Eiffel Over

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  • Taking time to find the right fit

    In yesterday’s post, I explored the difference between kinetic and thermodynamic products in chemistry. The analogy was about allowing change to unfold more slowly, giving the system a chance to find a state of greater harmony.

    The “system” can be anything—a masterplan, an organisation, or even a supply chain. But the principle holds true: quick change might give us rapid results, but finding the best fit for the system takes time. What’s key here is iteration—testing and adjusting to discover if a better solution can emerge, whatever “better” might mean.

    So why should we care about the best fit? If the goal is just to get the job done, then a fast solution might seem sufficient. But if the goal is long-term success and the thriving of all the system’s parts, finding the best fit helps avoid hidden cracks that could lead to failure, and it reduces built-in stresses that could cause damage over time. Fixing those issues later costs time, energy, and money.

    Best-fit design, enabled by iterative processes and informed by local feedback, takes time—but the reward is a more harmonious, lower-energy system.

  • Kinetic versus thermodynamic designs

    I used this example for the first time at the Regenerative Design Lab and so I am sharing it here. It is about how time and conditions shape what we create. It is about finding the best fit.

    If you take a super saturated solution and cool it down, at some point, crystals will start forming in the solution. If you cool the solution quickly, the crystals appear suddenly. They are small and jumbled up. In chemistry this is called the ‘kinetic product’. 

    But if you cool the solution very slowly, the crystal formation is very gradual. If you are very careful you can even create one single giant crystal. This slower version is called the ‘thermodynamic product’.

    In the kinetic product, because the solution is cooling quickly, the crystals just form from the ions in whatever location they happen to be at that moment. It is a product of convenience, but is full of internal stresses and fractures. 

    In the thermodynamic product, because the solution is cooling slowly, the ions have time to arrange themselves into their ideal equilibrium position in the crystal. There are fewer internal stresses and fractures. The ions exist in greater harmony.

    And so to design. When engineers (and other humans) develop a design, are developing a kinetic answer, that is quick and convenient? Or a thermodynamic answer, that allows the elements of the system to find their best fit? And which approach creates a design that brings greater harmony to the parts involved? 

  • Does power support change?

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    Earlier this week I wrote about designers needing to understand the conditions for change. What enables change and what blocks it.

    If we understand organisational culture as how things get done in an organisation, then culture gives us some strong clues about what – or who might be enabling or blocking change.

    Power is one of the six lenses of culture in the Johnson and Scholes culture web. How people with power wield it in the organisation sets a strong signal for what is valued and what can be ignored. The policy may say one thing, but it is what management or leadership actually do that sets the culture.

    And so back to change. Do the people with power visibly support change? If so, a culture of change will enable you to do your work more easily. If not, you will have more work to do.

  • Never mind the aurochs

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    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    …here’s the Tauros.

    I read last week that Aurochs were the third heaviest mammals to wander Europe, after woolly mammoths and their sartorial companions, woolly rhinoceroses. Aurochs were like giant long-horned cows. They crashed their way through woodlands, opening up the canopy by knocking over trees. In doing so they allowed an interconnected mosaic of habitats to form and sustain in the woods of Europe. 

    That is until over 300 years ago when they became extinct in the UK. It is believed the last aurochs was killed in Poland four centuries ago.

    As engineers (and other humans) become increasingly concerned about habitat loss and restoration, there is increasing interest in the role that extinct mega fauna (giant animals) played in creating and maintaining thriving habitats. 

    And so I am excited to hear about this experimental programme which aims to recreate the effects that aurochs had on the landscape. In this scheme, charity Trees for Life is releasing a herd of Tauros into the Dundreggan Estate, near Loch Ness. Tauros have been back bred from long-horned cattle to create animals that begin to resemble the mega fauna that once roamed the UK.

    I see this project as an exciting example of unlocking the living world’s potential to create rich habitats. And of the role humans can play in this process of trying to counter some of the previous harm we have done.

  • What’s holding the current situation in place?

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    Design is about making change. Our aim is to turn an existing situation into a better situation. Sometimes that might be about designing a new thing. But other times it may be about allowing change to happen. 

    If we are interested in the latter then a useful question to ask is what is holding the existing situation in place? What is reinforcing the status quo? What is stopping innovation? What is preventing change?

    Sometimes we need both. We need to float a new idea, but to stop it from sinking, we need to also create the conditions for change. But other times, it may be sufficient just to design the conditions for change, and then to allow something that has been waiting to emerge the chance to develop.

  • Where we make but also where we take

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    This has become one of my catchphrases in regenerative design*. To think of design as being for ‘where we make but also where we take’. The role of the regenerative designer is to create a transition to an industry in which our designs create human and ecological thriving. 

    To make that possible we need to bring two separate things into our view at the same time. The place where we are doing the making, and the places that are we are drawing upon to do that making.

    Because if our work makes the world better where we are making, but worse where we are taking, we are not creating thriving. We are just shifting it from one place to the other.

    *It definitely is a catchphrase – I’ve already written a post this year with this exact same title.

  • Remote treehouse design

    Sometimes humour serves best to highlight the ridiculousness of a situation. 

    In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between designers and the ecosystem they draw their materials from. 

    The working thought experiment has been a game in which differently sized design teams compete to build a wooden shelter from fallen branches in a forest. The size and configuration of the team have a big impact on how the teams source and work with their materials. 

    Now, let’s make it ridiculous. Imagine that instead of the design teams being situated on site in the wood, they are instead situated in a cabin just outside the forest. The construction teams remain on site. How would the game work?

    The direct link between designers, the site, the construction team and the environment that the materials come from is broken.

    The first challenge is communicating to the designers what the site is like. This could be done by means of a drawing, or even a video sent to the designers. But any representation is likely to be a partial version of fully understanding the site. 

    Next we need to find a way to communicate to the designers what materials are available. In the game, the materials are sourced from the surrounding woodland. But found materials don’t necessarily conform to easily describable units. We could envisage then a system in which branches are harvested and sawn to make their dimensions easier to work with and specify. In doing so, we lose some of the material in order to ease communication and specification for the remote design team.

    With a list of standard parts the remote design team can then begin their design. They may invite the build team in to the design office for ‘early contractor involvement’. When the designs are produced, there will need to be further meetings to brief the construction team on how the design works.

    As construction begins, the people on site notice the design could better fit into the local environment with some changes, but that would take additional meetings with the design team over in the cabin. And it’s not their own design anyway. They don’t feel like they own it, so they don’t bother.

    Meanwhile, the design team forget that they are in a game and start selling their remote treehouse design services to other people. They have a design that they believe works, and so start using it in other woodlands, albeit with even less knowledge of the locally available materials, site conditions, and fitness-for-purpose of their design.

    Of course, this is a ridiculous way to organise a construction process.

  • Just build less

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    More and more people are asking: how do we move from sustainable design to regenerative design?

    In these conversations, we often talk about system change. We talk about strengthening the connection between designers and the origins of their materials. We discuss unlocking symbiotic loops in material supply and enabling designs that best serve the local ecosystem. All of these changes are essential—and they’ll take years, even decades, to fully implement.

    But these conversations can be a distraction from a much more pressing, if uncomfortable thing we can do to shift our industry towards more regenerative ways of working. Given the massive contribution that construction makes to greenhouse emissions and the massive impact it has an habitat destruction, it is simply this. 

    We must build much less stuff. 

    Build less is writ large in the IStructE’s Hierarchy for Net-Zero Design. And while this hierarchy focuses on carbon, given the impact that material extraction has on habitat loss, there is a strong case that building less will significantly reduce our impact on ecosystems too.

    Of course, there will be things we need, structures we can’t do without. But once we set the intention to build less, we can redirect our creativity as designers toward adapting and thriving with what we already have.

    We’ll still need to build some—but we can, and must, build much less.

  • Losing edge (on the disadvantages of scale)

    In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between the scale of design team and the connection with the places they are working with. Today I’ll go into the benefits of smaller scale.

    To explore this topic I’ve invented a game as a thought experiment. In this game, teams of different sizes compete in a woodland to build shelters from materials they have foraged. To form their working groups, the participants of each team form into tight clusters. The catch is that only people on the outside of the cluster – the ones on the edge – can do the foraging. 

    Yesterday, I explored the advantages that larger groups have, and in particular the possibility of specialisation that a larger team allows. But this specialisation comes with costs. A big one is the loss of contact with the surrounding ecosystem. 

    In a smaller team, everyone is involved with foraging, designing and building. This interconnectedness means that the processes can inform each other. The process of foraging informs what materials are available for design and construction. Design itself might be a process of trial and error with the available materials. And the experience of construction can inform what materials the foragers need to look for next. 

    The smaller scale also enables the design process to adapt to environmental conditions. If, for example, a particular material is running out in the environment, the foragers can get something different, and adapt the design. Over time, there is even the possibility that the foragers could notice the impact of harvesting materials on the ecosystem. It could be, for example, that harvesting a certain kind of timber encourages regrowth of other species. 

    This constant, direct feedback loop is much easier to achieve in smaller teams—teams with more “edge,” or more points of contact with the environment.

    In larger teams, this kind of information can still be shared, but because specialist designers aren’t directly in contact with the environment, a formal process for transmitting information must be established. This introduces a risk: if designers don’t experience the environment firsthand, they may become desensitised to the information. Seeing and feeling the conditions on the ground creates a deeper understanding than hearing about them secondhand.

    While this is a post about building wooden shelters, it is a metaphor for our actual large-scale design processes, in which designers have virtually no contact with the environment that they are affecting by their design decisions. Without edge – without strong connection with our ecosystems – it is much harder to work in harmony with those systems. 

  • Building a wooden rocket (on the advantages of scale)

    There are advantages to scale in design teams. NASA estimates that 400,000 people were involved in the Apollo space programme. This scale of operation allows a degree of super-specialisation, which enabled the development of brand new technologies — like the creation of software, a new technology at the time. Scale can be a great advantage when it is focused on one single task – in this case putting a human on the moon. 

    When you have scale, you can have small teams hyper-focused on single tasks without having to spend time doing any of the other tasks that support the work. This kind of focus unlocks potential for innovation and efficiency.

    In my previous post, I described a new game I have invented, called ForEdge. It explores how the size of a design team impacts the way they interact with their environment. In ForEdge, teams of different sizes compete to build wooden shelters in a forest. One of the dynamics I expect to see emerge is the role of scale in allowing specialisation.

    One of the effects I expect to play out is of scale on the degree of specialisation the teams are able to deploy. In ForEdge, each team organises itself into a tightly arranged cluster. But only the players on the outside edge can forage for materials. For a small team, that means everyone can search for construction materials in their environment, but larger teams, the inner team members must stay behind. 

    The opportunity for specialisation thus opens up the larger teams. They can have specialist foragers and specialist designers. Both can spend longer on their jobs and so both can learn to do them better. The foragers will learn where to get better timber. The designers will learn how to design better with the materials at hand, learning for instance the best way to design a connection with roundwood timber.

    I envisaged the game working with competing groups of between 3 and 18 people. Just imagine what kind of structure a team of 50 could do with their potential for specialisation – maybe not just a shelter but an auditorium. Maybe with 100 people in their team, they could have enough specialisation to also make instruments to perform in their auditorium. Maybe a team of 10,000 could build a wooden space rocket and fly it to the moon. But what would be the impact of this specialisation on the woodland that surrounds them? Material for tomorrow’s post.

  • My new game: ForEdge

    I’ve just invented a game, called ForEdge to explore the concept of how the amount of ‘edge’ in different sizes of systems affects their efficiency. 

    This game is currently a thought experiment, but I hope to try it out soon. It’s designed for 18 people and takes place in a woodland environment.

    It’s a game about foraging and edges, hence ForEdge….

    Team Sizes

    The game involves several teams of different sizes. Here are some possible combinations:

    • 1x 12-person team and 2x 3-person teams
    • 1x 12-person team and 1x 6-person team
    • 1x 9-person team, 1x 6-person team, and 1x 3-person team
    • Or simple 1x 18 person team

    Circle Formation

    • Each player is allowed an area of ground with a 1-meter radius.
    • Teams form their combined working areas by clustering their circles together as tightly as possible, leaving no gaps between individual circles.
    • Players on the outer edge of the cluster have access to forage materials from the woodland.
    • Players in the inner circles, surrounded by other team members’ circles, cannot forage. In smaller groups, everyone will have access to forage.

    Foraging Area

    • Players on the perimeter can forage only within the part of their circle that is exposed to the outside. The angle of the sector they can forage in depends on how much of their circle is unobstructed by other circles. Players in smaller clusters will have access to a wider arc for foraging.
    • Inner players (completely surrounded by other circles) cannot forage but can help organize and build the shelter using the materials collected by others.

    Combining Foraging Areas

    • An edge player can give up their foraging arc to team up with someone else in their foraging arc. While their combined foraging range is smaller, they can work together in the reduced range to potentially gather more materials.

    Inner Players

    • In larger clusters, inner players who do not have access to the edge are allowed to step into neighbouring circles to help collect incoming materials from the edge.

    Coming next, my hypothesis about what this game will show.

  • Stuffed crust geometry

    At some point in my childhood, Pizza Hut introduced the stuffed crust pizza. The idea was simple: stuff the crust with a ring of gooey cheese. It was fine when you had a slice from a large pizza, but on a small pizza, the balance was off—too much crust and not enough topping.

    I haven’t thought about stuffed crust pizzas in decades, but they help illustrate an important point in geometry. As a pizza gets bigger, the ratio of crust to surface area gets smaller. So a small pizza has lots of crust, while a large pizza has relatively less crust per unit of topping.

    In general, this is expressed as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its area, which decreases as the radius grows. A small circle has far more edge per unit area than a large one. This is why my small stuffed crust pizza tasted too crusty.

    But this post isn’t just about childhood pizza or geometry. It’s about the importance of edges in systems. How much “edge” we have shapes how we interact with the wider environment and how systems function internally. It affects the design of buildings, cities, and infrastructure. 

    But that’s more than I can stuff into this post—more tomorrow.

  • Seeing the latent potential

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    As Rob Hopkins points out in his wonderful book From What Is to What If, the climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the imagination. If we can’t envision a thriving world, we won’t be able to create it.

    A key skill in regenerative design is cultivating the conditions that allow us to imagine this thriving future.

    This requires us to not only see what exists but also to imagine what could be. For example, looking at an empty park and envisioning it full of people running (as highlighted in yesterday’s post), or standing on a traffic-filled street and picturing it so quiet that birdsong fills the air and people stop to chat.

    In these cases, the elements are already present—they are latent. But to unlock this latent potential, we must recognise both the desertified present and the abundant possibilities. Only then can we begin to design the next step toward that vision.

    Equipping ourselves for this imaginative work is, I believe, a critical part of becoming a regenerative designer.

    Hopkins, R., 2019. From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT.

  • From no run to park run

    A few days ago, Parkrun turned 20 years old. What started as a simple community gathering, launched by Paul Sinton-Hewitt on October 2nd, 2004, has grown into a global sports phenomenon with over 7 million registered participants. It began as a way for people to come together and socialise, and it’s evolved into so much more.

    I’m an occasional Parkrunner myself, showing up every now and then to run the 5km loop at my local park. And I often wonder: what would all these people have been doing otherwise? Twenty years ago, at 9am on a Saturday, this park might’ve had a handful of runners. Today, hundreds gather to run.

    To me, Parkrun is a story of what happens when something unlocks the potential in a system, creating abundance where there was once scarcity. Where there were only a few runners, now there are many. Where people might have spent their Saturday mornings passively at home, now they’re out in the fresh air, moving, connecting, and engaging with their community.

    What’s remarkable about Parkrun is that it’s powered by volunteers—ordinary people who freely give their time to make these events possible. This time and energy were always there, untapped, waiting for an outlet. Parkrun created that structure, unlocking this latent resource.

    In many ways, this is the essence of regenerative design: seeing potential abundance in situations that seem scarce. Parkrun didn’t introduce new people or new resources into these communities; it simply provided a framework that allowed people to organize and engage. The potential was always there—it just needed to be brought to life.

  • Desertification versus dessertification

    Desertification = a real word that refers to the process where fertile land becomes desert, typically due to drought, deforestation, or poor land management. It can also be used more broadly to describe when a population of living things becomes so small that it struggles to sustain itself.

    Dessertification = a word I’ve just made up to describe an abundance of cake.

    Yesterday I talked about overfishing leaving fish populations so sparse that they can barely survive. When a population is reduced to such small numbers, it may become almost invisible. The creatures that remain may live in small, isolated pockets that are vulnerable to disease, and don’t benefit from much genetic variation. Such populations are on the brink of local extinction. 

    But populations in a desertified state can slowly come back into a state of thriving. One way to help them do this is by finding ways to connect together isolated pockets. Connecting to smaller populations creates a larger one with the potential for greater genetic variation, and the ability to move further should environmental conditions change. Both of these increase the resilience of the population. 

    Here I am going to leap from talking about fish to butterflies and people.

    When I first visited Hazel Hill Wood in 2008, it was to take part in a butterfly conservation activity. Our task was creating open corridors through the wood that would allow populations of butterflies living on either side of the wood to mix. As we were told, butterflies don’t like flying through dense, dark, cold woodland. So the wood was effectively a barrier between these two populations. But creating wide openings in the wood lets sunlight in and provides a pathway that the butterflies can follow. Connecting the populations builds their resilience, and today the wood is rich with a wide range of species of butterflies fluttering by. 

    Doing the work of conservation also brings people together. During Covid, the wood was a place where people come together, out of isolation, to form community and build resilience. 

    It is pleasing to think that this work of countering desertification, be that of butterflies or sense of community, is fuelled at tea time by an abundance of cake. Dessertification indeed.

  • No more fish in the sea

    Somehow the topics of my posts have returned to the subject of the sea. It is apparently a rich subject to trawl.  Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun, but it is exactly to trawling that I am heading. 

    Yesterday I used Donella Meadows’s fish stocks example to show how humans can harvest a living resource while enabling it to thrive. A key to enabling this system to work is the balancing feedback loop between supply and the people doing the harvest. When the catch gets too low, the boats go home, and the fish can restore their population.

    But what happens when that balancing feedback loop is broken? 

    Let us imagine an entrepreneurial fisher who, noticing that their catch was diminishing, decides to invest in a much bigger net. Now their catch goes up and it is worthwhile for them to stay at sea for longer. Other boat captains do the same, and the fleet stays out much longer. 

    Now, rather than the fish population having time to replenish itself, it is further depleted. When the fish are further apart, their rate of reproduction diminishes. 

    Here, trawling is breaking the balancing feedback loop between supply and harvesters. So, instead of stopping, fishing continues and the population becomes so low that it is not able to grow back. It has become what is known as a ‘desertified state’, a vulnerable situation in which a living system can no longer thrive. 

    Clearly, this is a simplified version of a much more complex system. But hopefully it serves to illustrate that in thinking about how we scale up options, we need to think about how we might inadvertently be breaking the feedback loops that enable our activities to operate within the living system’s limits.

  • Plenty more fish in the sea

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

    As engineers (and other humans) we need to find ways to harvest the materials and energy we need in balance with what the living and mineral world can sustain. So to help us understand how this can work I’m sharing Donella Meadows’s example of fish stocks to help see how humans can live as part of a sustainable system of supply.

    Meadows’s model concerns the local fish population in an area of sea. Left to its own devices, the fish population is stable because there is only so much food to go around. Too many fish, less food per fish, some fish die. Too few fish, more food per fish, they reproduce more. This feedback loop stays in equilibrium around a mean.

    Now, the local fishing fleet gets involved. By harvesting a small number of fish, the population goes down, increasing the reproduction rate of the remaining fish, and the population returns to what it was. Fish too much, however, and the fish are further apart. Fish that are further apart take longer to reproduce! And so for a while, there are few fish, the nets are empty and the boats go back to port. During this time the fish population recovers, and eventually the boats can go back to sea.

    This simplified model beautifully illustrates how humans can harvest what they need while still living within the ecosystem’s limits.  The key characteristics here are a living system that regenerates itself – the fish; and a feedback loop between supply and those doing the harvest. Simply, when the catch is too low, the boats go home. 

    This feedback loop between supply and harvesting is what interests us in regenerative design. It is what allows us to harvest abundance, and even create abundance, all while living within the ecosystem’s limits. 

  • Stone circles on the beach

    Hundreds of years ago, the inhabitants of the Île de Ré, just off France’s Atlantic coast, developed an ingenious way to catch fish. At low tide, they built large stone circles, say 20 metres or more in diameter, and formed by a rock wall about 50cm high. At high tide these stone circles are completely submerged. But as the tide falls, water remains trapped in them, and so do the fish swimming in that water. At low tide the water eventually drains out of the walls, leaving the fish lying on the beach, for the local fishers to just pick up.

    These stone circles, or ‘écluses’ in French, were very effective in providing a local food supply. So much so that during the Napoleonic Wars, recruiting officers for the army tried to destroy the walls in an attempt to starve the local population and force them into joining the army. Later, the owners of commercial fishing fleets sought to have them shut down as they proved a risk to their own market domination.

    Through a regenerative lens, in this example we see:

    • A local population connected to a local source of supply. 
    • A low-tech method for harvest that the community itself can build and adapt.
    • The resilience that local supply can provide (and therefore why the army and larger commercial operations sought to remove it).
    • A scale of operation that is necessarily limited – they can only harvest fish that swim over the beach; there’s literally plenty more fish in the sea. This is in contrast to the super trawlers that can take far more than their fair share.

    Community, ecology, supply and resilience. These are the sorts of stacked, multiple benefits that we are seeking to create through regenerative design.

    Today, groups of volunteers are protecting and rebuilding the walls. Perhaps for posterity. And, or, perhaps they see a time in the future when harvesting in this way may return stacked, multiple benefits to their community and ecosystem.

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

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    This little refrain is my version of Aristotle’s three artistic truths for making a convincing argument. Aristotle proposed three things were needed to win people over. The first is ethos – or trustworthiness. Is this person someone I trust. The second is pathos – or empathy. Does this person have a shared sense of pain. And the third is logos – or logic. In other words, what’s the plan.

    As engineers we often start with the plan. But the plan won’t work without trust and empathy. Hence the refrain. Showing up as a professional can build trust. Feeling the pain might be the hardest part, because it has to be genuine. Then, we get to the plan, which is probably the part we started off with.

  • Think of a world without any email

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    This came up in a workshop yesterday so I am sharing it today. There will be a time in the future for a longer set of posts on how engineers and other humans can cope with email, but now is not the time.

    So instead, I recommend reading ‘A World Without Email’, by Cal Newport*. I have even considered making reading this book as a prerequisite for entering into new collaborations.

    There is some irony in writing about a world without email on a blog post that is summarised in a weekly email digest. But ultimately it comes down to intentional communication design.

    Hopefully, if you signed up to this list, you did so with the intention of hearing from me (and you can change your settings here). But the problem with email and other forms of instant communication is how easy it is to fall into unintentional communication.

    Dealing with unintentional communication, and the sense of overwhelm it can cause us, feels important because if we are overwhelmed, we have haven’t got space to think. If we can’t think, we don’t have the capacity to imagine a thriving future. And if we can’t imagine it, it makes it much harder to build it.

    *Newport, C. (2021) A world without email: reimagining work in an age of communication overload. London: Penguin Business.

  • Designers as insiders

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    Yesterday I said designers are outsiders. Here’s the tricky part: we are also insiders. 

    That’s because we need to earn the right to work with the people we are designing with and for.

    Being an insider means we are trusted and that we are in an empathetic relationship with the people we are seeking to influence.

    Just as being an outsider takes work, so does the trust and empathy building process of being an insider. But if we can’t convince people to move with us, our ideas may be good for nothing. 

  • Designers as outsiders

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

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

    Choosing to be a designer is choosing to step outside. To take a different perspective. To go against the grain in order to see what might be possible.

    And all that takes work. So if design feels hard, it may be because of the extra work we are having to swim  in a different direction. But unless someone is prepared to take that risk, then we’ll all carry on heading the same way.

  • Zig zag zig zag zig zag zig

    My song Arthur the Lawn Mower is about our relationship with machines. In it, Arthur describes how he takes ‘a random path across the garden terrain’. It turns out that taking a random path through an unknown space is a very efficient way to understand the topography. 

    To someone used to taking a methodical approach to problem solving, starting off in a random direction may appear whimsical, but in an unknown territory, it may well be the optimal way to go.

    Which is autonomous lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners take a random path (or as is close as possible for a machine) to map the space they are working in. (It is also how our free-range guinea pigs, which also autonomously mow the lawn, seem to explore their solution space).

    As the chorus goes “we go zig zag zig zag zig zag zig, together who knows what we’ll find”

    For more on this idea and the maths that underlies it, see James Bridle’s excellent book ‘Ways of Being’. 

    Bridle, J., 2022. Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence. London: Allen Lane.

  • The signal and the coincidence

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

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

    How do we make decision, and what factors truly influence the choices we think are our own?

    I almost laughed out loud because yesterday’s post was a long riff on decision making. I really hesitated before publishing that post because I wasn’t entirely sure of its relevance to this series of posts. But having received this slip of paper, I feel entirely vindicated in my choice of post!

    Now, of course, that’s just a coincidence. I could have written a post on any subject yesterday and found something written down somewhere the next day that related to the same topic. 

    But it’s also a signal. The signal is that my brain is looking to make connections to, and draw significance to, the topic of decision-making.

    As engineers (and other humans) we are bombarded with inputs in our daily lives. There are far too many inputs to process. But quietly, in the background, our subconscious is processing and pattern spotting. 

    And there is also resonance with last week’s posts about looking for patterns in chaos. 

    As we navigate the world as designers, creators, leaders and enablers. And as we do this in times of overwhelming inputs, our pattern-spotting brains can help us make sense of the possibilities. 

    The patterns that our brain is getting us to follow might not make sense at first. That often seems to be the way of the subconscious. But maybe it is worth trusting to this instinct and seeing what emerges. Follow that lead. Go out on a limb. It may turn out that our subconscious has locked on to something useful.

  • The wrong (moment to put on your waterproof) trousers

    This is a post for the cycling decision-makers among you. It may resonate even if you don’t cycle. Variations on the question of whether, if it starts raining when cycling, it is worth stopping to put on your waterproofs.

    How late am I running? Have I got time to stop? How heavy is the rain? Will it carry on? How quickly could my clothes dry? Will I get wetter stopping to put them on?

    If I do decide to carry on, is it wetter to go quicker or slower?

    Do I have all the facts? Do I know all the unknowns? Is this a complicated or a complex problem? Am I able to make a good decision? 

    Is there an angle I can cycle at in which my rain shadow protects my lower half sufficiently? 

    Is how I’m framing the question limiting the result? What opportunities am I not considering? If I stop at a random location to put on my waterproofs, what might I notice that I might never have discovered had I ploughed on?

    What happened last time? Was it the right decision? What are other people doing? What would my future self advise?

    Am I even in the right frame of mind to make this decision? What could I be thinking about instead?

    What happens if I get it wrong? How much does it matter to me if I get it right? Am I deluding myself that I’m in control? 

  • Five books for getting into regenerative thinking

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist website: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    This week we updated the Regenerative Design Lab reading list and included five books that we think are a good way into regenerative thinking for engineers (and other humans). As far as I can remember, the word regenerative is hardly mentioned in any of them. But what I think they do between them is create a holistic view of people as part of a complex, living world. And from there, to think about how we work with, rather than against that interdependence.

    From What is to What If –  Rob Hopkins

    How the climate crisis is a crisis of the imagination and the work we need to do to imagine a thriving future. A brilliant, far-seeing book, with an excellent podcast series to accompany it.

    Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer

    This book creates a bridge between Indigenous and scientific thinking. The short essay format makes this an easy book to dip into and return to.

    Thinking in Systems – Donella Meadows

    A great way into systems thinking, and for the early members of the lab, the way into exploring regenerative design, even though these are not terms Meadows uses.

    Doughnut Economics – Kate Raworth

    The book that launched the famous model linking social foundations with planetary boundaries, it is full of clear-thinking models for breaking free of the unlimited-growth paradigm.

    The Hidden Life of Trees – Peter Wohlleben

    Sheds light on how trees communicate with each other, collaborate and work with shared intelligence. Shows how living systems are interconnected and use feedback loops to respond to environmental change. Helps us shift from an anthropocentric to ecocentric view of how ecosystems work.

    These are the entry points. The full reading list on the Constructivist website has a set of more in-depth and regenerative-specific books to follow on with.

  • You only learn when you do difficult things

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist website: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    This is my catchphrase for the start of workshops: ‘You only learn when you do difficult things.’

    It is a reminder to expect things to be difficult when we try to do something new. We often learn something in order to make something we can’t do easier. And we should expect to put in some activation energy during this process to reach a place of greater ease.

    But if left at that, this is quite a passive interpretation. 

    A more active interpretation is to use your sense of what is difficult to orientate yourself to where the learning opportunities are. And this, I think, is the sense in which this catchphrase was meant when I originally heard it. The words come from my friend and mentor in Problem-Based Learning, Prof Søren Willert.

    In problem-based learning, we are looking for problems as an opportunity for learning. In these instances, learning isn’t general, it is tightly bound to the specificity of the problem.

    Seeking difficult things might actually serve as a good compass for where to focus our learning. A place where there is work to be done, where we can hopefully make a positive contribution and learn along the way. We mustn’t expect it to be easy.

  • The past, present and future at the same time

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    In conversations about regenerative design I draw heavily on Bill Sharpe’s Three-Horizons Model because it allows us to make sense of a complex situation. For in any group of people collaborating on a project it is possible to find people who are managing the decisions of the past, some who are dreaming about the future and some who are thinking about what we should do next. 

    This co-existence of past, present and future so beautifully showed up for me recently as a parent, watching our daughter manage the transitions of the present, dreaming about her grown-up plans for the future, and still wanting the care of a younger self. 

    And now I am thinking about it, I recognise these different voices, with needs and hopes, from different times, co-exist in my adult head too.

    The power I see in Bill’s teaching is to recognise and welcome all three of these voices at the same time. Last week I wrote about chaos and looking for the signal in the noise. But when we can start to recognise that there are three (or more) things going when we encounter any change, we can start to make more sense of the signals we are working with. 

    The future, present and the past are always present. Recognising them can help us work with them to reach design decisions that are the best next step. 

  • On the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and teaching design

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist website: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    In the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics that people could see just didn’t make sense in reality. This was a major problem for physicists because it showed that their theories didn’t stack up. The punchline was that Max Planck came along and explained the phenomenon in a new way, which became the birth of quantum mechanics. 

    I remember finding the original Ultraviolet Catastrophe concept difficult to comprehend (although I did think it would make a good band name). And now I realise the only reason we learnt about the theory was to show that it was wrong. In a sense, we were being taught chemistry in the order that the discoveries had been made – in the order that predecessors had learnt.

    But does that always make sense? This approach is founded in a ‘positivist’ learning framing. It says, this is how the world showed up to me and I will now pass that story on to you (and then test you on it!). I named our company Constructivist after the more modern learning theory that says that people learn by taking new concepts and mapping them to their previous experiences. Learning is to do with how the world shows up to the learner, not the lecturer. 

    And so this leaves design educators with a challenge. In a sense, the ‘Ultraviolet Catastrophe’ moment of classical design thinking, is that as currently formulated, design thinking is not sufficient to make the world better. I see regenerative design as an evolution in design thinking. One that integrates more fully our responsibility for increasing living-system health. And as we are discovering, it has some very different approaches compared to traditional design. 

    For the ‘classical’ designers, developing an understanding of regenerative design will indeed be an evolution. But for people new to design thinking, they aren’t burdened with that history. Instead, they have grown up with the climate and ecological crises that previous design and engineering thinking has helped to create. This is not an imagined ultraviolet catastrophe, but a real, unfolding catastrophe. We need to be teaching design for their story, not ours.

    [My thanks to Nick Francis at the University of Sheffield for our recent conversation that fed into this post]

  • Design versus Shopping

    If the client knows exactly what they want at the start of a design process, then it isn’t design – it’s shopping. Shopping for the answer that you’ve already decided upon. Because design isn’t the business of dealing with knowns. It is precisely because there are unknowns that we need a design process. 

    By all means we should have an initial brief that describes outcomes we are trying to reach. And then begins a journey into realm of unknown possibilities and constraints to find out what might be possible. What we may discover is that that original statement of intent was not quite right. We might find something based on a better understanding of the situation. 

    And then we get a better brief. Better for everyone involved, including the client.

    Consider the opposite. The client sets a tightly defined brief with highly specified outcomes. The designer is forced to the client’s exacting brief, tantamount to a shopping list (and which has probably become formalised as a contract). The designer discovers a better solution but because it is not on the client’s shopping list, it isn’t considered. 

    And so the client comes back from the shops with what they asked for. But there is no guarantee they are going to fit.