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Setting my landfill targets for the year ahead
By carrying these three items with me a save loads of waste. The water bottle and coffee cup should be obvious. The plastic bag is for food waste which is hard to get rid of on the go. This way I can bring it home and feed it to the worms.

My New Year’s resolution for 2015 is to reduce my waste to landfill. I realised as soon as I came up with this resolution that I didn’t really know what I meant by reduce because I had no idea how much waste I produce in the first place. So I have been spending January measuring and observing, and now I can set myself some targets. But before I do, here are some my ‘rubbish observations’.

– You can’t observe something without changing it. And so the mere act of being mindful of the waste that I generate is making me alter my behaviour, so my benchmark is already likely to be at a lower level than say my typical waste production was last year.

– I realised very quickly that I produce far more waste than what goes in my kitchen bin. The waste that I produce at home is relatively small compared to what I generate consuming food and drink at work, particularly on work trips. Even if those bits of food packaging are recyclable, that only happens if you actually recycle them, which is not always easy to do. At home, it is much easier to make sure that the materials are reused, or correctly recycled. From an ecological perspective, this makes sense: the more removed we are from our local ecosystems (as we are when on a work trip) the more waste we generate.

– somebody once asked my hairdresser if she could keep the hair that was cut from her head (the hair is usually thrown in the bin). Apparently hair cuttings are good for spreading around roses in the garden.

– What’s in and what’s out? I realise I need to determine the edges of this problem. Obviously, waste is produced at every stage in the production of most things we consume. What I want to focus on is the waste that I directly generate, be that at home, or at work. Nevertheless I am sure that in the process embodied waste will be something I at least think about.

– If you are prepared, you can easily reduce the amount of waste you generate on the road. Three things I now carry with me have almost entirely irradiated the waste I generate while on work trips: a reusable coffee cup (I have a KeepCup. A cool design and has the right balance of keeping your hands warm and your coffee warm); a collapsable reusable water bottle; and a plastic bag for putting food waste and other things that I can deal with when I get home.

– Funny numbers. Those numbers that tell you what a plastic is are actually called ‘Resin Identification Numbers’ – and I almost have them committed to heart.

– Does any of my waste go to landfill in any case? Looking into this a little (and I need to delve much deeper), my waste collected from home is taken to an incinerator where, once valuable elements are removed the waste stream, it is burnt and energy is recovered from the heat. That said this shouldn’t deter me, as this approach surely must be the last option once all other reduction and reuse options have been considered. Nevertheless I want to find out more – and I am hoping that finding out more will involve a visit to an incinerator.

– This exercise is already informing my shopping choices. I have ordered different food for a large meeting at work in order to reduce the packaging waste generated, and I brought home the waste from the meeting where I would have more time to sort the waste properly!

– That portion of chips and pitta I had on New Year’s Eve is probably the last of those I will be having this year unless I can think of something else to transport it in -though surely the pitta is a good enough vessel without the need for a polystyrene box.

– And finally, as the following numbers reveal, may landfill isn’t my biggest challenge, because, if you forget about the nappies, the weight of recycling I produce is X times more than the amount of waste for landfill I produce. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for recycling, but I could try to do a bit more reducing and reusing before resorting to the recycling bucket. Maybe that is something I should address later in the year.

The numbers

I weighed the waste that went into our three bins: kitchen, bathroom and garden. Since each waste stream is distinct, I kept them separate as I want to set a separate target for each. The kitchen waste is mainly packaging and wet waste that can’t be fed to our wormery or put in the compost. The main contents of the bathroom bin is the night-time disposable nappies that we use for our daughter (she is in washables during the day at home). The garden waste bin is mainly for packaging of stuff we buy for outside.
- Kitchen – 1kg/month
- Bathroom – 13.9kg/month
- Garden – 0.25kg/month
Based on these numbers, clearly the single biggest difference I can make to our waste stream is to potty train our daughter, which is something we are doing. I should add in defence of this number that for most of her life she has been in washable nappies, and this weight is a fraction of what it would be were we using disposables all the time. Having looked at the kitchen waste stream, I feel this is something that could be reduced mainly by being more careful about what we buy. The garden waste stream is hard to say much about because it is winter, and we are not doing much out there.

And so, on the basis of what I have observed this month, I am setting myself the target of generating less than 1/2kg of waste/month. This includes all the waste we generate as a household, except the nappies, which fingers crossed, we are going to be able to phase out in the next few months altogether. It also includes all the waste that I generate through my day-to-day activities at work and when on holiday.

I’ll let you know in a month’s time how I am getting on!
February 11, 2015
Greenwich Peninsula

I snapped these wandering along Greenwich Peninsula last Saturday.

Enderby Steps

Canary Wharf from Greenwich Peninsula

Millennium Dome

Millennium Dome – over the tree tops

January 26, 2015
8-count basic lindy hop lesson

Tuesday nights are when the Mudflappers teach our weekly beginners’ swing dancing class before the London Dance Orchestra takes to the stage at Swing at the Scolt Head. Since I have been doing a lot of the teaching recently I have deployed my usual set of beginners’ class material and so I am having to come up with some new content. Since quite a bit of thought goes into this, I thought I would make some record of it on this blog, not least so I don’t forget in future.

In recent classes we have been spending a lot more time on warm ups. This week we put on Opus One by the Mills Brothers and just got the crowd to shake different bits of their body to the music. It felt really good and everyone seemed instantly to have shaken off their day.

Next up, we taught a bit more of the Shim Sham. This week we tackled the trick bit, the break. (I think we could dedicate a whole class to learning breaks, and maybe call it ‘Breaking Good’). We started by clapping the rhythm, then worked through the footwork, calling the steps. Pretty quickly the crowd picked up, and we had them doing their breaks to the classic T’Ain’t what you do.

Then on to the bulk of the bulk of the lesson, which we spent teaching side-by-side lindy hop moves. I think this set of moves feels really good to learn because you can really move a long way on the dancefloor, you can style it up lots, and the benefit of a strong connection can really be felt. We taught side-by-side charleston, and taught kick ups, and kick the dog. We then showed how from a side-by-side Charleston you can do an inside turn to reverse direction, and from there to move into a hand-to-hand Charleston.

To fit all this in in an hour and half we had to keep the pace up. We did our usual half-time drinks break about two thirds of the way through and then we upped the pace to fit in the hand-to-hand Charleston. By the end, I think everyone in the crowd had nailed the routine and felt pretty good and warmed up for the band.

The last thing to mention is for this week, I paid particular attention to the music. Earlier in the week I had discovered the music of Kid Ory, and so the whole teaching playlist was tracks by him: Ain’t Misbehavin’, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jerricho, Muskrat Ramble and Maple Leaf Rag, all top tunes which I can’t get out of my head. I’m looking forward to next week!

January 15, 2015
The view from More London

It’s a curious place, More London.

January 15, 2015
2015 New Year’s Resolution – Zero waste, or as close to
Pedal-powered washing machine – created as part of a TV demo I took part in which we tried imagine making machines from waste in post-apocalyptic Britain

My New Year’s resolution for 2015 is it to try and send as little waste to landfill as possible. (Read my end of January update). The idea popped into my mind a few weeks ago, and since then I have been thinking of more and more reasons why I should give this a go.
1. Waste is such a waste – I look at piles of waste, big or small – in bins, on building sites, in front gardens – I think, wow, what a waste! It seems crazy to me that given everything we can do with modern technology we still live in such a throw-away way.
2. I like a challenge
3. I have actually given versions of this challenge a go, but usually only for a week, and not since starting a family, so it is time to revisit.
4. Recycling is great, and there’s more of it around, but what about the stuff that can’t be recycled? Is it ok to to buy something knowing it’s going to landfill? I want to experiment with having to adopt ‘no’ as the answer to that question. What does it mean I can’t buy or do?
5. I think this is something lots of people will have a view on, and I am interested to hear what they have to say.
6. It’s a great chance to find out what’s in stuff, how things are made.
7. Finding ingenious uses for things I don’t want to throw away.
8. Experimenting with keystone habits – I read about ‘keystone habits’ in the book ‘the Power Habit’ and I don’t know it is a common term, but basically the idea that if people develop certain habits, then other habits follow suit. I’d be interested to see what other habits the habit of reducing waste develops.
9. Hopefully out of all of this I can develop practical ways to reduce my waste which might be useful to other people (this reason is inspired by ‘Walden’, one of my best reads of 2014, in which one of the key themes is finding ways to develop a ‘practical philosophy for life’, which I really like).
10. To challenge the status quo.
11. Personal supply chain management – I put this in because I have recently been running training for corporations on sustainable supply chain management, and one of the key ideas in the training is to encourage buyers to talk to sellers about ways to reduce waste in production. Perhaps by engaging with the people I buy stuff from I can find ways to reduce waste in my ‘supply chain’.
12. It is a chance to assess how compatible low-impact living is with working four-days-a-week and looking after a child. Is zero waste a full time job?
So there are the reasons. Achieving the aim is going to take some time. For starters, ‘as little waste as possible’ to landfill is not really an aim, so January is going to be a benchmarking month on the basis of which I hope to be able to set myself a reasonable target. I also need to think a bit more time to think about the parameters. Measuring kitchen waste is one thing, but what about all the waste I produce out and about, or doing my job. Hopefully come then end of January, I will have some answers.

I am looking for co-travellers on this journey, either to join me on the challenge, or just to ask me how’s it going every so often. If either appeal, I look forward to hearing from you.
January 1, 2015
Stressed by stressed ribbons – teaching notes from Southampton

Long axis of the Millennium Bridge by Oliver Broadbent is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

One of the groups of students that Ben Godber and I teach at the University of Southampton is designing a stressed ribbon footbridge as their entry for a design competition we’ve set them. A stressed ribbon is bridge is like a very shallow suspension bridge, the difference is that once the deck units are attached, the tension in the cables is ratcheted up, squashing the deck units together. The benefit of this post-tensioning is that it can greatly reduce the sag in the bridge, creating a much flatter bridge.

The students’ proposal is an elegant response to the site, but they have come up against the problem that they don’t know how to calculate the forces in the cables and so they can’t design the bridge. I was talking to my colleague Chris Wise about this problem of students not being able to design what they draw (a common student response apparently is that because they have seen a similar design online, they know it can be done: job done). But what Chris tells me he tells his students is that they should be able to justify every line that they draw. To help them, he provides students with an engineer’s toolbox, a handout full of rules of thumb that allow student engineers to draw engineering structures in roughly the right dimensions the first time around.

Returning to the case of our student’s stressed ribbon bridge, the bit of mechanics they need to understand is the equation that links the sag in a catenary cable with the horizontal force at the supports. For a static load on a single span bridge, this is easy to calculate, and is given by the equation Fh = wL^2/8s (where ‘w’ is the line load; ‘L’ is the length of the span; and ’s’ is the sag in the cable). Plugging the numbers into this equation gives what the horizontal pull of the cables at either end. The picture is however complicated when there are there are three unequal spans with the cables running continuously over the two supports in the river. If the cable is continuous, the tension in the cable must be equal either side of the support. If that is the case, then for a fixed load on the bridge, the sag in the spans needs to be adjusted to ensure the horizontal forces in the cables at the point where they go over the supports is equal on either side.

Were you to create a physical model of this scenario in which two people hold a chain that is draped across a pair of stools, the chain would adjust it’s own position until it finds its own equilibrium. To find this equilibrium in the design process, engineers do what’s called form-finding, an iterative process in which the parameters of the design are adjusted until all the forces are in equilibrium. For the purposes of a student project, a good-enough result can be obtained by setting up a spreadsheet to do the horizontal force calculations, and to iteratively adjust the sag in the cables until the forces balance.

There’s one final catch though. The process I’ve just described assumes the load on the bridge is constant; however, loads on a bridge change according to how people are using it. Engineers look for worse-case scenarios: the pattern of loading that would create the most difficult load for the bridge to carry. For instance, one worse-case scenario for a footbridge might be all the users standing against one edge watching a boat race, and then all at once, running to the other edge as the boats pass underneath. In the students’ scenario, the students need to think about how they will accommodate any difference in loading between the spans. If they were to leave the cables to free slide back and forth over the central supports, then as the loading changes the sags in the bridge spans would increase or decrease, which would be quite uncomfortable for the user! The alternative is to clamp the cables down on the tops of the supports. Any difference in the tension between the two spans due to unequal loading will then cause the column to be pulled sideways one way or another. The columns can be designed to resist these overturning forces. The challenge for the students is to work out what worse-case scenarios would exist to cause this unbalance in the cable forces.

Of course, everything above is greatly simplified. I don’t pretend to know the details of how to design a stressed ribbon bridge and I am grateful to my colleague Andrew Weir who helped me understand the mechanics of the problem in such a way that I can easily explain it to my students. The point is to illustrate what I think is one of the most important things that students can learn from design projects at university, and that is the ability to use their knowledge of mechanics and their experience of the world to develop a plausible response to a project. It is also one the areas of teaching that I enjoy the most because it best illustrates what an engineer can do: combining their own experience with an understanding of how things work to shape the world around them.

November 27, 2014
Qui l’eût cru – when Paris flooded in 1910

Crue de la Seine – Rond Point de L’Alma –
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Seven years ago I was rummaging in the loft of my great grandfather’s old house in the south of France when I discovered a box of postcards, ninety of them in total, like the one above, all depicting images of the 1910 Great Flood of Paris.

While not in great condition, and certainly not unique, I thought I should do something with them. It’s taken seven years to act on that impulse, and here is the result. I’ve had the postcards scanned and then I’ve posted them to an online map of Paris. Click on any of the pins and you can see a photo of the flood from that location. Click on the URL below each picture and it will take you to the Flickr gallery I’ve created of these images.

Note this is just a screenshot of the map. Click here to access the interactive version of this map

Origins

The reason, I think, that the postcards were in the house in the first place is that I think my great grandfather saw himself as a historian and a bit of an archivist. It is unlikely that he collected the postcards himself: he would have been seven at the time and it would be at least another five years until he left his farming community – although he did end up running a bookshop in one of the areas flooded. It is more likely that he picked up a job lot of them at a flea market and recognising the significance of the event, thought they were worth keeping. In these days of the internet I don’t have the feeling that people do that sort of thing so much. But I’m glad that he did, because today I am able to publish online a load of photos that I haven’t seen elsewhere on the web, and hopefully others will find them useful.

Below are a few of my favourites. Be sure not to miss the polar bears.

La Grande Crue de la Seine – le pont Alexandre III –
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

La Grande Crue de la Seine – Gare St Lazare –
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

La Grande Crue de la Seine – Avenue Montaigne –
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

La Grande Crue de la Seine – les Ours Blancs du Jardin des Plantes surpris dans leur fosse par l’inondation –
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

La Grande Crue de la Seine – Quai de la Tournelle –
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

La Grande Crue de la Seine – Innondation de l’Avenue Rapp

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Image showing the flooded railway tracks of the Invalides train line in Paris during the 1910 Great Flood of Paris

November 22, 2014
Experiments in content flipping
This year I have been experimenting with content flipping in my teaching. The idea of content flipping is that students first encounter the course material in their own time, so that teaching time can be spent discussing, applying or interpreting the material. The aim is to make more effective use of both time together and time apart.

I have had two opportunities this year to take a flipped approach. The first was as part of a Think Up commission at the University of Cambridge to assist in the coordination of a residential Masters module in innovation in construction engineering. It was my job to provide a theoretical framework that would weave together the themes of the week’s speakers. I decided it would be a better use of class time if the students could arrive at the residential week having already got to grips with conceptual ideas around notions of ‘future’ and ‘innovation’. These frameworks having been established before students arrive, we’d then be able to use our contact time to interpret what the course speakers had said against these frameworks.

The flipped exercises I sent out as two documents we called ‘Think Up Think Pieces’, one on ‘Future’ and one on ‘Innovation’. [link coming soon] These were sent to the students along with pre-reading papers from the more ‘traditional’ lecturers. In my first session with the students, I asked if anyone had covered the flipped content – only two out of twenty had. Not a great success – I’ll come on to my reflections on this in a moment.

Where I have had more success with flipping is with the graduate training programme I designed as part of a Think Up commission for a large construction management company. Here the aim was to introduce their first-year graduate intake to the key stages in the construction life-cycle of a building. The programme was to involve five intensive role-play-based workshops in which the graduates, working in teams, would take on the role of a team engineers as it managed the key stages in the construction process of a building. In order to have the maximum time available for role-play we decided to flip the theory. Two weeks before each workshop, we sent the participants a pre-briefing worksheet of activities and reading they needed to carry out to prepare them for the contact time.

In this instance, the majority of the students actually did the ‘flipped’ exercises. So what was the difference?
- In the Cambridge scenario, there was just one set of flipped exercise, followed by a back-to-back set of lectures and contact time. In the corporate training scenario, there were several sessions with long gaps in between when the participants could do their flipped work. In the latter case, the participants could see the benefits of doing the flipped work, and if they didn’t do so for the first workshop, they probably made sure they did for the second one.
- In the Cambridge scenario, my hopefully-interesting flipped exercises were bundled with more traditional reading lists sent out by the other lecturers. They weren’t to know there was something maybe a little different inside the material I’d sent over, and so probably didn’t look (I didn’t get the chance to ask students why they hadn’t read my material, or whether they had read anyone else’s)
- In the corporate training scenario, I got to brief the participants several weeks before the start of the course on the pedagogical model we were adopting, and in particular the importance of the flipped learning exercises. In other words, they knew what was expected of them, and so may have been more motivated to follow that learning scheme.
- Unfortunately I was not able to bring a reflective learning element into the work at Cambridge, but in the corporate training example, the teams were required to complete a reflective learning diary post after each workshop during which they were asked to reflect on the value of what they had learnt in the pre-briefing phase, which I am sure helped participants to see the value of this approach.
- Finally, in some of the flipped exercises in the corporate training example, I required participants to write a short summary of what they had learnt in the run-up to the session.
The flipped learning exercises were clearly of benefit to the graduate participants. They arrived at the role-play scenarios with a clearer idea of how they might be able to succeed at the tasks they were being set, and had more contact time with the facilitators to discuss the issues that they didn’t understand.

So what do I conclude about flipping? In the case where it worked I was very happy with the impact of the approach, and I will continue to adopt the approach where I can. To anyone else trying it, I would recommend:
- Being clear with the learners in advance that this is the approach you are going to take and why.
- Keep the reading or exercises concise and achievable rather than sending out a lengthy reading list that no one is capable of reading.
- Consider setting a short exercise to check participants have completed the flipped activities.
- If you are using a reflective learning approach, ask students to think about what they learnt from the flipped compoment of the teaching.
So, what do you think? Have you tried this approach? What are you experiences?
November 14, 2014
Où est la salle de danse? – Why learning to lindy hop is like learning a language

Mudflappers Peter and Nat demonstrate you can lindy hop anywhere.

It’s not long until fellow Mudflapper Jenny Millman and I begin teaching our six-week course ‘Learn to Lindy Hop’ at the Idler Academy. Being a lindy hopper and being an Idler go hand-in-hand, as these classes will show.

You only have to a watch a short vintage clip of lindy hoppers dancing on a film like Hellzapoppin to see that the Lindy Hop oozes with cool, but the great thing about this and other forms of swing dance is that it is a social dance. What this means is that if you learn a few basic moves, and you find yourself in the vicinity of someone else who knows some basic moves, you can get up and start dancing. The threshold for participation is low and the fun you can have is endless. All you need is a song on the radio and someone to dance with and you can get instant pleasure, making it an ideal leisure pursuit for Idlers.

Learning to Lindy Hop is a bit like learning a new language. You begin with learning some words and phrases, and, sure, you have to practice these for a bit using corny holiday-based role-play exercises, but pretty soon, you can start improvising and finding things out about the person you are talking with. In Lindy Hop, the moves are the vocabulary, the rhythms are the grammar, the lead and follow technique the conversational etiquette and the music… is what you talk about. Over the course of six weeks we’ll be teaching some basic vocab and grammar, which we will practice in role-play (où est la salle de danse?) and we’ll be playing lots of music, so that before they know it our students will be conjugating their way around the dance floor.

Learn to Lindy Hop kicks off on Wednesday 22^nd October. For more info and to book a place visit the Idler Academy website.

October 6, 2014
Seedling analogy for organisational change

A couple of time in the last year or so I have used what I call the ‘seedling analogy’ to explain what I believe to be is a sustainable approach to organisational change. My inspiration came during a conservation weekend that I was involved with at Hazel Hill Wood several years ago (see my post about that weekend here).

One of the main aims of the conservation activities at the wood is to reintroduce hardwood trees. Hardwoods were common here before the site was cleared for commercial forestry. For many years, conversation groups had been spending weekends planting new trees. But only a small number took root and flourished. However, on the weekend in quesiton, the conservation team were trying a new approach. Rather than planting new trees, they were looking for places where the seedlings of the desired species had already sprung up from the floor. Having found the seedlings, they protected them from browsing deer by putting a tube around them.

(more…)

August 12, 2014
Hazel Hill Family Adventure Weekend

A kid, supported with a harness, climbs ten metres up a tall beech tree at Hazel Hill

I’ve just returned a wonderful weekend in the woods, the first ever Hazel Hill Family Adventure Weekend. The aim of the weekend was to give kids the chance to get out into the woods and to create their own adventures. We ran the weekend in partnership with Monkey Do who create fantastic rope net structures that allow kids (and grown ups) to jump, bounce and swing from level to level between the trees.

When the families arrived on Friday evening, we filled up on enchiladas before going on a walk through the woods to help everyone get their bearings. We finished the evening with introductions around the campfire and a discussion about the weekend ahead. We had thought the kids would want to go to bed, but, as it turned out, not until they had been on a night walk through the pitch-black forest.

After an early breakfast on Saturday morning we went looking for leaves to help us learn about the different types of tree in the wood. Then it was time to get into the nets. For an hour and a half the kids clambered around, daring each other to jump from the highest net to the lowest one, and challenging each other to race from one side to the other. Meanwhile, one by one, kids and adults were strapped into a safety harness and climbed as high as they would dare up one of the tallest beech trees in the wood. When the forecast rain came in the afternoon we retreated to the covered roundhouse for a session on how to light a fire with a flint and steel. My accordion provided background music which eventually turned into everyone singing along.

Earlier in the day we challenged the kids to move from one area of the wood to another without being seen. The idea was to encourage them to go deeper into the woods and explore the secret pathways through the undergrowth created by the dear. This exercise was good practice for our last outdoor activity of the afternoon, a game of capture the flag (tea towel) played right across an area of dense woodland at the westernmost end of Hazel Hill.

The evening began with a dinner of vegetable kebabs that the kids roasted on an open fire. I then ran a solo Charleston class for adults and kids, which was supposed to last half an hour, but went on for an hour and a half as everyone was enjoying it so much. We eventually regrouped at the campfire to reflect on the day and to listen to some poems by Michael Rosen.

Sunday’s start was not quite so early: the kids’ exertions were beginning to catch up with them. We played more stalking games through the wood, this time in the thickest area of forest. We then moved on to the dark wood, an area planted with scots pine, for a game of Owl and Mouse, a blindfold game in which the ‘mice’ must sneak up on the blindfolded ‘owl’ without being heard – an exquisitely silent game to watch! We returned to the nets for more suspended adventures and finished with a final game of capture the flag, this time played among the tall trees of the heart wood where there is much more space to run around.

The weekend was a great success in many ways. All the participants left beaming. The parents told of their joy at managing to persuade their kids to put away their electronic devices for the weekend; and even some of the kids admitted to appreciating this as well. It was also a for the crew, none of us having worked together before, and all of us enjoying ourselves and feeling part of the wood. And I think it was a great success for Hazel Hill, showing how the woodland can be used as a place for adventure.

I look forward to using what we learnt from this event in other weekends at Hazel Hill (especially at our upcoming Autumn Conservation Weekend), to working with all the facilitators again, and hopefully to seeing many of the participants at future Hazel Hill weekends.

June 30, 2014
Being Bazalgette – a new work experience idea

Joseph Bazalgette by ICE Archive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at expeditionworkshed.org.

Today at Think Up, Ed McCann and I had lunch with Mike Chrimes from the Institution of Civil Engineers. The main topic on the menu was how to articulate the value to practising engineers of a knowledge of engineering history. Earlier in the day the two of us were talking about how tech could be used to create engaging simulations of work experience for use in schools.

And then as the main courses arrived the light bulb lit up above my head: why not create a mini module for schools that allows students to take on the role of a famous engineer say for a week. For example, students could spend a week being Bazalgette, chewing over the task of how to transfer vast quantities of poo across London. It would be a fun, playful exercise, but which could be used to develop a range of workplace skills as well as hopefully getting students thinking about what engineers did and do now. There’s more to come on this, but I need to sleep on it…

June 10, 2014
A sketch for the Big Idea

It was on a train to Bristol yesterday, travelling with my colleague Ben, that I articulated in I think the clearest terms yet the model of learning that through my various projects I would like to explore and develop practically. It goes something like this:

What do I want to know or be able to do?

What skills or knowledge do I need to have in order to meet this aim?

Which of these skills, knowledge or aptitudes do I already have?

How can I make up the deficit?

How will I know when I’ve got there?

The benefits of the approach are:

it starts with the needs of the individual, and values their own experience of the world. It is potentially empowering and rewarding. It could be self-sustaining if the individuals develop the skills necessary to adopt the approach.

Disadvantages or challenges I can see are:

Learners need to have developed a certain level of skill and maturity before they can adopt the approach. Learners need access to a whole different type of coach or teacher who can guide them through the process. The approach is not easily scalable, requiring a much more tailored relationship between coach or teacher and student.

I see these disadvantages as challenges to be overcome, and hopefully my projects can help contribute.

My motivations are:

A love of self-started learning and personal development; the astounding way that our brains can learn and a concern that our current formalised systems of learning are crude; the depressing sight of students motivated purely by grades and the hugely destructive fetch that summative assessment seems to have on the learning process.

Clearly these thoughts need refining, but I wanted to get these reflections written down while they are fresh. Clearly these are also big ideas to implement – perhaps impossible. In this respect I am inspired by the following from Rousseau’s Emile:

“People are always telling me to make practicable suggestions. You might as well tell me to suggest what people are doing already, or at least to suggest improvements which may be incorporated with the wrong methods currently in use. There are matters witch regard to which such a suggestion is far more chimerical than my own, for in such a connection the good is corrupted and the bad is none the better for it. I would rather follow the established method than adopt a better method by halves. There would be fewer contradictions in the man; he cannot aim at one and at the same time two objects.”

June 4, 2014
Learning emergency first aid

Resuci-Annie catastrophe

Yesterday I went on the excellent St John’s Ambulance 1-day emergency first aid at work course. It was a real eye-opener: it made me realise just how many of the voluntary and fun activities that I go to are made possible by having first-aiders on site.

I was of course also interested in the way it was taught. This is not meant to be the land ambiguity; little room here for interpretation. This training gives clear procedures to help save people’s lives. Any crudeness or bluntness to the rules is offset by the huge potential benefit of saving someone’s life.

The thing I found particularly difficult was doing the treatment with the hands at the same time as doing the patter. One for the science communicators!

The course relies heavily on acronyms to help you remember procedures, and I admit that despite very clear instruction I was on acronym overload by lunchtime. The course has summative assessments built in throughout so that by the end you have an assessment-based qualification. I am however curious about the drop-off rate in retention of that knowledge. For example, I am certain that many people will remember the DR ABC stuff, but other points will drop away.

Obviously some retention is better than nothing, and these courses are clearly doing a great deal to save people’s lives, but I wonder if some delayed assessment, say a week later, using a mobile phone app would be a better basis for the qualification?

That said, St John Ambulance have released an app that gives you back up information, and you do get a pocket reference card – but do you really want to be referring to those in an accident?

I for one know that I will forget much of the content unless I practise, so those of you that know me don’t be surprised if I ask you to lay down and pretend to be unconscious!

April 10, 2014
Harrow: my original civil engineering inspiration?
St Ann’s shopping centre, Harrow – my original inspiration? ‘geograph-2284249‘ by Stacey Harris is licenced under CC BY SA 2.0

This morning I was down at our local primary school arranging to do a talk about civil engineering for the Year 5 and 6s. The head teacher remarked that most of the teachers at the school probably wouldn’t know what civil engineers do, let alone the students. It was the same for me as a kid. But although I didn’t know the words civil engineer, I was fascinated by all things civil engineering: big construction, railways, bridges, waterways.

I grew up in Harrow, and though I regularly visit family in the area, in over fifteen years I haven’t been back to the town centre that was the backdrop to my childhood. This week, beating the Tube strikes meant an eighteen mile cycle ride through that part of the world. After an hour and a half in the saddle in the pouring rain I decided to take a pit stop in downtown Harrow. And WHAMM: all these childhood memories came streaming back, as vivid as if they were yesterday:
- There’s the ‘whole in the wall’ where my Dad would queue for cash
- There’s the Debenhams that I followed my Mum round on what seemed like endless trips
- There’s where I first went to McDonald’s on my own
- That’s where I got mugged for the money I’d saved up to buy a new motor for my radio control car
- There’s the bar that underaged me used to go into at 4pm on a Saturday and wait patiently to avoid the evening bouncers.
But the strongest memory I have of all is the excitement of seeing much of the town centre under construction. For the suburban child that I was, Harrow was the big lights. The 6-8 storey office blocks in the town centre I considered big, glamorous, sophisticated – like the buildings in the montage at the start of Dallas. So when construction started of an enormous middle-of-town shopping centre began including a 9-storey post-modern multi-storey car park, it really captured my imagination.

I remember watching the St Ann’s centre being built right from the basement excavation works and the piling through to the fit-out – watching from the bus stop across the road. I remember the steel superstructure being erected and asking my Dad why they were building a giant Meccano model of the building before they built the real thing. The new centre required major rerouting of the roads – this too I found fascinating.

The influence of all this construction is clear in the drawings that I made at this age – some of which I still have. I was trying to design my own shopping centres, car parks, one-way systems, tram systems, all modelled on Harrow. There were other influences too: the construction of the M25 up the road was an event horizon for me. When my best friend moved away, I asked if he would be coming back before they finished the M25, something which I knew would take ages. When I was told no he wouldn’t, I knew I was in for a long wait.

I even remember aged about ten going to a traveling exhibition about how Harrow would be served by something called ‘Crossrail’ – that sounded incredible.

After St Ann’s with its anchor stores and enticing food court, they built St George’s the even more ambitious St George’s shopping centre, and then the Harrow property bubble must have burst because there is the concrete shell of abandoned incomplete office block just around the corner. These days the anchor stores have dwindled, and the food court sells more chicken than I remember.

Had I grown up here fifteen years later I wonder if I would have been similarly inspired?
February 9, 2014
In the can: the Bare Essentials of Soil Mechanics
Today at Think Up I posted the first five videos of a series we are creating called the Bare Essentials of Soil Mechanics. The idea of the Bare Essentials series is for senior figures in the engineering profession to identify the key pieces of knowledge that they think engineers really need to understand. For this first set of videos we worked with Professor John Burland of Imperial College. John is known for being a great teacher, and though I didn’t have the benefit of his lecturers, I can see why. Working with him on this project has been really enjoyable.

Take a look for yourself here, and if you like what you see, please help spread the word as the more hits we get, the sooner we are likely to raise funding for some more…and we have some great ideas for the next set.
Bare Essentials of Soil Mechanics title slide by Think Up is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuofAC9rq58.
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February 5, 2014
The bridge between mechanical and civil engineers

Rochefort Transporter Bridge

Last night I was reminded of the fascinating world of moveable bridges. From the glorious transporter bridges of ports and river estuaries to hulking swing bridges of the New Jersey railroad, these projects would make interesting interdisciplinary case studies for civil and mechanical engineers.

The lightbulb went on when I found this fantastic set of animations on Wikipedia showing the movements of different types of moveable bridges. For me part of the wonder of civil engineering is the scale of the projects. When those massive structures start to move, well, I just have to sit down. But as well as wonder, I think they offer really valuable learning.

A conclusion of research interviews I carried out last year about developing engineering skills for industry was that engineering employers want graduates who can work with people from other backgrounds to solve engineering problems. In my experience as a civil engineering student we felt miles apart from our mechanical cousins down the corridor. Crudely, we were concerned with things that stayed still, and they were concerned with things that moved. Civils courses that had the word ‘dynamic’ in the title were considered hard and we knew our engineering relatives were studying a more difficult degree!

One of the challenges in giving students opportunities for interdisciplinary working is the siloed nature of university departments. This is a problem not just across engineering but also in the built environment. I know of major institutions whose civil engineering and architecture students never meet – at least in any formal capacity. So I am increasingly on the look-out for projects or topics that can bring different disciplines together. And a moveable bridge could be just the ticket.

At the Constructionarium, where engineering students build scaled versions of engineering structures using real materials, plant and processes, two of the bridge projects on site require already significant movement of the superstructure to complete the structure. At Millau the students construct bridge piers in the gorge and slide the deck units across from the gorge sides. At Kingsgate the two halves are the bridge a constructed on either bank of the river and then rotated into position to meet in the middle – I am still struck by the elegance of this construction method.

Moving a bridge deck once as part of the construction sequence is a starting point, but the real crossover with mechanical engineering begins when the bridge requires a permanent mechanism to make the movement repeatable. At their simplest, moveable bridges require bearings to move the deck units, but a more challenging project would be to have to include hydraulic rams to make get the deck to to lift or swing.

The aim of the crossover is to give students from either bank of this engineering divide the chance to understand the perspective of the people from the other side so that they might work together better in the future. For the civil engineer that might mean understanding how mechanisms are modelled, the dynamic forces on moving elements and the tolerances required to get the structure to work. For mechanical engineers that might mean understanding how a piece of mechanical plant fits into a civil engineering structure and understanding the practicalities of construction on site.

But as well as the educational reasons for wanting to develop a moveable bridge-themed student project, I have a more personal reason. When I lived in New Jersey I’d often take the train to New York, and I would stare out of the window in wonder at the host of moveable bridges of every type that the railroad uses between Jersey City and Elizabeth. We just don’t have the same proliferation of moveable bridges in the UK (maybe we paid more to put our railways on viaducts?).

A couple of years later I had a Saturday job in an office adjacent to Thomas Hetherwick’s roll-up bridge. We’d get people visiting the bridge every day and one time I got chatting to a retired engineer from the states, who it turns out had been a very senior member of staff at the US’s largest moveable bridge specialists. He had worked on and knew a great deal about many of those bridges that I had seen out of the train window in Jersey. Hearing that I was studying engineering, he told me all sorts of fascinating stories.

Six months later after leaving that job, I dropped by to see my old colleagues, and the receptionist gave me an envelope stuffed full of pictures and reports that that engineer had posted me from the states, without a return address – I had no way to say thank you. To make things worse, I then managed to lose this treasure trove. If I am able to contrive to get a moveable bridge project set up at the Constructionarium, it willl be my way of saying thank you to that generous-minded engineer.

January 16, 2014
Adventures in the trees – planning under way
Camp fire at Hazel Hill Wood

Planning is now in full swing for a Adventures in the Trees, a new project that I am excited to be involved with at Hazel Hill Wood. For this project the team at Hazel Hill Wood has teamed up with the team from Monkey Do to create two family weekends that give young people a taste for wild play in the woods.

Monkey-Do is a small non-proﬁt social enterprise founded to promote tree climbing that runs free wild play activities for children in parks and woodlands, bringing people together with nature through play. At Hazel Hill, Alan Heeks interested in exploring how the wood can be used to prototype new ways of getting young people interested in woodland. The Adventures in the Trees weekends will bring Monkey Do’s experience of rigging aerial playgrounds to the magical woodland of Hazel Hill.

My job is to help design the event programme and to co-lead one of the weekends aimed at 7 to 13-year-olds.

More information and booking details will shortly be available through the Hazel Hill website.

Greater involvement with Hazel Hill

In 2014 I will be getting more involved with developing the programme of educational activities at Hazel Hill wood, in many ways inspired by reading George Monbiot’s ‘Feral’ last year. My role in the Adventures with Trees weekends is part of that programme. Another activity will be co-leading a conservation weekend at the wood in the Autumn. More details to follow…

Related posts
- Diary – Feral/Flora and Fauna/Hook, Line and Singer
- Notes from Hazel Hill – Slow learning for teaching sustainability
January 3, 2014
The Beginning of Engineering Knowledge Club

Engineering Knowledge Club Logo by Think Up is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at info@thinkup.org.

Almost nine months since we were awarded funding from UCL’s Teaching Innovation fund, Paul Greening and I kicked off ‘Engineering Knowledge Club‘. The idea is to encourage students to develop for themselves the engineering knowledge they need in order to be successful in the field of engineering they want to go into. We have set up a dedicated blog for Engineering Knowledge Club, which describes our aims for the project, so I won’t repeat them here.

But what I will say here is how excited I am about this project. The timing is particularly appropriate as I have been spending most of November co-writing a guide for the Royal Academy of Engineering on experience-led learning in engineering. Many of the ideas discussed in that report we can put in practice in Engineering Knowledge Club, for example:

Student–led learning – so much of the learning that I see happening in civil engineering courses seems to be motivated by grades, which probably stifles curiosity, intrinsic motivation and independence. I strongly believe that if learners were learning about what they were interested in, then they’d be self-motivated, perhaps work harder, and learn more effectively. Engineering knowledge club is about giving students the chance to define and drive their own learning.

Learning based on real-world stimuli – civil engineering is a subject that surrounds us, and so lends itself well to learning by observation. And yet, so much civil engineering education is based on text books, lecture notes and websites. Engineering knowledge club will encourage students to be inspired by, be curious about and learn from the environment which surrounds them.

Reflective learning – people tend to learn better when they think about how they are learning. Over the last two years I’ve experimented at UCL with Paul Greening and at Queens Belfast with Siobhan Cox on using private student blogs for reflective learning. While this has had some success, what’s been missing is students being able to learn from each others’ blog posts. Engineering Knowledge Club will give me the chance to experiment with using a public class blog. This will hopefully help to build a sense of community among the students, and should serve to demonstrate the concept to anyone interested.

Building a community of learning – I don’t feel that students are encouraged enough to support each other in their learning. I believe that a student cohort in which everyone is looking out for each other would be one that learns more. We hope to build a sense of community in Engineering Knowledge Club and be able to see its impact on learning.

We shall see!

November 26, 2013
Now ‘lecturing’ at UCL

The letter came in the post yesterday. I can now call myself an Honorary Lecturer at UCL’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. Obviously the ‘Honorary’ bit means that I still have my day job at Think Up, but it is great to have recognised a good and growing working relationship with the department through projects such as Knowledge Club and a re-run of Think Up’s Haiti Disaster Relief design project.

UCL and Think Up are on each other’s doorsteps, so I expect to find myself on campus much more. And now with access to EduRoam, any campus is my office.

October 17, 2013
Teaching at Queens – part 1

Over the next couple of days I’ll be at Queens University Belfast to do two things: to kick off a new sustainability-themed student project, and to run a curriculum development session with staff on the theme of embedding sustainability.

Queens commissioned Think Up to design a sustainability-themed project for first year students. With this collaboration we plan to test three things: the idea of using a project early in the course to introduce the ‘basic building blocks’ of sustainable design; how this project can be used to introduce a topic that other teaching staff can build upon in later modules; and how a virtual learning environment (in this case Our in-house platform Student Studio) can be used to facilitate a better link between universities and industry.

Basic building blocks

Principle Two of our report Embedding Sustainability in the Undergraduate Civil Engineering Curriculum is to ‘establish the basic building blocks early on in the course’. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy as our theoretical basis, the higher order cognitive processes needed for sustainable design (analysis, assimilation, creation and evaluation) are founded upon the more basic cognitive processes (knowledge of, knowledge that). To enable students to make better judgements in the field of sustainable design, we need to establish the basics that will help them make those decisions.

The basics are widespread, and include: common terms and definitions; principles of simple analysis techniques; materials; exemplars. Communicating this material is not a great use of class time. The project that we are designing will provide a context within which the students can start to establish these basic building blocks.

Project brief

Student are asked to work in groups to answer the rather open-ended question, how sustainable is Titanic Quarter (a large new mixed commercial-residential-cultural development in Belfast)? To help them, we have suggested seven axes for investigation based on the twelve objectives for sustainable development on the Olympic Park. For each axis, we have suggested aspects of the development to investigate, analysis tools and techniques they might use, and technologies they should find out more about.

Over the coming week, students will go on a fact-finding tour, do online research and try to speak to people who know about the site. Once they have gathered their data, they need to agree as a group how they are going to answer this question. The task is deliberately designed to provoke debate, and to ask students to apply their judgement. We emphasise that there is no right answer, and what is important is the thinking process they go through.

To conclude the project, students will present their findings to other groups. In each pair of groups, one will the on the role of the developer, the other will take on the role of sustainability consultants answering this question. The students will choose which team they think have best answered-the question. That group will then present their findings to my colleague in the Useful Simple Trust, Dan Epstein, who was head of sustainability on the London Olympics.

Basis for our teaching modules

Our hope is that this project will enable other teaching staff to develop modules that build upon these foundations. Titanic Quarter is a development close to he Queens campus and it is likely to be under development for some years to come, so it makes sense to link teaching to reality by drawing on case studies from this project.

Using Student Studio

This project will be the second time that I have used Think Up’s virtual learning environment Student Studio to run a remote teaching module in a university. The platform is used to provide briefing information to the students, to provide an online space for a learning blog, and a forum space for discussion posting questions.

The plan is that I will be in Belfast to kick off the project and give the students an introductory lecture. I will brief them on how to use Student Studio. I will then go back to London, but I will be able to track students’ progress through the project remotely. Together with using Skype to deliver the final presentation, if successful, we hope this technique will demonstrate how industry can be connected to the teaching environment without necessarily having to be there all the time.

October 11, 2013
Day 4 at the RDI Summer School
This Day 4 post is written somewhat after the fact, and that’s a good thing. An immediate post might have captured all the logistical comings and goings without capturing anything about what was special.

I am not sure who first used these words, but in the concluding session, Michael Wolff quoted the following,

“People will forget what you said, and they will forget what you did, but they will always remember how they made you feel.”

The handful of attendees I have spoken to in recent days have shared a similar sentiment: that after five weeks back at our desks, the Summer School feels like a long time ago; the details are dim, but there is a feeling that they can start to make sense of what was felt – what was revealed about ourselves and each other – in the context of their day to day lives. It is as if the Summer School is one of those glorious trees at Dartington Hall, basking – photo-synthesising. The leaves are what we said and did; buffeted by the arrival of autumn they quickly fall, but the energy of the summer, the coding and nutrients – in other words how it made us feel – are preserved in the seeds.

Oak tree at Dartington Hall

Fergus Fielden gave me the the seed metaphor. He used a sweet chestnut seed from the grounds at Dartington represent his wish on the wish sculpture that we built on day two. In his words (see video snippet here),

“It symbolises growth…and investing in a sustainable future, but it’s a long game so it is about getting people to be more hands-on about sustainability and awareness. And you have to have faith. You have to invest early on.”

Planting seeds is the most illustrative description I can find for what the summer school did. Some will germinate next season; others will come to life in later years; some may not survive. Once it emerges, the sapling may take many years to thrive. And it is hard to know from the seed what form the eventual tree will take. Sometimes it is hard to remember what seeds you have planted. Fortunately I have two hours’ footage of video interviews to give me some clues about what sort of seeds were planted.

Seven Seeds of the Summer School
- Seed One – The courage to believe in your own convictions and abilities
- Seed Two – The removal of the mundane to gain sight of what you want to do.
- Seed Three – The re-ignition and validation of personal passions.
- Seed Four – The foundation of new friendships and alliances
- Seed Five – The identification of new personal objectives
- Seed Six – The nature of working with strangers and how to collaborate.
- Seed Seven – The knowledge that our greatest adversary in life may be ourselves.
As we were leaving the summer school, I asked (somewhat metaphorically) designer Syd Hausman, if she’d found what she was looking for:

“Sounds like a U2 song… I wouldn’t say I’ve found what I am looking for, but the start of many things I will probably find”

Related Posts
External links
October 8, 2013
Following Laws of Simplicity, and stumbling upon life hacks

At the RDI Summer School, I met potter Billy Lloyd. He suggested I take a look at John Maeda’s blog, The Laws of Simplicity‘ which I’ve just started following and reading. I like the approach of having a blog based around the idea of applying a series of rules or commandments. It is something that could work well for putting online Think Up’s report on principles for embedding sustainability teaching in undergraduate engineering courses.

Reading the Laws of Simplicity blog I stumbled upon a link to a page on 50 life hacks. Well worth looking at!

October 5, 2013
From concrete courtyard to blooming garden – the story of the Big Dig

In December last year I wrote about day one of the Big Dig, M and my plan to transform our barren concrete courtyard into a thriving patch of urban greenery. Today we celebrated the completion of that grand plan with a garden party – a harvest festival no less! – for everyone who helped us along the way. Here’s a little movie slide show of what we achieved.

Seeing all the insects buzzing between the flowers in the beds it is hard to remember that this was an apparently lifeless little corner of London (no doubt kept lifeless with ample weed killer). And in January, when we were standing in knee-deep holes in the ground digging in compost, it was hard to believe that it would turn into the lush environment that it is now.

By the time spring arrived we were putting in the new ground covering: a mixture of turf and gravel, beds and raised beds. The trees and most of the plants went in by early April. I remember thinking that they were quite spread out – just as well given how much they grew. In the summer we turned our hands to plant vegetables – too late in hindsight, but we are still figuring this stuff out.

One of the aims of the project was to use waste material wherever possible. We had had our collapsing garden fence replaced with a new one, but had asked to keep the old timber. This well weathered material we were able to put to good use, creating three raised beds, a cold frame, a bike shed and compost heap. And because the material all came from the same fence, all the structures we built have a unified look. Continuing on the re-use theme: half of the old back door became the lid for the cold frame; the dozens of bricks we found in the ground became the garden path; an old allotment shed door became the roof of the bike shed.

Two things have made this transformation possible. The first is the plan for the garden put together by our friend Amanda Dennis. From her beautiful pen and watercolour design, to the step-by-step project plan, she guided us through the whole process, and I think she is as pleased as we are with the result. The second is the tremendous help we have had from friends, family and neighbours – I count sixteen volunteers in total over the last nine months. People have lent us tools, sent us plants, driven cars to the dump, built sheds, looked after our baby and dedicated whole days to digging. It has been very heartwarming – and a lot of fun.

And so to the harvest. Roughly speaking: a punnet of raspberries, red currants, blueberries and a half one of strawberries; a few baby carrots; two plums; two courgettes; fist-fulls of herbs; a dozen ripe tomatoes – and two dozen green tomatoes still full of promise; and a gherkin. We wanted to feed our harvest festival guests the fruits of the labour, but since most of these fell earlier in the year, we had to be a bit creative with the menu: lavender cake; savoury vine leaf cake (delicious!) and herb bread topped with our one gherkin thinly sliced.

It would be easy to think now that the hard work is done – but now we have the not so small task of keeping it all alive. Watch this space.

October 1, 2013
5 months of paternity leave – the highlights
Since April, through a mixture of parental leave and part-time working, I’ve been the primary carer for our daughter. Tomorrow I resume (almost) full time office work so I thought I’d take a moment to write down some of the highlights of being a full-time stay-at-home Dad.
1. Getting to spend extended periods of time in the company of my daughter, getting to know her, her getting to know me, and creating the kind of bond that could never have formed had I stayed behind my desk.
2. Confidence – before I went on parental leave, I would need a list of instructions just to look after the little one for the afternoon. Five months of responding to a baby’s needs is a great confidence builder – and teaches you to improvise.
3. Cooking – I’ve been doing lots of cooking – sometimes four meals a day. – and its been really enjoyable. I have tried my hand at loads of new dishes, but perhaps more importantly I have a few tricks up my sleeve for when there’s a tired hungry baby at the table and the cupboards are all but bare.
4. Time outside – weather-wise I couldn’t have chosen a better five months to be on parental leave. Our baby seems to thrive on being outside, so I’ve been making the most of the opportunity to get outdoors. In the early days she’d only nap in a buggy on the move – never in her cot – so I’d walk some times ten kilometres in a day interspersing naps with playgrounds we’d find along the way. More recently things flipped, and she’d only sleep at home, but that just means we spend more time in local parks. The thought of spending winter indoors is daunting.
5. Getting to know local people and the neighbourhood. Like it or not (for some people this is a surprise): having a baby immediately connects you to your neighbourhood and the people in it. I like it – I can’t walk out the door anymore without recognising a parent out and about. The funny thing about taking over as primary carer is that lots of people already knew our baby but had no idea who I was – luckily the little bean does introductions (see below).
6. Seeing the world through a different set of eyes – this is quite a parenting cliché so I’ll just illustrate one small example of it. Our baby waves at complete strangers. She smiles at them and elicits a response. Before I know it, strangers are waving back, and I end up talking to people I never would have otherwise. For her there are no social barriers. People are just people, and they are all fair game for a wave and a smile – even if they are combat-ready paratroopers holding enormous machine guns doing security patrols of French train stations.
7. Witnessing step-by-step developmental changes – it is amazing to have watched our little one become less little. The change over five months – from a sitting grunting baby to an all-waving furniture-surfing toddler with an ever-growing repertoire of gestures to communicate what she wants – has happened through so many increments. A highlight of these last few months has been being able to watch so many of these little changes happen.
8. Time to think – all that walking around parks, hanging out washing and long lunchtimes have given me plenty of time to think – valuable time that I wouldn’t have had behind my desk.
9. Time out from my office job – having had lots of time to think, I return to my office job with new ideas and ambitions.
Of course there have been low points. There have been some afternoons when I have looked at the clock at 2pm and wondered how I’m ever going to get to bedtime. Norro virus was the nadir. But you get through. Overall though, these last five months of parental leave have been fantastically rewarding.

I am delighted to see more parents sharing the parental leave. I now ask prospective Dads not if they are taking parental leave but rather how much. The question still comes as a surprise to some, but I hope that one day, shared parenting is the norm.
September 24, 2013
Day 3 at the RDI Summer School 2013
Off for an early morning swim in the Dart

7am: ten of us met for an early morning swim in the Dart. The water was so cold it began to burn, but the sensation was incredible. Whether they had been swimming or not, by impression from the people I interviewed that morning was that everyone felt refreshed – charged with renewed energy.

The instructions were to continue the journey begun yesterday. Unlike the day before, there seemed to be a greater feeling of coalescence in each of the working groups. Perhaps a trust was forming; people began to be quite secretive. I decided it would be difficult to learn about what was going on by skipping from group to group so I joined one.

Stratocumulus over the tilting field at Dartington

For several hours, we walked and explored the gardens. The brief remained wide open. Ideas emerged and disappeared just as quickly – but without judgement. We found our way to High Cross House, and it was there that, like the fleck of dust that is needed to begin the crystallisation of a solute from solution, something stuck around which ideas started to emerge. We wanted to create something that responded to the landscape – a giant puppet or mobile suspended from one side of the tilting yard to the other. We needed a rope, but all the rope had been taken by other groups.

We decided to create our own rope from the only remaining material in the stores, gaffer tape. Then began wonderful process of collaboration and learning as we crafted our own 25m-long rope by spinning the tape around itself. Engaged in this physical task our spirits were soaring. The storm clouds that had been threatening all weekend finally broke, but we stayed out in the rain, spinning our rope.

A rope hand-woven from gaffer tape

When the rain stopped we tested our idea – to explore emotion by creating a giant tug-o-war spanning the great valley of the tilting field. It didn’t work – the rope failed under the stress of two people pulling – but it drove us to something better: to create a giant skipping rope. The next hour was brimful with joy as we leaped in and out of the skipping rope. We showed each other how to do it, we created games – we played. We returned to dinner with spring in our step aware that we had touched upon something profound, perhaps the satisfaction of craft…the beauty in simplicity…the joy in play.

Later we returned to the wish sculpture begun on the day two. Here is what Co-Director Chris Wise had to say about he happened.

Related posts
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September 10, 2013
Notes from Day Two of the RSA RDI Summer School – sort of
Storm clouds brewing at RDI Summer School

My aim for this reportage has been to tell a live story from the Summer School. This is tricky to do because, as I said in my first day post, part of the appeal – and perhaps the impact – of the Summer School is that the participants know so little about what is going to happen. Summer School co-director Chris Wise told me that this mystery intends to put participants on a level playing field without preparation, preconception or prejudice. I understand the importance of what he is saying, but this leaves me, as a storyteller, little story to tell other than descriptions of historic buildings and landscape gardening. I have decided therefore to use the hindsight of what actually happened to help judge what I can include in my reportage of this Summer School without jeopardising the experience for future participants. So, if you are sitting comfortably…

Dartington Hall is a fantastic place to hold the summer school. The ancient rooms inside and the cascading garden outside, with its wide open spaces and nooks and crannies provide endless spaces for people to stop, think, explore, assemble and create.

We gathered in one of these rooms for our first activity of the day. Having all been asked to bring a small object that represented a precious wish, we suspended our wishes from tiny threads within a giant cube structure. Our wishes floating before us (check potter Billy Lloyd’s wish here, and more pics here), we were then instructed to ask others about what they had brought, and if we felt some connection to that person’s wish, to connect our two wishes together with more string. Gradually forty-eight individuals and their wishes – many very profound and personal – became interlinked and co-supported in a fine matrix – a beautiful manifestation of the webs that were already starting to spin around and between us.

Assembled around this wish sculpture we listened to a compilation of interviews from Mike Dempsey’s RDInsights podcasts. As the collection included excerpts from interviews with many of the RDIs present, it allowed something quite personal to be revealed about these designers without anyone having to speak a word. For me this process of opening up began here, and became an important part of our stay at Dartington.

At eleven, the Co-Directors of the Summer School briefed the participants on what was to become the main activity of the Summer School. The participants were instructed to carry out a sequence of tasks, the means and mechanics of which I won’t go into, designed to set us off on a journey exploring human emotion. The journey would end on the last day of the Summer School when everyone would report back to say what they had found.

While the Directors’ briefing focused on the mechanics of the exercise, they were ambiguous about their expectations. With hindsight, this ambiguity set up an important tension that would eventually propel each of the groups to go far on their journeys of exploration. I witnessed this growing tension while I moved from group to group, interviewing participants along the way. Initially, everyone participated in good faith, but over a few hours unease grew. Two camps emerged. Some participated in the exercises placing their full faith in the mysterious programme that would somehow guide them to some sort of epiphany. Others found the exercises opaque and a barrier to meaningful discussion.

Then over dinner something snapped. The Directors stood up and effectively told everyone to stop being so polite and to take responsibility for themselves. It felt like a dressing down, but it was enough to suddenly propel everyone forwards. I think that for those who had been following instructions it was a shock: the instructions were no-longer trustworthy; the only people they could trust were themselves. And I think for those that had felt shackled, they were suddenly released. I may be wrong about those last two sentences, but I am certain by the end of day two a threshold had been crossed.

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September 9, 2013
RDI Summer School – Day One
First encounters at the RDI Summer School

What is remarkable about the RDI Summer School is how so many people applied on the basis on personal recommendation, and yet how little any of the attendees know about what they are going to happen or who they are going to meet. There is a shroud of secrecy around the event that none of the previous attendees want to unveil – as clear an indicator as possible that this event is about the journey and not the destination. The journey began at 7:30am where a mixture of RDIs, young designers and ‘wild cards’ boarded the magical mystery coach. The RDIs are senior designers who have been awarded the title of Royal Designers for Industry in honour of achieving sustained design excellence, aesthetic value, and significant benefit to society. The RDIs are here to inspire, guide and inform the young designers, the largest constituency here – tactfully named to suggest people less advanced in career and age than the RDIs. The wildcards are professionals who are not designers and generally do not work with designers per se but may be touched by design, either as civil servants, commissioners, etc. They too can inspire and guide the young designers, but for this latter group it is also a chance to learn about how to build better collaborations with designers.

As the charabanc advanced westwards, curious conversation began to unfold between clusters on the bus. People began to discover who their co-travellers are. Somewhere outside Bristol the bus disgorged its contents into a service station. All of a sudden some the UK’s leading designers – architects, potters, stage designers, engineers – were all in the queue at the tiny coffee stand. It was like some 21st century recreation of the 19th century coffee shop encounters of Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, James Bolton and Erasmus Darwin. By mid-afternnon we arrived in the glorious ground of Dartington Hall. We disembarked, ate and went straight into our first activity. Blackberries, iPhones and laptops were thrown aside, space was created, contact was made, and connections began to form.

My job on board this journey is to tell a story that it seems must remain secret. From four hours of moving from seat to seat on the coach, I am getting a clearer idea who the characters are and what their backstory is. This is a gang of people who all do useful stuff, and to do that well, they seek in one form or another, a creative recharge. I look forward to witnessing that.

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September 6, 2013
Off to the RDI Summer School

For the next few days, I will be down at the RDI Summer School. Over four days and three nights, the School inspires, challenges, and provokes designers and those who use design, sharing experiences and searching for insight. For the participants, the Summer School is a journey, and my job is to capture that journey in a series of short videos and blog posts.

Contrary to current trends in event organisation, there will be no official live blogging or tweeting from the site. The organisers feel that clarity of thought at the school (maintained by minimising distraction from the outside world) is more important than any minute-by-minute account of the event, and I completely agree. The odd tweet that does spin out may use the hashtag #RSARDIsummerschool. So, watch this space, but don’t hold your breath.

It promises to be a fantastic few days!

September 4, 2013
Build a nuclear power station in a week

Student coordinates lifting of reactor into Nuclear Big Rig

It was three years ago, standing in the middle of my first Big Rig structure that I first had the idea of getting engineering students to build their own nuclear reactor. Today I watched as a group of students lifted their ‘reactor’ into position on day two of the pilot of Nuclear Island Big Rig.

The Big Rig lends itself well to creating mock-ups of industrial plant and installations. The design and construction of a nuclear power station, with some significant alterations for practicality, is exactly the sort of exciting-sounding brief that we use at Think Up to inspire people to pursue a career in engineering.

The opportunity to put this idea into practice came when Think Up was approached by Cogent to design an event to inspire electrical, mechanical and chemical engineers to take up a career in the nuclear new-build sector. The result is Nuclear Island Big Rig, a week-long event in which a group of 16 engineering undergraduates and apprentices are challenged to assemble, operate, and dismantle a mock-up of the primary cooling circuit of a PWR.

I was not able to facilitate this event because of my paternity leave, but today I went down for the day to see how everyone is getting on. There I found a team of well motivated students working their way through the problems they were encountering. Some of the most the undergraduates – I had the impression they had a lot to learn from each other.

While I am not there all week, some of the features we are building into the event are making it easier for us to connect with learners directly from our head office. For instance, we are using our Student Studio online platform to host personal reflective blogs and a student forum for the event. We can use this tool to track the event remotely, and to gather lie feedback as the event progresses. Similarly we created a Facebook event page, which has already enabled us to connect more easily with participants, and allowed them to share practical information with one another.

I am looking forward to hearing how the students get on over the rest of the week, and to seeing how we can improve the event over future iterations based on what we have learned.

July 3, 2013