact on me. The project is called Enginite, an EruasmusPlus-funded programme of graduate training and placements that aims to give graduating engineers extra skills and experience that will make them more employable.
My role has been to collaborate with Prof Søren Willert, of the University of Aalborg, to train project partners in how to design courses using a problem-based learning methodology. PBL flips traditional learning on itself, and holds as its fundamental principle that learning is more effective – in terms of retention, recall and motivation – if students drive the learning process themselves. It is one of those statements that we know to be true from experience, but goes directly against how most education is delivered in engineering education. PBL addresses that dissonance by creating a framework for giving students ownership of the problem. (more…)
I was due there for a four-day meeting and training course, part of the EU Erasmus Plus-funded Enginite project, with partners from Cyprus and Greece. I didn’t have time for the surface journey. In this case I felt the cross-border collaboration benefits outweighed the environmental cost of flying, so I jumped on a plane. But having flown that far, I was determined to have an overland adventure when I got there. I got my chance on the last day.
When I’m asked, you know, at a cocktail party or some other social setting, ‘what exactly do you do’ I say ‘I train engineers to be more creative’. This is a great statement to use because: it feels good to say; it is reasonably close to the truth; and it is short enough to enable my interlocutors to decide quickly if they want to engage further or keep their distance.
For the people that stick around the next question is usually, ‘well how do you do that then’, and I explain I run two courses, ‘how to have ideas’ and ‘how to have better ideas’, the first being a pre-requisite to the second.
This is again only approximatinately true (my course content is usually based on what the learners say they want to cover rather than following a strict syllabus, and the course titles aren’t always as catchy as I’d like) but it keeps the conversation moving.
After further dialogue, I am asked if I have got this all written down somewhere, and this is when I usually get embarrassed, and have to say, ‘no’, because it is all in my head. But not anymore, because now I can point them to the post you are reading, my first attempt to commit an overview of this material to writing.
0:00:00 Moorgate and London Wall. Once solid-looking stonewalls are now façades pinned in place by scaffolding while new buildings are constructed behind. In just a few years the streetscape along London Wall has completely changed
0:04:34 London Wall and Copthall Avenue Deep metallic groans sound out from behind these hoardings. I assume the core of the building is being demolished, and the sound is the building complain.
00:09:41 Black Rock The circle leads straight into the offices of Black Rock. I enter the revolving doors and walk through a long dark lobby past whispering clusters of suited men and women. I emerge blinking onto a much quieter street, Tower 42 in the distance.
0:13:31 Copthall Avenue The circle passes straight through the Angel Court building. I attempt to walk through the underground loading bay but I’m turned back by security. There are some places you really aren’t supposed to go.
Last night I have a talk at the first ever City of London Showoff called Circling the Square. The event was put on by the City Centre, a fantastic organsiation right at the heart of the City that hosts a fascinatingly detailed 3D model of the City of London. I had been asked to say something entertaining and interesting about engineering in the City. I thought this was a great opportunity to try out and talk about my new hobby, psychogeography. The folllowing is a transcript of my talk (my full data log see my post Dérive #2 – City of London – Logbook)
As an engineer I love going on unconventional journeys: using odd means of transport, exploring forgotten paths, seeing the new from different perspectives. In his book, a Road of One’s Own, Robert Macfarlane instructs us to:
…unfold a street map. Place a glass rim down anywhere on the map and daw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city and walk the circle, keeping as close you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation…Log the data stream…Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, conincidenes, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle and the record ends. Walking makes for content; footage for footage.
Robert Macfarlne – a Road of One’s Own, cited by Merlin Covereley in ‘Psychogeogrpahy’
Pear-to-pear (it was better than the images I got for peer-to-peer).
As part of my Visiting Professorship at Imperial College I have been asked to think about how peer-to-peer assessment works in group works. Here are my thoughts.
One of the common features of the group-work-based learning experiences that I have been involved with is the need for the participants to be able to give each other feedback. Often in an undergraduate setting there is an emphasis on giving anonymous feedback. I have seen many colleagues cook up clever ways of gathering this anonymous feedback – I’ve conceived a few such systems myself – and processing this feedback in order to find out what is going on in student groups and to enable the teacher to be the arbiter of fairness. Managing such systems of peer-to-peer feedback can quickly become burdensome, and I am never really sure whether you really know what is going in the group or if the students are rigging the system.
As I become more and more involved in problem-based learning, I realise that this approach – anonymity and delegation of confrontation to the teacher – misses the point. If students feel that their peers aren’t pulling their weight in a teaching scenario, then they should be trained in how to confront these issues in themselves. And taking a more positive spin, students should also learn how to give positive feedback too.
I think it should be possible to give students the tools to handle these sorts of interactions themselves, and then for the teaching staff to coach students through the process where difficult situations arise. These are tools that my collaborator Nick Zienau uses in his ‘Leading and Influencing‘ course. The following is how I envisage this could work:
How it would work
The context is an extended student group design session in which a group of six to ten students spend a number of weeks collaborating to deliver a shared group output.
Skills development day: trust, confrontation and non-judgemental feedback.
I envisage a day-long training day for student groups. This would involve a series of group work exercises punctuated with whole-class briefing and feedback sessions.
Contracting – this is the process by which students agree with each other what they can each contribute to the team, what they want from the others, and how through their own actions they might jeopardise the group’s success. Students develop contracts for themselves, present them to one-another, and then agree a contract for the group.
The creation of contracts is a trust-building activity, and it creates a visible set of expectations by which the students can hold each-other to account.
Confrontation – in this session we provide a quick formula for confronting challenges. It involves naming a behaviour that they have seen and saying how it contravenes their individual or group contract. The reference to the contracts makes the terms of engagement very clear. Practising a formula for engagement makes the process something that people are familiar with.
Non-judgemental feedback – we walk students through process where they give each non-judgemental feedback, much of which comes down to language. We show students how to stick to facts, like ‘I have seen you do this’ or ‘when you do that it makes me feel like this’, rather than ‘what you have done is bad, or wrong’.
At the end of the training day, students have contracts for themselves and the group, a language for direct, open and kind confrontation and a mechanism for giving non-judgemental feedback.
Self-regulation during group work
After the initial training day students get on with their group work as normal. They are asked to have a quick daily group feedback session, where they appreciate each other’s efforts and identify any emerging issues. They are also expected to have a weekly structured feedback session, where they tell each other where they are contributing most to the group, and how they could contribute more.
Through the group work, it is expected that the contracts remain in view. They are intended to be a visual reminder to individuals of what they should be doing themselves, and also a way for people to understand other people’s behaviour.
Instructor Intervention
The course instructor makes themselves available say once a week to deal with any issues that students feel they can’t deal with in their own groups. The consultation happens with the whole group and the instructor will ask to see evidence that the teams have been meeting to review their contracts regularly and have been giving each other constructive feedback along the way.
Overall, I believe this approach would empower the students, give them useful life skills and improve the quality of their learning.
My thanks to Nick Zienau and Søren Willert who have significantly advanced my thinking on this topic.
I struggled to find an image to go with this post. When I typed design into my image database, this came up. It is rather fine, isn’t it?
Today at Think Up I am writing a set of questions that can be used as a diagnostic tool to characterise different stages in the design process. The questions will go into an online questionnaire through which we will be trying to establish a link between different types of design problem, the design process they require and techniques and tools that designers use. The aim is to help students understnad what might be suitable approaches to use in response to different design problems.
I am fortunate to be working with my colleague Bengt Counsins-Jenvey who knows a huge amount about design thinking in a range of different contexts. He is working on the other part of the questionnaire that is characterising the design problems.
Here’s some reflections and notes from today’s working:
Reducing long-form answer questions on questionnaires. They are easier to write but I’ve learn the hard way on other projects recently that long-form answer questions take so long to analyse it is really worth taking the time to come up with good numeric-scale or mutltiple-choice questions. Having done an initial round of interviews is helping me determine the right language to use.
How succint can I get the questions? I am trying to weigh up writing questions that everyone can understand and keeping the questions short. Again, having done some initial interviews helps me know what language people are likely to use.
I’ve realised my design world view was initially shaped by ‘blank-piece-of-paper’ designers. My interviews on this project have shown me how few design contexts require blank paper. I hope this process gives me greater understanding of design contexts where the operating context is much more complex.
What number scale to use? I’ve gone for 1-4. I don’t want people to think about their answers for too long and I don’t want them to sit on the fence. It will be interesting to see the impact of this choice.
I have been daunted by putting this questionnaire together, so last night I just set myself a simple target of writing three questions for each of the main stages in the design process. This much less daunting task was easy to do – the questions almost wrote themselves – and then I was easily able to supplement them. Later Greg Downing explained to me that this process is what he calls skeltoning: you quickly put in place the outline and everything else follows.
For more info on this piece of research see this post on the Think Up website.
In Janaury 2018 I decided I would try veganism. I have been vegetarian all my life but in recent years I have found it harder to reconcile concern about the meat industry with eating dairy produce and eggs. In recent years we have eaten very little dairy at home, so this year I decided to try going the full hog and committing myself to a no-dairy no-eggs diet.
Understandably people ask ‘what do you eat?’ Here’s the answer:
7/3/18
Toast with marmite
Lunch: humous and veg sandwiches from platter
Cake time – Vegan banana and coconut bread (Southbank)
Dinner – Turkish mezze at Taz
6/3/18
Leon porridge with blueberries
Elevenses: toast
Lunch: Pure vegan wraps (from platter)
Tea: more toast with humous
1st dinner: Kale and pumpkin one-pot pasta (Anna Jones)
2nd dinner: Roast spiced brassicas with split pea purée (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall)
5/3/18
Breakfast: porridge
Lunch: Pret a Manger Spiced chickpea and spinach sandwich
Dinner: Kale and pumpkin one-pot pasta (Anna Jones)
Today I have been reviewing the action learning diaries that half a dozen people have sent me from Greece and Cyprus. They are getting ready for training in problem-based learning that I will be co-leading here in London at Think Up with Prof Søren Willert from the University of Aalborg (see picture) as part of the EU ErasmusPlus-funded Enginite programme, and we have set them some problem-based learning of their own to do before they arrive.
The idea behind problem-based learning is that the student should own the problem and own the process of finding the solution. This approach is diamertrically opposed to the traditional direction of travel for learning. The aim of our approach is to get the participants to experience this problem-based approach for themselves before they start designing such experiences for their students.
The first set of reflective diaries that I have read reveal very different ways of working in our cohort. Some are applying problem-based learning with their students; others, who don’t teach, are adopting this approach with colleagues in their companies, and it is this latter group which is perhaps the most fascinating – because is in fact the sort of environment for which we are eventually preparing students.
At the moment problem-based learning feels like very rich territory to be farming in. The approach itself is a powerful philisophy that has many daily applications, and coaching other people in its use is gives me the chance to witness the daily strategies for sucess that other people use.
One of things that I really enjoy about this project is that is it is open – you can join in yourself if you follow the instructions below – and everyone is learning as they go. For my part I am learning what other people understand problem-based learning to be and become ever more aware of its applications. It is also terrific to be working with Søren, I feel like I learn so much from each of our interactions. Today it has been really interesting to see how he characterises the different types of PBL as described in the reflective diaries. To his words, it is enabling me to notice ‘exemplarities’ that I can look for in other people’s work.
Last week I was down at Bridgwater and Taunton College to check out the tools Stefan Cecchini and his colleagues are going to be using to deliver a revolutionary new engineering degree curriculum that aims to be entirely inquiry-led. There for the first time I tried out a virtual reality (VR) training environment. I put on the VR headset and gloves, and this is what happened (that’s Stefan, by the way wearing the VR gear).
In this episode I bring you a step-by-step guide on how to build a skyscraper with structural engineer Roma Agrawal (@RomaTheEngineer), author of ‘Built, the Hidden Stories Behind our Structures’. We get into the engineering, creativity and philosophy of sky scrapers and their designers. Don’t try to build a skyscraper yourself without listening to this first.
And since engineering education is something I do for my day job, I thought I’d accompany this episode with some additional resources related to the topics of this podcast. I’ll be adding to these over the next few days so stay tuned.
Graphic designer Jack Bardwell and I used to be colleagues at the Useful Simple Trust, he bringing alive the many wacky ideas I have had about how to teach people engineering. Over our three years working together we had many fascinating and long discussions together about creative processes and teaching design.
I recorded this episode with Jack last summer just before he left to puruse new adventures in interior architecture. I miss him in this office, so it has been a pleasure therefore to listen his voice in the edit, and to hear the many fascinating things he has to say about his creative process, what he has learnt from working with engineers, and, most intriguingly, the spine-tingling effect other people’s creativity can have on him.
In this episode we get into:
Tuning in to other people’s creativity
How people express creativity without realising it.
The receiver is the context
Cooking is design
The importance of copying in developing skill as a designer
How new skills open up possibilities, too much skill can limit them
Using jigs to constrain the creative process
How a carefully tuned jig can force a particularly aesthetic on what you create.
How you communicate different parts of the design to the client.
When is a jig not a jig.
Thinking in lists
The way information is presented to you is not necessarily the best way for you to look at it.
I’ve got a feeling this going to be one of those episodes I keep coming back to when I need angles for looking at the world. Enjoy!
Journalist and author John-Paul Flintoff is this person who inspired me to start this podcast. He talks passionately about how to get people started on their creative projects and the positive impact their creativity has on the world. This interview gets very meta: a podcast about the creative process of podcasting. We get into all sorts of great techniques for creative projects, including:
Improv games
Valuing what you are good at
Not losing track of what is working well already
The importance of getting started
Not worrying about whether it is going to be good.
Shared space in the creaive process
Why we need to keep noticing
But beyond any particular tactic, it is J-P’s warmth and encouragement that I find so inspiring. I hope it inspires you too.
I can’t think of metropolitan landscape that offers more varied and exciting opportunities for designing transport infrastructure than San Francisco, with its steep hills, its bay, its rapidly changing economy and its tantalisingly separated land masses.
In this second episode of the Eiffelovercast from my recent trip to the US (catch the first one here) I catch up San Francisco-based transport engineer and old friend Andrew Kosinski and we geek out on transport-related matters including:
Bridgoff: Bay vs. Golden Gate
Tearing down freeways
Bringing cycling into San Francisco
Is driving a right and it is a freedom?
The phenomenon of ‘parklets’
Tunnelling through ships
Building towers on weak and shifting sands
The creative bubble of silicon valley and the unintended consequences
Autonomous vehicles
Using firms like Uber to replace under-productive bus routes
The final stage in the arc of design thinking workshops that I have been developing at Think Up with my colleague Nick Zienau is developing the ability to convince other people to adopt your design. In these workshops there are three areas we work on with participants: building trust with the client; three elements of content; and giving effective feedback.
Trust
Building trust with your client is absolutely essential if you are going to connivence them of anything. There are two things we concentrate on here. The first is being mindful about the first impressions we create. We all create first impressions, whether we like it or not, but we might not be aware of what those are. In our workshops we help people become more aware of the impressions that they create, and help them think about how to create the impressions they want with clients.
The second thing we concentrate on is developing trust through showing vulnerability. To show vulnerability to someone is to show that you trust them; if you can trust others then they are more likely to reciprocate. In our workshops we help participants explore how they can show their vulnerabilities, such as what they are worried about or where they feel their weaknesses are, and use this as the basis of building trust with others.
Together, managing first impressions and building reciprocal trust with our clients we call ‘gaining entry’.
Three-phase content
For many people, the starting point for any pitch is to work out what they want to say. Aristotle said that for a speaker to convince an audience of anything, then the speaker needs ethos, pathos and logos. Having ethos is to be trustworthy. Having pathos is having a shared sense of their feelings (in particularly their pain). Having logos is to have a logical argument. We can think of these as three phases we need to develop in our pitch.
In my experience, many engineers are most comfortable starting with the logos phase, the logic of the solution. The trust-building that we start the workshop with is an important element for developing the ethos phase, as is the reputation of the companies that participants work for. For many, the hardest phase is developing pathos. To develop good pathos you need good understanding of the client’s perspective, which is easiest to gain if you have a good relationship with them based on trust.
Giving and receiving honest non-judgemental feedback
We now have a plan for getting the content together, but how do we know if the pitch we have put together is any good? Here we rely on feedback from others. But for many, the idea of receiving feedback is dreadful – it isn’t all that fun for the feedback giver either. But when done well, feedback is an invaluable tool for improving our work, and it can be fulfilling for the person offering it too.
To make feedback work really well, we require the person giving the feedback to be really honest, but also non-judgemental. So they should say how something makes them feel, and why that might be, but not to judge it. A judgement is too final and puts the listener on the defensive, whereas talking about feelings offers the person listening the chance to find out more about why what they have done has elicited these feelings.
Equally, good feedback has requirements of the receiver too: they need to be open to receiving it, grateful, and not defensive. The last part is critical if the exchange is going to be useful. If the person receiving feedback can hold off on defending, and instead show interest in the other person’s views, then they can really deepen their understanding.
Taking these tools together, we can build an effective pitch for ideas that says,: ‘trust me, I feel your pain, and I have a plan’.
[This is an adapted version of a post I originally wrote for the Think Up website, posted on 1st November 2017].
I really enjoyed listening to this 99 Percent Invisible podcast called ‘Oyster-tecture‘, which explains how, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the city is developing artificial reefs on which oysters will be seeded. The oyster beds will defend the city from storm swell and large waves. As the podcast explains, 200 years ago, the southern end of Manhatten Island was one of the greatest sources of oysters in the world, and these oyster beds woudl have defended the coastline from storms. The oyster beds disappeared due to overexploitation, but now designers are working on bringing them back to defend the city against the impact of severe weather events.
I liked this article because it reminded me of the importance of looking to nature to find more collaborative ways of tackling some of our infrastructure challenges. It is also a reminded of the positive impact that imaginative design thinking can have a positive impact on people’s lives.
Today I take my journey home from Münster to London via a different route from my way out. Outbound I came by ferry because it was cheaper; travelling back midweek I can just about afford the Eurostar. The route gives me the chance for a quick stop in Köln and the chance for an engineering detour via the Wupertaal suspended monorail.
Münster to Wuppertal
Münster is a beautiful town. I’ve spent the last few days staying with a friend and working on my book in the city library. The cities walls were removed to create a circumferential boulevard that is now tree-lined and a major thoroughfare for bikes and pedestrians. I walk this path one last time and peel off at the Hauptbahnhof.
I ride for twenty minutes on a quiet commuter train to Hamm. The flat landscape is filled with a mixture of fields and factories, with the occasional wind turbine. It reminds me of travelling up the Lea Valley north of London.
Hamm station feels in the middle of nowhere but its ten unloved platforms are busy with trains of all sorts coming and going. I get to my platform early and see one of the slightly older German high speed ICE trains arriving. Its bright white carriages are like hermetically sealed capsules. You can imagine this train is capable of zooming along the sea bed as easily as over land.
The ICE train is in fact two hitched together. I watch as the two are uncoupled and the front half pulls away. Just in time, I realise the back half is my train to Wuppertal, and I jump aboard. The land becomes more rutted and we follow an industrial valley that is well scored into the valley – it resembles the valley of the Seine as it winds its way north from Paris to Rouen in Normandy.
My connection time in Wuppertal is three-and-a-half hours; that was deliberate to give me time to make an engineering pilgrimage to a highly unusual railway, the Schweibebahn, Wuppertal’s suspended monorail. More details of that in a separate post.
Wuppertal to Köln
I’m blown away by the monorail – a great piece of railway engineering integrated into the city. With hindsight, three-and-a-half hours was a bit too long for my engineering excursion and I struggle to find the inspiration to explore the town further. It’s nothing against Wuppertal: I’m just keen to get on. I wait impatiently at the platform for my next train.
If the last ICE train I took looked like it could be amphibious, this train, a next generation edition, looks ready for space flight, with it’s pointed nose and sleek black-and-white lines. It’s a short twenty-minute ride to Köln and before I know it we are rumbling across the bridge over the Rhine. Köln Hauptbhahnhoff is covered by a wide arching roof; beneath, trains come and go from across Germany – and I see my first French train, the Thalys service to Paris.
I have fifty minutes between trains so I visit the magnificent cathedral which is surprisingly right next door to the station – almost on top of it. It’s quiet pews are better than any waiting room I can think of.
Köln to Bruxelles Midi
I get on board another of the sleek new DB ICE trains and settle in. I don’t remember much about this 2-hour leg as I slept most of the way. The day before long journeys I rarely sleep well as I worry about missing my train, and last night’s wakefulness just caught up with me. As we slow down on the approach into Brussels I see some fairly grotty looking commuter trains and I realise these are the oldest trains I have seen since I left the UK. All the trains I’ve taken over the last few days in Germany or the Netherlands, whether high speed or slower, were well looked after. I am reminded why I don’t ever get that excited about train travel through Belgium. I may however just be prejudiced against Belgian railways because they were responsible for putting the DB night train to Berlin out of business when they put up the transit fees they charge other countries for their overnight services.
Bruxelles Midi to London
Bruxelles Midi is an endless warren of tunnels where the light at the end never seems that appealing. I have an hour and a half before I can check in; I bought tickets for a later train because it would save me £50. The beer in the cafe is half the price of the tea, which is a shame as I’ve just decided to give up alcohol for a few days.
The journey flies by; before I know it I am back in St Pancras. As I walk down the long platforms I am struck that in all the stations that I have been through on either my outbound or my return journey in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and France nothing quite compares to the experience of arriving under the magnificent Midland Blue-coloured soaring arch of St Pancras station. A fantastic piece of engineering lovingly re-invented for a different century.
For generations it has been a tradition on the French side of my family to spend summer evenings out in the garden looking at the stars. I happen to know that this is something my great-grand parents were doing from at least their retirement in the 60s, and it is what other families in the village were doing too. When televisions arrived, neighbours didn’t give up their stargazing; they simply opened the windows wide, put the TV on inside and watched it from outside, while still inclined heavenwards.
By the time of my childhood in the 80s, I have no memory of seeing other families outside gazing upwards in the evenings. I wonder if the people watching televisions from their gardens had switched to sitting inside and watching TV with the window open so they could see the stars, to eventually shutting out the stars altogether. But my grandparents, to their credit, shunned the phosphorus screens for the slower moving celestial entertainment.
It is for this reason that I have spent hundreds of nights staring at the same patch of sky from the same particular orientation. I know where the first star usually shines from; where the great bear appears over the horizon; where to expect to see different clusters and motifs of stars. But despite hours of dedicated study, I, nor any of my ancestors seems to have had any definitive knowledge of what any of the stars or constellations actually are. There has been much speculation and debate. That flickering red dot just above the horizon early in the evening must be mars/ no it can’t possibly be mars because it is always in the same place/ it’s actually called Beetlejuice. Our collective space ignorance is further demonstrated when we try and point out to one another where a satellite may be seen crossing the sky: you see that bright star, straight above? Go left a bit to the next bright star, then to that square of really dim stars, then go west about twelve inches, and you’ll see the satellite heading towards to the house.
I share all this to give a sense of the utter familiarity to me of this particular sky-scape, like someone who knows the view from their childhood bedroom window so well that it is impossible that anyone could show them anything new; a scene that is understood through layers of explanation, agreed between generations but never verified, so that you will appreciate the impact on me of downloading for the first time a star identification app and pointing it at the sky. It was as if I had been given a new set of glasses without ever having known that eyes were blurry.
All of a sudden, constellations stretched out in front of me. Scorpio reclining on the horizon, the diving fish of Pisces leaping over the trees in the east. I am looking at the same sky but I am seeing new things – this is augmented reality. That red star of which we had spent so many evenings arguing turns out to be the centre of the galaxy – incredible. I really felt ecstatic. We call out to each other, pointing out new things that we can see with more excitement and intensity than we have mustered for years from these seats.
The next evening, we return to the garden excited to return to our star-gazing. But I sense a subtle shift has come over us. The focus is on the screen and not on the sky; on the augmented reality rather than boring old reality. When the app loses its calibration, I start to believe what the screen tell me rather than what I can see with my eyes, even when the two clearly don’t line up. When I’ve got bored of looking at the app, I start to look at other apps: since I’ve got my screen out why not check my messages quickly. And at this moment the spell of stargazing is broken.
Very quickly the situation seems to be changing from one in which we sat under the cloak of the stars, sometimes in conversation, sometimes in silence, but always together, to one in which we are close-by but in separate worlds. I wonder if in a few years’ time a natural evolution of this scenario will be for us to sit inside where the light is better and check our messages there – with the windows open so we can still see the stars, like our predecessors did two generations ago with their televisions.
This future scenario that I present is of course by no means a foregone conclusion, but it has the characteristics of a pattern that I see myself falling into: using digital technology to solve or augment a particular situation, but in doing so, introducing a set of unintended behaviours, that overall serve to diminish the situation.
Of course none of this information is new. The Greeks new about these constellations. We just needed the technology to help us remember. Now that I know what I am looking at, I need to remember to turn my phone off again.
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.
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.
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.
Bristol Swing Festival is unique among swing dancing festivals because it offers the chance to learn circus skills alongside learning to dance. One of the things that I love about coming to Bristol for the swing festival every year is the way it makes me feel grounded in myself and the connection it gives me to other people and the world around me. In the past, I haven’t had a philosophical framework to help me interpret these experiences. But this year I think I found it in Matthew Crawford’s book The World Beyond Your Head. Reading the second chapter, ‘Embodied Perception’, I recognise many of the phenomena that he describes in my experiences here at the festival.
The key idea Crawford introduces is that we think through our bodies: our bodies are an integral part of our thinking process and thinking doesn’t occur just within the confines of our skulls. Before I think about the consequences of this idea I want to first relate the pieces of evidence that he puts forward for this notion of embodied perception to the experiences I have here at the festival. Before we go on I should just say a little more about what goes on at this festival. As the name suggests people coming to this festival to learn to swing dance but what what makes it unusual is that you also learn circus skills alongside those dance skills. On a typical day you’ll spend the morning and early afternoon learning dance steps and then the rest of the afternoon trying out different circus techniques such as tumbling, handstands, tight rope walking, juggling and clowning. It is therefore a very physical environment and one in which you make a lots of physical and mental contact with other people.
The first piece of evidence that Crawford sites in support of embodied perception is what happens when we use a stick held in the hand to explore a space we can’t see. When we use the stick to rummage around in the unseen space, we are aware of the stick jostling around in our hand as the other end moves over the contours of the hidden space; however, after a while we stop noticing the stick’s pressure against our hands changing and focus instead on what is happening at the tip of the stick. As he describes, it is as if we see through the stick right to the tip. Our awareness has shifted from our hands and is focused instead on what is happening at the tip of the stick. To use his words the probe itself has become transparent – it disappears. He goes on that the crucial fact that makes this integration of the prosthetic possible is it there is a closed loop between action and perception: “what you perceive is determined by what do you, just as when we make use of our own hands.
You can see this happening as people start to develop dancing and circus skills. The stiltwalkers are initially very aware of the contraptions they have strapped to their legs but as they gain confidence and familiarity with the sensations they receive through these prosthetics about their relationship to the physical world on the ground it is as if the stilts disappear from view. They have become incorporated into the body from an attentional perspective and what the stiltwalker senses is the ground at the at the bottom of the stilts and not the stilts themselves. I think the same can be said of the sensations that two people feel when they learn to dance with one another. When they begin they are very aware of all the places where their two bodies touch: the connection between their arms, between the sides of their bodies. To beginners this connection with the other dancer is something that they think about a lot. But as the familiarity with this dance hold increases it is if the notion that there are two separate bodies holding onto each other disappears and they experience the dance as one conjoined unit. To re-emphasise Crawford’s words this integration of the stilt or the other dancer into our own bodies is only possible because there is a feedback loop between action and perception. The sensory information we receive when we are dancing with someone is that associated with a four-legged organism with a centre of gravity that exists at some imaginary point between the two dancers’ ribcages and so based on this sensory information we no longer perceive ourselves to be two separate beings but rather one entity.
So that was the first piece of evidence in support of extended perception:tThe way we integrate tools and prosthetics and even other people into our bodies. The second set of evidence relates to how we interpret the world around us based on sensory information. He explains that the traditional model of perception has it that our eyes supply our brains with a two dimensional representations of the world. When I look at the beer can in front of me what I see is a 2-D representation. But from memory I have images of the can from other perspectives. What my brain does is a sort of three-dimensional rendering in order to create a 3-D model of the can in front of me. This model seems to imply a great deal of processing happens in the head whenever we wish to perceive a 3-D object. That model however, as Crawford explains is being challenged by and alternative approach. That approach takes as its starting point the fact that our eyes are located in eye sockets in which they can swivel. Those eye sockets are located in a head seated up on a neck that can look from left to right up and down. Those eyes, head and neck are attached to a body that is connected to legs that can propel the body forwards, backwards, left and right and up-and-down. To repeat the quote that Crawford uses, vision is not the purely mental processing of sensory inputs but rather the way in which we use our body to extract invariants from the stimulus flux. In other words, we explore and understand the world around us by moving through it and seeing things from different perspectives and critically this allows us to identify things that remain the same from different perspectives. Movement through the world is therefore critical to understanding it.
Here at the festival we learn lots about movement and moving in different ways, so it is possible that this altered locomotion offers us new perspectives on the world. In the handstand classes we spent time moving around on all fours and connecting our hands to the ground. In solo jazz we learn to slide, hop and skip through a space, filling it in new ways. In tumbling classes we run, we jump and we fall (gracefully). All of these activities reveal the world to us from new perspectives, and remind us how narrowly we perceive the environments that we commonly inhabit.
When I look out of the window from the cafe at which I am writing this post at the streams of people walking to work, walking the same direction as each other, walking the same way as each other, to go and sit in office environments that are probably very similar to one another. If we move through (or rather remain sedentary) in very similar ways, what does that say about diversity of thought?
Crawford concludes this part of the chapter with a reflection on how toddlers learn to walk. When they are learning they are experimenting to see what movements of their bodies produce what effects. Initially this takes lots of concentration, but eventually the commands can be carried out with thinking about them. The child’s attention shifts away from the body toward the world that can now be explored through movement. Through mastering a new skill, their world has grown, and their attention and perception reaches out beyond the body. Invoking Nietzsche, Crawford says that joy is the sense of one’s power increasing. As we master a new physical skill, frustration gives way – their attention shifts from their body to the world beyond – and they feel a sense of joy.
So what do I take from all of this? Why does going to the Swing Festival feel so good. I think that there are four things at play here:
The first is that for many, myself included, our primary stimuli during the day are visual and audio – all from the head and little from the body. At the festival, the stimuli are much more physical. This gives our brains a break, and perhaps puts us back into a sensory environment to which are perhaps better evolutionarily suited.
The second is that many of the skills we learn at the festival allow us to move through the world in new ways, giving us new ways of perceiving it and understanding it. Turning upside down may seem a trivial thing to do, but when we do so much of our thinking the right way round, flipping things provides a refreshing change.
A third thing I’ve noticed is that spending a few hours a day doing bodily-focused classes seems to make people more physically playful outside those classes. It’s as if we are given permission to rediscover our world through physical play, to rediscover that intrinsic joy that children find when they run around, swing from branches, balance on walls, wrestle with one another or just give each other hugs.
And finally, the festival gives us a tiny taste of the power we could feel if we could master a circus skill: when we might one day stop looking at our hands and watch the juggling balls dancing in front of us; when we might one day feel the lightness that comes with the perfect handstand.
To conclude with one of Crawford’s phrases, ‘we think through our bodies’. Bristol Swing Festival gives me new ways to think through my body, and that’s why I enjoy being there so much.
Ever since I was a kid my Dad has been sharing musical composition strategies with me, so I think music has been a lens thorugh which I’ve thought about creativity for a long time. And so I jumped at the opportunity to interview my friend Ellie Westgarth-Flynn, pianist, singer, composer and performer about our shared interest in creative techinques for composition. As in many of these podcast interviews, I think that creative techinques from one domain can easily be transported to another, and so I hope that whatever your domain of work, you find something useful in the creative techinques that Ellie and discuss. In this episode, we get into:
The tension between technical mastery and creative freedom.
The freedom that rhythmic and harmonic templates or restrictions bring to our compositions.
Building up composition from motifs and building blocks.
The importance of feedback in the creative process – acting on feedback is where change takes place.
There comes a point at which you need to leave yourself out of it and get on the with the job of writing the music.
Three creative techniques for anyone trying to get into song writing.
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.
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.
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.
This is the second workshop I have run in the ‘Everyday Creativity for…’ series, this time for blues dancers in the London blues scene. A huge thank you to Ellie and the Sunday Shake Off crew for inviting me down.
The premise is that blues dancing is an inherently creative activity (maybe even more so than lindy hop?), and by interrogating what we are doing when we are dancing blues we can find creative strategies and techniques that we can use in other parts of our lives, from personal projects to professional work.
This workshop was a truncated version of the full workshop that I run for swing dancers. Into an hour we managed to squeeze in:
Thinking of creativity as a system, and understanding the parts of that system
The influences we draw upon in our swing dancing and in our professional work
Generating connection with your collaborators and your audience
Strategies for stimulating divergent thinking
The value of doing really silly things.
Keep an eye out on this site for dates when I’m planning on running the full workshop again.
