Eiffel Over

Tag: emergence

  • What you only notice when everything quietens down

    This is my final post for the year.

    Some things we notice because we are looking for them. I have lost my keys; I look around the house, my brain is scanning for the keys; I spot the keys. But in that search what I fail to notice is that the pot plant above my desk hasn’t been watered for weeks and is about to die. 

    Then there’s another kind of noticing, an awareness that isn’t driven by a specific task. It’s a more open awareness, in which we we may be able to see things that we were not necessarily looking for. 

    For me, the starting point in design is observation. And not just the laser-focused, looking-for-a-thing type of observation, but a more open, breathing-in-of-the-situation kind. What does a place feel like? What is the energy of a group of people? What am I drawn towards or away from? 

    Our brains are incredible at spotting patterns, but only when we let them. Hyper-focused attention, while useful, often comes at the cost of perceiving the bigger picture.

    For many in the built-environment sector, work is a hyper-focused, task-orientated space. Deadlines don’t leave mush space for stepping back. But taking a break from work gives us the opportunity to look up and have a more general awareness.

    If you have holidays coming up, then I invite you to simply notice what you notice when you aren’t looking for anything in particular. What you see might reveal be the wider patterns of place, of community, of life that we aim to serve in our work as engineers (and other humans). 

  • Better than a New Year’s resolution

    I used to like making New Year’s resolutions. My resolution to stop eating chocolate digestives in my old job at Expedition Engineering lasted 3.5 years. My resolution to stop being sarcastic has been more intermittent—let’s call it a “New Year’s preference” rather than a resolution.

    But lately, I’ve been thinking that resolutions are a rather peculiar way to approach change. They tend to overplay our sense of agency while underestimating the myriad unseen factors that shape how our complex lives unfold.

    As 2025 approaches, I’m struck by the idea that the seeds of what will emerge in the coming year have already been planted throughout 2024. Taking inspiration from the Three Horizons Model, a better approach might be to ask:

    • What new patterns are emerging for me?
    • How might these patterns bear fruit?

    These are questions that take time to answer. In the living world, new shoots don’t appear until late winter or early spring—they emerge in their own time

    So, instead of making a New Year’s resolution, why not try something quieter? Pay attention to the patterns emerging in your life and work. Notice them, nurture them, and think about how you might align yourself with them. In doing so, you’ll work with the momentum that has already, quietly, been building beneath the surface.

  • Design decisions – who decides?

    Design is full of decisions. Which client? Which supplier? Which materials? What location? Whether to build or not to build? Which idea best suits the brief? Shall I challenge the brief (yes!)?

    The journey through design is a process of decision making. The ability to make well-informed, ethical and insightful decisions is the mark of the professional. And so it is worth spending a bit of time thinking about how we arrive at decisions.

    So let’s start here — with the question of who decides. Here are four answers.

    • I decide – through some process to be unpicked, I am doing the decision-making
    • Someone else decides – we are merely informed of their decision.
    • A decision emerges – through a series of interactions between people, possibly without anyone necessarily knowing how, a preferred decision reveals itself.
    • A decision evolves – this is the living world’s mechanism for decision-making. 

    You can see all of these at play in a design team. 

    • I might make a decision about what material to specify 
    • The client decides they want to reduce the budget –  I am not consulted, merely informed.
    • In a design team meeting, we review various options together, and through the interaction of people and ideas, a particular option wins out as the most popular.
    • And I might not be aware of it, but our decision is informed by and part of a long-term evolution of design which, for example, has seen greater emphasis placed on end-of-life design.

    Understanding who decides is a first step to figuring out the decision-making mechanism, where we have agency and how we can help make better decisions.

  • You don’t say very much

    One of my favourite moments in Barbara Kingsolver’s book Flight Behaviour is when one character says to a scientist at dinner, ‘you don’t talk much, do you’.

    The scientist responds, ‘when I’m talking, I’m not listening.’

  • 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.

  • Never mind the aurochs

    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.

    …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.

  • 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. 

  • 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.