Eiffel Over

Tag: IdeaGeneration

  • The technicolour light of new ideas

    The technicolour light of new ideas

    In December 2016, I visited my favourite building, Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia. That afternoon, the low sun shone straight in through the stained-glass windows in the west wall, filling the space with warm, technicolour light. The effect held me in a trance for what felt like minutes. 

    Unlike traditional stained-glass windows, in which the designs are often more figurative, the image in these windows is created from an apparently random pattern of tiny glass elements. Like a giant, static kaleidoscope. 

    James Webb Young likened the process of having ideas to using a kaleidoscope. The bits of glass are existing pieces of information. Turning the kaleidoscope rearranges the pieces of information to create new patterns— new ideas. 

    For me, this model, like the windows in the Sagrada Familia, captures the essential elements of having ideas: an assembly of existing elements, arranged and rearranged to create something new, something capable of captivating us and driving change.

    Through the creative process, we mix together what we already know with different elements to create new patterns. These new patterns have the capacity to shine a fresh light on existing situations and point a different way forward. 

  • Pattern mixing lessons from Bristol’s brewers

    Bristol’s craft brewers are constantly experimenting – mixing patterns to create something new. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to facilitate workshops for teams from local breweries, which has given me some insight into their creative work.

    This flair for invention shines through in the descriptions of their attention-grabbing brews: espresso martini stout; gluten-free pale ale; or even key lime pie IPA. Each of these is a fusion of existing patterns to create something that sounds fresh. 

    But there are other versions of this creative process at play beyond mixing unusual flavour combinations.

    Forwards to the past

    Another mode of creation is to bring back something from the past and make it fashionable again. 

    A recent trend is for craft brewers to resurrect from obscurity the ‘mild’, a largely forgotten-about old-man beer. Here the mix is to take a pattern from the past and put it into the pattern of the modern-day tap room.

    Continuous remixing

    Sometimes, the creative mode is to continuously evolve and update an existing product. 

    When I arrived in Bristol 6 years ago brewers Wiper and True ran a beer called Quintet, which was intended to be a continuously evolving blend of five hops chosen on the basis of seasonal availability. With each creative step, the existing blend of hops is one pattern, the new hop is the other pattern and the new mix is the new pattern.

    Creatively staying the same

    Finally, there is a mode of creation that aims to keep things the same. 

    Many microbreweries strive to have a core beer that they can sell to the supermarkets. The large orders that the supermarkets make  give these small businesses a reliable revenue stream that enables them to grow. But one thing these large retailers don’t want is for the product to change. 

    So if a brewery wants to introduce new processes for reducing the carbon footprint of their core beer, they have to do so in a way that doesn’t change the product. In this case, they might have to change their pattern of ingredients and pattern of brewing with the aim of creating something that was the same as before.

    In these examples we have seen four creative modes:

    • Mixing previously unconnected patterns. 
    • Mixing patterns of past and present. 
    • Continuously remixing to update the present. 
    • Or creating new mixtures that keep things the same.

    Whether we are fermenting or cementing, the key to creativity is pattern mixing.

  • Joesph Monier’s flower pots

    The simple model we use in our teaching at Constructivist is that an idea is simply what happens when we take two existing patterns and mix them to create something new. 

    In the mid-nineteenth century, horticulturalist Joseph Monier was looking for a more sturdy way to make large flower pots for the orange trees he was tending in Paris. These orange trees needed to be brought into the greenhouse in winter and taken out again when the weather warmed. 

    Monier began experimenting with creating cement pots. This material was already commonly used in gardens, but on its own is brittle. Monier’s innovation was to insert an iron mesh into the cement. The resulting composite material, as we know, is much stronger, and the rest is engineering history.

    What Monier did was to take two existing patterns, concrete and iron, and mix them to create a new pattern: reinforced concrete. 

    A material from one context used in another. Taking a different shape and applying it to a familiar form. Applying an emerging technology to an existing field. These new combinations, or recombinations, of existing patterns all represent new ideas. 

    Of course, Monier’s pioneering took many more steps. We may never know the other material combinations he tried (History tends to forget the ideas that didn’t see the light of day). But all ideas, successful or not, start from this process of mixing.

    This perspective on idea generation gives us two things to focus on in the creative process:

    • what patterns do we need as inputs to creativity; and
    • how do we make the new combinations? 

  • Divergent poem

    Two days ago we had the Convergent Poem, full of ways of working that engineers (and other humans) tend to get praise for. Here is its awkward sibling, the Divergent Poem. Full of the things that aren’t necessarily valued by the professional system we are in, but are no less important, and could be more important.

    Shake it up,

    Tear it down,

    Breathe it in,

    Break it out,

    Multiply,

    Ask, what if I,

    Take random paths,

    And photographs,

    Pin up, collate,

    Re-conbobulate,

    Find time to explore,

    And imagine more.

    Choose the right poem for the job. Because, there’s no point in aiming for the summit if we are climbing the wrong hill.

  • Observe | Brief | Ideas | Test | Repeat

    This week I’ve been making the case for a continuous, place-based approach to design. As James Norman and I set out in the Regenerative Structural Engineer, we see this process as a cycle of the following stages.

    1. Observation

    Traditional design often begins with a design brief—a predefined problem to be solved. But Continuous Place-Based Design, with its focus on working with the existing dynamics of a place rather than imposing change from outside, begins with observation.

    Observation means more than a desk study or mapping exercise. It requires time spent in a place—experiencing it from different perspectives, noticing rhythms, interactions, and patterns of change. But observation isn’t just the first step. It is something we return to again and again, each time we make a change.

    2. Brief

    From observation, we begin to sense what is needed. The brief emerges as a way of distilling these needs into a set of design requirements.

    In traditional design, the brief is often seen as something to resolve upfront—reducing uncertainty as quickly as possible. But the Designer’s Paradox reminds us that a brief is never fully known at the start; understanding of the brief unfolds through the act of designing itself.

    Continuous Place-Based Design embraces this reality. The brief evolves over time, but it doesn’t necessarily converge to a single, finalised solution. Each iteration is the best response for now, while recognising that every intervention changes the system—and with it, the design brief itself.

    3. Ideas

    The creative phase of the process is deeply influenced by the place itself. Ideas are not imposed from outside but emerge from the system we are designing within.

    The designer’s role is not just to generate ideas, but to facilitate the emergence of ideas from place—to see what is latent, what is already forming, what might be supported. At the same time, by embedding ourselves in a place, we too become part of its system. Our ideas are shaped by this connection, rather than being external impositions.

    4. Make and Test

    This is where we intervene—where design moves from thought to action. We begin making changes to the system.

    Interventions can range from small-scale tests to large-scale changes—though an important principle stands: start small, learn, then scale out. Through making, we begin to see how the system responds.

    For example, in a housing development, instead of building an entire estate at once, we might start with a few houses, observing how the place changes and adapts before expanding further. The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to work with the unforeseen consequences of our design decisions—using them as feedback to refine and update the brief.

    Back to Observation Again

    Having made our changes to the system, we go back to observation. But we are not back where we started: the system we are designing in has changed and we too are changed by that process. We become a more integrated part of the system we are designing in, better able to facilitate change that will bring forward thriving in that place.