On a recent trip to the Alps I took Robert MacFarlane‘s breathtaking ‘Mountains of the Mind‘. In it I found this delightful tale about Mark Twain taking his family up on to a glacier in the Alps – a fashionable thing to do in the mid-nineteenth century. In short:
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Regenerative Design: a process not a thing
As I continue my exploration of regenerative design in engineering, correspondents have said it would be helpful to gather examples of regenerative design. Templates that we can look at, imitate and integrate.
From my reading of Wahl (see my recent post), I’m increasingly understanding regenerative design to be a process rather than a thing.
Regenerative practice of any sort (in design, in education, in living…) is practice that leaves the ecosystem richer and better able to heal itself. It is practice that sees humans as a keystone species that play a unique role in helping their ecosystems thrive.
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When government bans protest against our projects, engineers must put down their tools
The cornerstone of our democracy is the right to protest. At the moment the government is pushing through amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that would make it illegal to protest at a range of infrastructure sites.
The Government is intending to use the latest amendment to
introduce a new offence of interfering with the operation of key infrastructure, such as the strategic road network, railways, sea ports, airports, oil refineries and printing presses, carrying a maximum penalty of 12 months’ imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both
George Monbiot citing in the guardian a private letter to members of the House of LordsThis is on top of the existing authoritarian measures in the bill. For instance, named individuals can be banned from protesting. If I write a post encouraging readers to attend a protest, I can be individually banned from protesting. If I turn up anyway, under these new measures, I can be sent to prison for 51 weeks.
Why is the government doing this?
Well, I suspect it is because they know that protest works, as demonstrated by the success of the protests to stop fracking in the UK. A sustained campaign of protest by a small dedicated group halted one of the most illogical of engineering projects: fracking for more fossil fuels while committing to reducing our carbon footprint.
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Our responsibility: reduce carbon on projects by 7% a year starting now
Hold this figure in mind: 7%.
In 2019 the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) published a report concluding that in order to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees, we need to reduce carbon emissions by 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. That’s equivalent to 7% per year, starting now, every year until the end of the decade.
That is faster than they fell in 2020 during the pandemic.
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Sometimes I think it needs to get really bad before people will care about energy
In the bakery where I often go to write in the mornings they are having heating fitted. The cafe is in a warehouse and it gets cold in the winter. As I write, warm-air ducts are being installed overhead that circulate heat from a new gas-fired boiler.
Meanwhile, the room next door is so hot from the ovens that they use fans to vent the heat to the atmosphere. I asked isn’t there a way that they could use the waste heat from the ovens to heat the space we are in. The answer I got was that we asked and it is not possible.
I wonder how much more possible it would become if gas were not available. The challenge is the problem is not real enough. Sometimes I think it needs to get real bad before people will care about how much energy they are really using.
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The Boy Who Cried Climate Emergency
We all know the story of the boy who cried wolf. He didn’t really mean it. In the end, everyone stopped believing him. Wolf didn’t mean anything. But the danger was still there. When the wolf came, nobody helped. The wolf got him.
What do you think happens if your organisation declares a climate emergency and then doesn’t really do anything about it?
In an emergency, individuals take the shortest path to a place of safety. The normal rules don’t count. People collaborate to help others in greatest danger. The situation is monitored to see if the danger has subsided. We only go back when it is safe to do so.
If your organisation has declared a climate emergency, but most of the business is carrying on as usual, then do they really mean it? Has your work and the work of your colleagues changed substantially since declaring that emergency or not?
If so then they don’t really really mean it. Climate emergency will stop being meaningful. But the danger is still here.
When the wolf came, nobody helped. The wolf got him. Except the him is all of us.
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Why is the moon so big / when we spot mistakes
I just dreamed up this example to explain why our mistakes show up at system boundaries.
Have you ever noticed that the moon looks much bigger when it is close to the horizon? Well, it turns out this is an optical illusion. The moon is exactly the same size – no further or closer to us on Earth than it would be at a different position in the sky.
The difference is that when the moon is low we can compare its size with objects on the horizon. When it is high there are no nearby reference points for comparison. It just is.
And so to our mistakes. We can be working away, building a brick wall, working on a website, whatever and know of no error in our work. That is until we reach a boundary, and interface. Only then can we find our point of reference.
What’s your point of reference? How can you use it to check what you are doing?
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Hello Planet Earth (goodbye Planet Money)
Sunday morning we cycled through Bristol and up to Leigh Woods. We took the ‘high route’, choosing to climb up through the wealthy streets Clifton. Everywhere oozes money and wealth. The cavernous houses, gleaming cars, manicured front gardens and then the tiny shops of Clifton Village. Humans and their worldly possessions are all I can see.
And then, all of a sudden, release. The ground gives way and we are soaring high over the Avon Gorge. As the Clifton Suspension Bridge leaps from one cliff to the other, I feel like I am looking at a giant fracture in the Earth’s crust, looking back in time through rock layers laid down millions of years ago. The scale changes. Humans are tiny again, a tiny feature of the surface. Nature and all the evidence of all its forces spread out before me.
I yell ‘hello planet earth, and good bye planet money’, and we are off towards the woods.
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Updates from a regenerative system
Our nearby allotments are my local source of food and regenerative inspiration. Sharing my thoughts from this weekend’s visit when I was helping with apple pressing.
While Bristol is well served by local a scene of craft breweries, if you really want to get local alcohol, then cider is the hyper local choice. Whereas the ingredients for beer are gathered from around the world to be brewed in here, in Bristol you can drink cider under the tree that the apples came from.
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Facilitation tools for engineers (and other humans)
This post is still under construction. In this post I am linking together the best of my material on facilitation tools for engineers (and other humans). To facilitate is to render a conversation easier. Many of us are taught to present but not to facilitate. What’s the difference? Why might I want to facilitate? And how do I do it? It’s all in here. Stay tuned as I add more content (19/10/21).
From Presentation to Facilitation
- Oliver’s mantra for facilitation
- What you want may not be what they need
- From positivism to constructivism
- Build the agenda together
- From expert on content to expert on process
The Four Modes of Facilitation
- Presentation
- Break-out
- Guided Q&A
- Guided Plenary
And underpinning many of these, how to use Catalytic Style.
Structure for different outcomes
- Transmitting information
- Learning about a situation
- Helping people help each other
Training Courses
Facilitation training is some of my favourite training to deliver because it quickly gets into how we relate to each other. This is great stuff to explore.
Check out the latest courses we are running on facilitation, design and all sorts of related material.
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Sustainability is no-longer enough
Today I am sharing more of the thinking that went into my vision question for Hazel Hill Wood: what if we became a centre for regenerative practice?
It is my view that sustainability has been captured by mainstream industry and politics as a smokescreen for business-as-normal. We now know that our efforts to sustain our ecosystems for the benefit of future generations has not been enough and that we now beginning a process of climate and ecosystem breakdown.
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Setting a vision question rather than a vision statement
It is my role as Chair of Hazel Hill Trust to be the ‘vision holder’ for the project. There are lots of ways you can interpret what this means. It could be to write the vision. Or it could be to facilitate the process from which the vision emerges. I have chosen a middle path, which is to ask a question.
My question is, what if Hazel Hill Wood could become a centre for regenerative practice? The challenge I am faced with is being consultative and facilitative about longer-term decision-making at the same time as providing direction while we bring on board new Trustees and make some important operating decisions.
Asking a question rather than providing an answer sits more comfortably with my constructivist, problem-based learning practice. Yes, I am setting a question, and that question tells us in which direction to head. But the answer gets decided by the people on the journey.
Read my post setting out this vision question on the Hazel Hill Trust website.
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Analogue Skills for Design at the University of Bath
Today at the University of Bath I am running a workshop on Analogue Skills for Design. This workshop fuses material from my conceptual design teaching with my observations from the Analogue Skills project, my attempt to collect and curate less digital ways of doing things in case we need to use them again.
Creativity and design as human skills
A key thread that runs through my design and creativity teaching is that these are very human processes, which are deeply impacted by individual’s connection to themselves, each other and the environment which supports them.
At the individual level, creativity is hugely influenced by our emotional and physiochemical state, the relationship between our conscious and subconscious and our unique combination of lived experience. At a group level, how ideas emerge in a collective consciousness and become the work of many is influenced by relationships, accessibility and the many facets of working culture. And of course we all live in the physical world, the world that we are trying to shape. How we move through and experience that physical world – not in our heads but as moving inhabitants of space – influences how we respond to and act in that space.
All of these factors are features of how we design, not as purely rational, reason engines, but as emotional, physical human beings.
Analogue Skills
Another ability of humans – although not unique to humans – is the ability to create tools. Taking a lever as both an example and a metaphor, our tools enable us to multiply our efforts. The tools we use shape our perception of what is possible, and so influence how we perceive the world.
Over the last five years or so I have become increasingly interested in how our tools, and in particular our newer, digital tools influence how we think and live. Because while we have always been influenced by our tools, the rate of introduction of new, digital tools has become so rapid that in less than a generation, our tools have transformed the way we think, feel and behave.
I experience this personally because I am a Xennial, someone from a sub-generation that grew up without internet enabled computers but who has spent their whole working life with one. Xennials are halfway between digital natives and digital immigrants. I feel this timing of my up-bringing gives me insight into two different ways of thinking, what I loosely call the more analogue and the more digital. These two ways of thinking can be very different. Take the simple example how to organise information. In the analogue world, information is carefully indexed and prized because it may not be possible to find it again. It is a paradigm of scarcity but also care. In the digital world, the natural assumption is the information is searchable and always available and so information itself is de-valued. This is a paradigm of abundance but also of less care.
From this perspective, individuals become more and more dependent on these new technologies, I see that what once was a tool that served us, these technologies have become a tool to manipulate us. From user to used. With dependency comes fear. How could I ever live without it? But so ubiquitous is our internet-enabled world that we risk forgetting the ways we could live and flourish without computers in our pockets.
The Analogue Skills Project is my attempt to record less-digital ways of doing things before they get forgotten so that we can use these to evaluate what technology we do and don’t want. It is an attempt to build resilience and reduce dependence on technology that may not always be there to help us. It is my hope to find a more human balance between the analogue and the digital.
See my collection of analogue skills so far.
Human operating system
I see each analogue skill as a way of liberating ourselves from digital dependency and to discover something that it turns out we can do ourselves as humans: each one is a clue to the workings of the human operating system.
To accompany the growing list of skills I have also created the Analogue Skills Manifesto, which is an invitation to resist the digital pull and rediscover what you can do as a human being:
- Don’t delegate autonomy to the machines
- Resist a mediated experience
- Resist life as content
- Re-discover old tech
- Much less is much more
- Welcome uncertainty
- Don’t get things done
- Share, swap and learn from others
- Relish company
- Seek nourishment in time alone
- Embrace friction, embrace inconvenience
- Forget the unimportant and remember the valuable
- Ground yourself and find your bearings
- Use your hands and your senses
- Concentrate
- You have everything you need.
Analogue Skills in Design
Bringing these two themes of work together, what are the analogue skills that we bring to design that we risk forgetting if we don’t use them, and are worth rediscovering if they have already slipped away?
Looking through my design teaching deck, there are many concepts which are already analogue, and so I am putting them together here:
These are skills that we are going to experiment with today. These are things that you can do because you are human. There isn’t going to be a software upgrade. You don’t have to pay a license fee. You can share these tools with whoever you like, and when the internet goes down, you will still be designing. I should also add that these tools don’t stop you from using digital tools – they are here to help you choose.
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Act it out – embody your ideas
‘Act it Out’ is my favourite technique for shifting creative thinking from the mind to the body. This post is another in my series on Turning the Kalideascope, ways to form new connections in the creative process.
Engineering has important roots in Enlightenment thinking. The Enlightenment put us firmly in our heads, as abstract, rational thinkers. We take inputs from the outside world, process them and develop a reasoned response. Through this approach, humans have made great progress on some fronts. But this separation from our bodies and our environment comes at a cost. We forget that we are not apart from but in and part of a physiology that itself is situated in an ecosystem.
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What happened when I tried to use an old iPod
Once upon a time the offer of 1000 songs in your pocket – the slogan for the iPod – was so enticing. But in 2014 Apple discontinued the iPod Classic. Today the zeitgeist is all the songs in your pocket, courtesy of streaming services. So what happens when you try to boot up some old tech, like a discontinued iPod? I have found it to be a lesson in interesting lesson in feeling how our expectations are set by tech companies, and appreciating less is more.
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Notes from a systems design workshop at Hazel Hill
On Saturday at the Hazel Hill Autumn Conservation weekend I ran a systems design workshop as a wet-weather activity. Here are my notes and observations from the session.
Theatre of activity
The wood, being a place that people travel to and the leave again, is the perfect place to get people thinking about inputs and outputs to systems. You can ask people to think about what they bring with them, what they take home and what they leave behind. You can also ask, is the system richer as a result. And, what happens to that richness?
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Act, advise, advocate in the climate crisis
On the surface I feel like it is business as usual in the construction and engineering industry. Like a polluting ferryboat travelling full speed ahead towards the storm while no one on the bridge as the courage to turn the ship around. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, I see numerous individuals and groups swimming the other way. Each finding ways to build and engineer differently. How can these mutineers gather enough critical mass to form a viable fleet to take us to safety? I have three words: act, advise, advocate.
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Changing the key system to generate new ideas
Changing the key system is a technique I teach to help people develop new ideas when their thinking has become stuck. It’s one of my techniques for ‘turning the Kalideascope’. In other words, it’s a way to find new creative connections between all the inputs we have gathered.
What is the key system?
Design is creating something new. If it already exists, it isn’t design: it’s shopping (for more on this see my post on the Designer’s Paradox). I usually find that the overall shape of that new thing is defined by the answer to a few key questions.
For example, the overall shape of a city master plan might be defined by the answer to the question: how do we manage surface water. In a tall building, the key question is how do we manage lateral loads. For a song, it might be the rhyming structure or the chord progression.
In each of these situations, the key system, then, is the flood water system, the lateral stability system, the rhyming structure or the chord sequence.
The answer to these big questions has such a dominant effect on the solution space that, once they are set, the rest of the ideas develop within these parameters.
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What if you could present only using questions?
What if you could present only using questions? Why might you want to? Well, do you want your answer to listen or to think? What is the most thought provoking presentation you went to? What makes you think more, facts or questions?
Do all the questions need to be long? Surely not?
Is it possible to introduce facts using only questions? Did you know that stewardesses is the longest word you type with the left hand using standard typing? Can you introduce case studies? Have you seen Daniel Pink’s presentation on how to pitch?
See what I’m doing?
But I’d say these questions are more grammatical tricks to make sure I’m genuinely only asking questions, wouldn’t you? If we want to move beyond trickery to something more profound, what questions can we ask that have impact?
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What the fuel crisis reveals about the government’s approach to climate breakdown
I’m sharing today my notes on the fuel crisis and what it reveals about how the government is acting in the wider context of climate breakdown.
Defending fossil fuels
Fossil fuels are a dying out. One way or another, their use will dwindle. But for now at least the government is prepared to ensure their supply by using the army to distribute supplies. What is so striking is the use of the armed services to prop up the dying system rather than directing these resources towards tackling the far larger crisis: how to massively reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in the first place. It is a sign of how committed the government is to the status quo rather than to find a path away from the bigger problem.
In a related tactic, the government is willing to bend the rules to fast-track HGV licenses and visas for drivers, but we don’t see it acting to legislate to promote the rapid development of solutions that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
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Allotment notes: bindweed and fertiliser
I have been spending more time at the allotment as a stimulation for thinking about regenerative design. Notes from yesterday’s visit.
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What does regenerative design mean for engineers?
As I wrote in my last post, this summer I have been thinking about regenerative design, and what it means for engineers.
In the context of climate breakdown, the dominant paradigm in design is sustainability: design that seeks to sustain the quality of our existing ecosystem for the benefits of future generations. But as the latest IPCC report makes clear, our planetary systems are so depleted that even if we stopped putting carbon dioxide into the environment now, there is sufficient carbon dioxide in the environment to trigger significant temperature rises and ecosystem destruction. What we need now is to go further than maintaining the status quo and start regenerating our planetary ecosystems through our actions – this is regenerative design.
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Towards Regenerative Conceptual Design
I have had the great fortune of having spent three weeks in France, a good portion of it cycling. Touring is a great way to leave behind your pre-occupations and to think about the future – in my case, the themes for my training and writing in 2021-2022.
This year, all cycle paths point towards regenerative design – design that is win-win-win for individuals, society and the planet. I hear echos here of the triple bottom line of sustainable design, but sustainability, with it’s promise to protect the environment for the benefit of future generations is no-longer enough. This is a keep-things-the-same model. But as the latest IPCC report confirms, keeping things the same will lead to the breakdown of the carefully balanced ecosystem on which we depend. What we actually need is design that builds back the abundance, diversity, complexity and resilience of the ecosystem that quite literally gives us life.
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Find the disputable brief in your project
The disputable brief is a term I’ve coined to describe the bits of the brief that make your project worthwhile and different. It is easy to write a really long brief for your project. But what is going to make the difference between your project and the next one? It’s the part that isn’t necessarily a given, the part you need to fight for, the part that’s disputable.
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Keynote: Rigorous creativity (for engineers and other humans)
On 2nd June I was invited to give the opening keynote of the American Institution of Structural Engineer’s annual conference. I used the opportunity to make the case for:
- Why we need creativity in our profession more than ever,
- What the dampers might be to creativity
- And how to build creativity into our work in a way, that is, like our analytical work, careful, thorough and conscientious. In other words, rigorous creativity.
In my mind, there is no doubt that the climate and ecological emergencies are going to need some urgent creative thinking, and so this was the starting point for my talk.
At the same time, I am as ever conscious that there are on-the-ground barriers to address to creativity in organisations. One in particular caught really seemed to capture the attention of my audience: project management culture.
Having set the scene, I used the second half of the keynote to share strategies and tools for building creativity and an individual, team and organisational level.
This is what the person who booked me said about it all:
Your keynote was just OUTSTANDING. I had high hopes and expectations for you keynote and you exceeded them. A great message that we all needed to hear.
Glenn BellIf you’d like me to come and deliver a keynote for your event or come and speak to your organisation, then drop me a message on LinkedIn.
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From great to transformative: training and workshops that stick
How do you run a great workshop or training day that really makes a difference to the way people work? The keys are ownership and reflection.
In my view, great workshops, training days and away days need to do two things. They need to help people solve their own problems. And they need to help people work reflectively towards fixing them.
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Analogue Challenge 001: look for the time
On other people’s wrists, on clock towers, outside the jewellers, inside shops, at the station, on the scrolling news, from the position of the sun. Ask someone or make do not knowing, leaving plenty of time not to worry.
Here’s the challenge. Spend a day getting by without checking the time on any device of your own. Of course the more analogue way is to use a watch, but the aim of the challenge here is to sharpen a range of other analogue skills that will make you more comfortable with be more self-sufficient and less reliant on devices to get you through the day.
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