Eiffel Over

Tag: SubconsciousMind

  • Make a little time for design

    Things are just a bit too busy right now. I don’t really have much time to think about my design process. Or so it goes.

    But here’s the thing: even a little time spent thinking about your process is time well spent. Steal a few seconds on your commute or book a 15-minute meeting with yourself in a quiet pod.

    Once you’ve carved out those moments, here are some quick things you can do:

    • Write down the high-level brief. – Often, we forget what the brief actually is! Take a moment to capture the key things that need to be achieved to meet the client’s needs.
    • Gather your inputs. Check you’ve got the basics covered: information from the brief, site details, precedents, and inputs from colleagues.
    • Print off some sketches, images, or drawings. So much of our work lives on tiny screens, but our brains evolved to process a much wider field of vision. Fill that space with physical inputs to stimulate creative thinking.
    • Do a quick sketch. A simple sketch can help you spot new connections or things you hadn’t noticed before.
    • Do nothing! Sit quietly for ten minutes and let your subconscious do the work. Sometimes, clarity comes from stillness.

    Try it once, and you’ll likely notice something you hadn’t seen before. Do it often, and you’ll build a habit of making time for design—a habit that pays dividends over time.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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  • Analogue Skills for Design at the University of Bath

    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.

  • Does your project need a creative boost?

    Here’s four things you can do straight away to give your project a creative boost.

    1. Write down the brief. What are you trying to do? Who are you serving?
    2. Write as many things as you can about the project in a big piece of paper. I recommend using the following three headings as prompts: Information, Questions, Ideas. Stick it on the wall near where you work.
    3. Talk through your ideas with someone. Ask them just to listen and not say anything until you are done.
    4. Try to ignore the project for a day (I bet you can’t), and then the next day, write down five new ideas that will inevitably have emerged.
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  • Notes from IStructE Academics’ Conference 2018

    There was great energy at today’s IStructE Academics’ Conference, the theme of which was Creativity and Conceptual Design.
    If you are visiting this site for the first time, it may have been thanks to Chris Wise’s kind recommendation in his keynote presentation – thanks so much Chris.
    I presented a session on how to have ideas. Usually when I’m billed with this title, I run a workshop on idea generation, but I thought for once, I would stand up and say what I think about the subject. I’m glad I did because it seemed warmly received. It was also a chance to talk through themes that will be included in the chapter I am writing in a book on scheme design – more details to follow.

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