Eiffel Over

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  • 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.

  • 340-degree vision

    I read on a fact sheet that guinea pigs have 340-degree vision. On a horizontal plane they can see almost all around. Imagine! Their only blind spots are directly behind and a small patch directly in front of them. 

    That’s because they are prey animals. They spend their whole waking time observing their environment for threats (they can even sleep with their eyes open). And while they can’t see far, they build up a detailed mental map of their surroundings by scuttling around, which means they can navigate even in the dark.

    The animals that hunt them, on the other hand, have forward-facing eyes. Their breadth of vision is limited but their acuity is much higher. This focus allows them to spot and lock on to their prey from much further away.

    I note that my eyes are on the front of my head. Does that make me a hunter? 

    And when we design, which way are our eyes pointing? Are we focused on a pre-defined target or are we continually scanning the landscape to build up a picture?

    For the regenerative designer, seeing is much more akin to the latter: building up a picture of the system we are in by continually exploring it. Building our interconnection with place. Searching for symbiosis we can unlock. Looking for emergent patterns we can enable. Then we can know how to act, even without being able to see straight forward.

  • Mindset leverage

    Are you excited about the possibilities of your next project? Or worried about the unknowns? Do you see the possibility for competition or collaboration?

    There is not a part of design that mindset does not affect. That is because design is an interaction between the outer world of reality and the inner world of perception, imagination and choice.

    For me, our mindset is how we see the world – how it shows up for us. Our mindset affects what we look for and what we see when we gather data. It affects the sort of ideas we have. It affects what we hold important when we evaluate options. 

    So if we want to change the outcomes of our work as designers, there is merit in considering mindsets. Both the mindsets we bring and the mindsets we create through the processes we set up. 

    We shape our individual mindsets through reflective practice. We shape our collective mindsets through changing the working culture. These are invisible tools with huge leverage.

  • Some things you might not know about the Regenerative Design Lab

    In the coming weeks I’m going to be talking quite a lot about the Regenerative Design Lab because we have a new cohort starting next week. Some of you will know all about the Lab, some will know nothing, so, this quite long post is to help fill in the gaps.

    Beginnings

    Back in 2022, I was the recipient of the Sir Misha Black bursary and had the opportunity to develop my design teaching in new areas. I wanted to explore regenerative design. From what I already knew I realised that this exploration would be better done as a group, and so we set up the first Lab for that purpose. 

    Working with Alexie Sommer, we put together the original advert, and 20 brave people gave us their trust and signed up. About that time I also met Ellie Osborne, a brilliant facilitator, and the two of us have been co-facilitating the Lab ever since.

    The first cohort ran from March to October 2022. Our first cohort of participants from across the built-environment spectrum started digging into regenerative design. Our aim, to explore its principles and translate these into practice for industry. 

    Right from the start we have delivered the Lab with the support of Engineers Without Borders UK. Being regenerative is one of their four key principles for globally responsible engineering. We will be collaborating with Engineers Without Borders UK to share the findings of the Lab in the educational policy space.

    Growing

    Since then, with funding through my 1851 Fellowship in Regenerative Design, two more cohorts have completed the Lab process. We have over fifty Lab alumni who between them are spreading the ideas of regenerative practice across industry. The conversations from these cohorts heavily informed the book James Norman and I co-authored, The Regenerative Structural Engineer. 

    For each cohort there’s a report (accessible here).

    Regenerative design challenges the way we approach design. It’s not just a new flavour of design, but questions the goals, the motivations and how we show up. And so during the Lab, we consider regenerative design from a wide range of angles – including mindsets, systems thinking and how we collaborate.

    A key part of the Lab is spending time in a thriving, living system, which is why we take our participants on three residential visits to Hazel Hill Wood. We see the wood as one of the facilitators, providing an example to us of thriving, a place for congregation and focal point for considering the wonder of this living world that we want to protect.

    Evolving

    Our fourth cohort begins next week, and for the first time we are delivering this Lab in partnership with another host organisation, the Sustainability Accelerator at Chatham House. The focus for this cohort will be on how to create policy that delivers regenerative design. For the first time, this Lab cohort will have two homes, with one foot in the woods and the other in the centre of a city. 

    We are already beginning planning for our fifth cohort, for which we will be partnering with Watershed in Bristol. This cohort will focus on exploring regenerative design with a project context with particular emphasis on inclusion, diversity and power. Cohort 5 will kick off in September 2025.

  • The Schedule

    I am sharing today a schedule I use in my work every time the noise from distractions gets too much and/or I don’t actually think I am making any progress in what I do. It was inspired by reading ‘The Secrets of Productive People’ by Mark Forster, a book which, while labelled productivity, has a lot to do with creativity.

    I call my process simply ‘the schedule’ and it has served me well for the last six years. Feeling stretched? Time to return to the Schedule. The aim is to keep work focused on a single task but also to allow structured time where the brain can wander and new ideas can come into the flow. 

    • 09:10 – 09:50
    • 10mins break
    • 10:00 – 10:40
    • 30mins break
    • 11:10 – 11:50
    • 10mins break
    • 12:00 – 12:40
    • 1h10 break
    • 13:50 – 14h30
    • 10mins break
    • 14:40 – 15:20
    • 30mins break
    • 15:50 – 16:30
    • 10mins break
    • 16:40 – 17:20

    The breaks are as important as the focus time. Both count as work. Both count towards time on a job. Often we only value the active brain time, but sometimes our best thinking happens in between. 

    One rule of the Schedule is to stop the task at break time, even if the task is almost complete. The temptation is to carry on, but as it usually turns out, an almost finished task is never quite as finished as you think. What ensues is a period of dwindling concentration and diminishing returns. Better to take the break, come back with fresh eyes and finish the task quickly, and move on.

    Of course, few days fully work out like this. There’s fitting in with other people’s schedules. And there’s caring responsibilities. But when things start to feel a bit chaotic (see my post on the Chaos Field), re-establishing some order can help me think clearly again. 

    My recommendation is not that you follow my schedule (by all means do if you wish) but to establish a pattern of work that works for your cycle of energy and attention, gives you time to think, provides structure and is something that you just do automatically without devoting mental energy to. 

  • Start with your scales

    I was taught to start my music practice by playing my scales. Starting with your scales:

    • Grounds you in the practice. The basic relationship between you and the instrument and the sound you can make
    • Reinforces and enhances the automatic movements that become how you play.
    • Takes you through the full range of motions of play.
    • Removes the barrier to knowing where to start because where to start is always the same. You pick up your instrument, you play a scale and you have begun.

    Starting with your scales doesn’t just apply to instruments. It applies to any work where you develop a practice, be that a practice of design, facilitation or performance. 

    In the technique I call Professional Palette in my conceptual design training, I encourage participants to warm up to a design exercise by quickly drawing through all the common typologies for the project they are working on.

    It applies whether you are designing a bridge span, an investigation, a workshop or a dance performance. 

    Make it your default to start with your scales: go through the range of motions, get all the pens out and put them on the table, familiarise yourself with the full breadth of your tools, and then begin.

  • Field notes from chaos

    The wind was getting up. The waves were starting to blow in from different directions. The sea scape seemed to be changing at random. The day before, the waves had been rolling in with a nice rhythm.

    This is another blog post that comes from the sea. And this one is about chaos. One characteristic of chaotic systems is the rules of the system keep changing. And this seemed to be what was happening around me. The wind was gusting from different directions, the tide was turning, the sun was coming in and out from behind clouds. And all of this was making a chaotic mess of the surface of the water.

    Standing there trying to figure out what was going on I started to think about ways of coping with chaos. Think of these as working notes rather than a developed theory. 

    Get into the field – the sea looked messy from the shore but only in the water could I really feel how changeable it was. 

    The signal in the noise – there can be a lot of randomness but are there underlying patterns. There did seem to be a beat of waves heading in to the shore, confused by another set rolling in from the side. When you find a pattern in the system it is easier to work with. 

    Notice when the pattern ends – the rules of chaotic systems change. A pattern in the system is only useful as long as it persists. Look out for the pattern changing. 

    Think on your feet – you can’t rely on the normal patterns of working (see yesterday’s post on creating cycles in work). Instead you have to make the most of the situation you are in. 

    Learning is difficult – if learning relies on loops of action and reflection, then learning is much harder when the conditions keep changing.

    Chaos is tiring – if you are constantly on alert trying to figure out what is going on then you are not getting time to rest and recuperate. 

    Writing these notes up I am left wondering:

    • How can we support ourselves, other people and organisations when they enter into periods of chaos?
    • How might our own actions, behaviours and design decisions cause chaos for others?
    • How might we design for increasing chaos as climate breakdown rolls on?
  • Harnessing waves in our work

    Harnessing waves in our work

    Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s theme of riding the waves of human energy in our work. The idea is to create a cycle of working that tunes in to our own and others’ level of available energy to create better thriving for all involved. 

    For the regenerative designer, the living world often gives us a good template for how to create thriving systems. And so, whether the wavelength we are designing for is a day, a month, a year or even a lifetime, here are some modes of working inspired by the changes that living systems cycle through. I have organised these into five touch points.

    1 – Start of a new cycle 

    • Associated with potential and possibilities.
    • Might be a dream-like state.
    • Might be quite slow or dormant – possibly no activity visible on the surface.
    • Gradually shifting into planning.
    • Darkness, low levels of light or energy.

    2 – Ascent 

    • Gathering momentum.
    • Plans transition into action.
    • Gaining confidence.
    • Work becomes visible.

    3 – Peak

    • Maximum output or yield. Possibly a launch phase.
    • Everything is visible, a point of recognition.
    • The brightest part of the cycle, associated with clarity.
    • Celebration of achievement and milestones.

    4 – Descent 

    • Harvest, where outputs are gathered, enjoyed and shared.
    • Reflection on work done, evaluation. 
    • Taking apart or shedding in readiness for the next cycle.
    • Gather resources for dormant phase.

    5 – Rest and renewal 

    • Recovery and restoring. 
    • Lower visibility.
    • Less action, slower movement.

    Of course, how we spend our time is a negotiation with others. The invitation here is to look for opportunities to acknowledge the cyclical ways in which we work. And to acknowledge more widely the cyclical pattern to the living systems that enable us to thrive.

  • Riding the wave

    I spent most of yesterday afternoon up to my middle in waves learning to surf. (I’ve got a long way to go). So it is no coincidence that today’s post is about waves. Not necessarily physical waves but the waves we experience as humans. 

    As James Norman and I set out in our book, the goal of regenerative design is for humans and the living world to survive thrive and co-evolve. If we are thinking about human thriving then we should consider how we, and the people around us, experience a whole series of waves through our lives. The daily cycle of night and day, the menstrual cycle, the seasonal cycle and the cycle through the different phases of life. These cycles are waves with peaks and troughs. Trying to flatten them or ignore them by pretending that all things are constant stresses the system.  Maintaining a high level of work when there is no energy in the system can be damaging. Equally having an abundance of energy and no means to dissipate it can also cause damage.

    Much better is to try to work with energy of a system when it is available and use the downtime to recover. 

    Imagine a graph showing the power of two systems over time. One system has moments of high power and low power. The other system just operates at a constant power level that is the midline of the peaks and troughs. 

    The total area under these two graphs (which represents energy of each system) is the same. 

    If we have a system that is trying to run with oscillating levels of available energy and we try to flatten it, we risk damaging the system without gaining any more energy.

    When we are thinking about how to organise our own work and how we collaborate with others, it is much better to ride the wave of available energy. Whether that’s through tuning in to our own daily, menstrual, seasonal or life cycles. Or through providing allyship to how others experience theirs. 

    Riding the wave is also much better for surfing. Sadly, I’m a long way off riding it for very long.

  • The Great Flattening

    Jim Crace’s book Harvest provides fascinating portrait of rural life in England just before the start of the Industrial Revolution. What is so striking is the way the pattern of life is dictated by the availability of light and labour to do work. They make hay while the sun shines and rest in the winter.

    The arrival of energy-dense coal was a game-changer. Now we had energy on tap, factories could be set up and run continuously. The natural rhythms and pace that we had evolved with became smoothed out.

    Enter Taylorism in the twentieth century and every hour is a productive unit to be optimised.

    I call it the Great Flattening. The removal of all the contours of energy, light and even culture in the name of constant productivity, enabled by cheap energy.

    Now, I am not trying to be romantic about living 250 years ago. There are plenty of things not to like (not least the dentistry). But I find it interesting to consider what is the impact of this great flattening of our experience of life and the world that we design.

  • Smoothing things out

    One of earliest childhood memories of travel is riding in the back of the car driving along a motorway in mountains in the north of Italy. To traverse a terrain of deep valleys and high ridges the engineers had taken a midline. The road leaps across the ravines on high viaducts, plunging straight into a tunnel only to fly out again across the next bridge. With the sea glistening deep below it was an exhilarating journey. (Did this sow the seed of going into civil engineering?)

    Faced with a series of peaks and troughs the engineers flattened the journey. They saved journey time and energy on every single car journey on that route, every day for over half a century.

    Smoothing things out is something that engineers seem to be generally good at. For example we’ve been straightening rivers to make them more navigable for centuries. 

    But building faster, straighter roads also increases traffic. Straightening rivers increases flood risk. 

    When we start to consider the unintended consequences smoothing things out we might find that working with the ups and downs and twists and turns is better. The friction slows down the flow. People or water, in these examples, spend longer in each place. There is greater interaction and opportunity exchange and creation of wealth in its many forms.

    Next time I cross the Italian Alps hopefully I can do it on a bicycle, following the contours of the river valleys.

  • Go (notes on complexity)

    My favourite board game is Go. A 19 by 19 board. White stones versus black. You win by surrounding your opponent’s stones before they surround yours. The game has just three rules, but from this simple concept a game of incredible complexity emerges. 

    My early years of playing Go were frustrating: it didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t find a way to win. And now that I am more experienced, I find it hard to teach others. I take solace therefore that while the first computer to beat a reigning chess world champion (Deep Blue versus Gary Kasparov) did it in 1997 it took another 20 years for a computer, Deep Mind to beat reining world Go champion Ke Jie.

    The reason Go is so much harder for a computer to play than Chess is the number of branching possibilities that emerge from each move. It is just not possible to play solely on the basis of the player assessing the opposite player’s best move. And therefore a much more complex dynamic emerges in the game that involves the players ability to spot patterns as much as the patterns themselves. 

    I find this fascinating. In this complex situation, the players are part of the solution. Or put it another way, the solution is function of both the physical reality (the stones on the board), the players’ perception of the stones, and the players’ perception of each other’s perception of the stones. In maths terms, the solution y = f(physical world, internal world).

    It highlights for me that with complex situations in which engineers (and other humans) are agents, how we show up and how everyone else is showing up has a big impact on the outcome. We are a long way from optimum answers that can be deduced from calculation.

  • Machine work

    Inputs

    Outputs

    KPIs

    Tools

    Models

    Performance

    Quantitative analysis

    Scaling up

    Accelerator

    Dashboard

    Timesheet

    Human resources 

    Bottom line 

    When we think of our work as the work of a machine, then is it any surprise that the incredible machines that we have built will one day starting doing it for us.

    But we do ourselves a disservice if we only think of ourselves in machine terms. If we leave out empathy, care, collective knowledge, grounded understanding of place, knowing that is not describable in words, trust, passion, play… then we are not bringing our whole selves to the work we need to do. 

    There are so many more ways of knowing than the knowledge we can enter into a computer. Let the computers do the computational part – they will be very good at it – and let us step into our wider intelligence as engineers (and other humans).

    This blog post was inspired by Reinventing Organizations, by Frederic Laloux. 

  • A radical pause in a meeting

    For two minutes we sat there on Zoom and said nothing. We had just concluded a period of intense conversation. Thrashing out details. And then words escaped me. So we just sat there and let the silence in.

    We are often quick in meetings to move on to the next item on the agenda. We listen to others but do we have the time to listen to ourselves.

    Gut feel takes longer to process. And feelings take longer to notice. But these are sources of information as much as quick-fire words.

    Pausing can feel contercultural. But only if we see it as a waste of time. But what if it could reveal something really valuable? Then that would be worthwhile.

  • Who hired the knowledge worker?

    Do you work with metal? Wood? No, I work with knowledge. I mine it, I process it, I chop it up into tiny pieces, I study it, I mix it with other ingredients, I put it back together, I mould it into new forms, I package it up, I send it and I get paid for what I make. 

    We have Peter Drucker to thank the metaphor of the knowledge worker. Coined (another manufacturing metaphor) in the 1960s, it was a term he used to capture the essence of the work being done in corporate America. It was a time of shifting away from manual work to desk-based work with knowledge. 

    Ever wondered why we talk about running a ‘workshop’ with other people? Or creating a toolkit of different approaches. It’s the knowledge worker metaphor.

  • Where do you have your best ideas?

    At the start of my how to have ideas workshops, I ask where do people have their best ideas. People often say things like running, taking the dog for a walk, talking with friends, first thing in the morning.

    Depending on how brave the group is someone will say while on the toilet. 

    I must have asked this question to 500 people. And the answer I almost never get is ‘I have best ideas while sitting at my computer’. 

  • New developments in ‘i’

    Engineers have announced today some astounding new breakthroughs in their latest version of i.

    • Empathy – the ability to see the world from the perspective of another. To have a genuine, shared sense of pain. This ability is developed through twenty-year long training process called ‘childhood and adolescence’.
    • Embodied cognition – a way to develop understanding that emerges through the unique physical characteristics of each ‘i’ and how it moves through and experiences the world.
    • Music – audio signals organised into patterns and created by individual or groups of ‘i’s to communicate information that can’t be captured in a .txt file.
    • Culture – a collective intelligence that emerges when several i operating systems do things together.
    • Gut-feeling – a parallel processor providing checks and balances against the logic board.
    • Sleep – a remarkable sub-routine that both repairs the operating system and identifies new patterns.
    • Love – a higher order circuit that guides priorisation, builds system resilience and provides additional energy when resources are low.

    This technology is completely free and open-source.

  • 100 posts in 100 days for engineers (and other humans)

    Dear reader, 

    Thank you for following my writing. It means a lot to me. To mark my 18th year of blogging, I am writing 100 posts in 100 days on regenerative design, creativity and practical philosophy for engineers (and other humans). 

    I will be publishing a weekly digest of the posts via my mailing list (which you can join here).

    My mission in this work is to help the people who are bravely trying to design a more thriving world.

    Through my work as 1851 Fellow in Regenerative Design and my broader teaching I am encountering so many valuable concepts, fascinating projects and amazing people that I want to make sure I am sharing this wealth with my followers.

    I call these posts ‘for engineers and other humans’ because:

    • My centre of gravity is engineering but these ideas apply more widely
    • It’s not just engineers but a much array of wonderful humans doing this work
    • And, because I think we need to emphasise the humanity in engineering.

    So, here we go. Thanks so much for reading.

    Oliver.

  • Returning to the centre

    Whenever I enter a period of calm, a quietening, I instinctively want to turn to reflective writing. Writing like this. It feels like I am speaking to an old friend. But the friend is inside. When I look back to my last blog post I realise that we haven’t spoken since March this year – it’s now July. There is so much to catch up on.

    (more…)

  • Where we make but also where we take

    When it comes to regenerative design, it’s not just where we make but also where we take that matters.

    For the last two decades, engineers (and other humans) have become more conscious of reducing their impact. Of how energy efficient our buildings are. Of reducing pollution from our sites into the surrounding environment.

    These are ways of reducing our impact where we build buildings and infrastructure. In the places where we make.

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  • The Systems Bookcase at the Houses of Parliament

    The Systems Bookcase at the Houses of Parliament

    Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the launch at Parliament of Building Blocks to Transform the Built Environment – a manifesto to turn the climate emergency into a climate opportunity. If you don’t know about it, then you should definitely check it out here.

    On the journey back I was thinking about what conversations it is and isn’t possible to have in a place like the Houses of Parliament. For example, we were there to talk about making our building standards fit for purpose, incentivising retrofit and circularity and ensuing a just and green transition. These may not seem like particularly radical ideas, but standing in those halls of power, I couldn’t help think that these run against the grain of business-as-usual here.

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  • Inventory of sleeper train journeys

    2024

    2023

    2017

    • London to Penzance

    2013

    • London to Edinburgh

    2011 

    • Paris to Madrid
    • Madrid to Paris

    2010

    • Inverness to London

    2009

    • Paris to Venice
    • Paris to Milan
    • Brussels to Copenhagen

    2008

    • Brussels to Berlin

    2007 

    • Paris to Perpignan
    • Zurich to Belgrade
    • Belgrade to Thessaloniki 
    • Thessaloniki to Istanbul
    • Istanbul to Tehran
    • Tehran to Malatya
    • Istanbul to Budapest

    2006

    2004 

    • Vilnius to Warsaw
    • Krakov to Budapest
    • Budapest to Mostar

    2001

    • Jasper to Winnipeg
    • Winnipeg to Toronto

    2000

    • Marrakesh to Tangiers

    1999

    • Trieste to Zagreb
    • Prague to Venice

    1990

    • Agen to Paris

  • Bristol to Glasgow via the Caledonian Sleeper

    While it is possible to go direct from Bristol to Edinburgh, and from Bristol to Glasgow with one change, it is a long route and involves spending a long time on Cross Country trains (which I prefer to avoid). So when the need arose this week for me to work in Glasgow for the day, I experimented with a different route: via London and the Caledonian Sleeper. 

    Going from Bristol to London and then up to Scotland is taking two sides of the triangle. But if I can sleep for a decent chunk of the journey then it is very appealing. 

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  • How much does your website weigh?

    It’s a funny question. How much does my website weigh? Is it heavy? It is light? I have no way of knowing. 

    But I like the question, because it is a good proxy for the energy impact of my website. What is its footprint? What is the energy used in keeping the servers whirring in the cloud (which is not in fact fluffy and is in fact a warehouse). 

    And the reason we don’t know the answer to the questions is that there is no feedback loop. When I write a post and add some data-heavy images I don’t feel that extra load. 

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  • Having a second and third idea

    Having a second and third idea

    Having ideas can be hard, especially when we already have a first idea. How do we trick our brain into thinking that we should go in search of another and another, when as far as our brain is concerned, the first one will do the job?

    Here’s a technique I call ‘using your professional palette’. I taught it today in a workshop on conceptual design for engineers, but I think it works for other humans too. The method is to remove the mental block by quickly sketching out five different ways of solving the problem from our palette of standard approaches. The approach forces us to consider options that we might not even have noticed we have discounted.

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