Serendipitously, as I was preparing for my first dance teaching workshop this morning at the Idler Festival, I spotted a quote in one of my other open browser tabs a quote from David Flemming.
Commons are cooperative enterprises; they therefore depend on trust, on reciprocity, and on social capital. The market economy can get by, for a time, with a gravely-weakened culture and social capital, but the commons cannot. If you really want to save the planet and to give human society a decent chance of living on it, the first thing you should do is to join a choir. Or have dancing lessons, or both. That is not quite the hyperbole it seems: in enduring communities, the thing which defines and distinguishes them is their culture of dance, music, story and tradition—so intertwined with trust that it is hard to tell cause from effect.
David Flemming, in ‘Lean Logic – A DICTIONARY for the FUTURE and HOW to SURVIVE IT’
We always said in the Mudflappers that our mission was to make the world slightly better through the medium of dance. Well here is some compelling philosophical underpinning to back that up. I shared this quote with the dance workshop today and it was well received.
This post is a message to all the lovely people who joined one my dancing lessons at the Idler Festival. You were such a lovely crowd. I had so many great conversations with people who were just happy to be dancing. And it fills me with joy to get people moving their bodies to music.
A big thank you to Tom and Victoria for inviting me back. And a big thank you to Ellie Westgarth-Flynn for teaching with me.
A few of you were asking if I teach anywhere regularly. The short answer is no, but I am looking forward to returning to more festival teaching in the year ahead. If you are based in London, check out Swing Out London for details of classes. If you are based in the West Country, then check out Swing Dance Bristol.
If you have found your way to this blog then hopefully you will find it to be a joyful mix of engineering, creativity, dance and philosophy, all tools I think we need to build the places we want to live in. So stay tuned, or sign up to my mailing list.
I’ll post again soon with the playlists from my teaching sessions.
A day of two halves: book writing this morning and then swing dance teaching at the Idler festival this evening, with some hair engineering in the middle.
Enabling systems to self learn
I have about ten days to finish the first draft of the two chapters I am writing for James and my book on regenerative design for structural engineers. Today I was writing one of 12 principles for thinking about regenerative design. This one is about enabling systems to self-learn, adapt and evolve.
As ever, with regenerative design, we are thinking about how to enable healthy system qualities to emerge. It is difficult to write about because for one thing we are not talking about directly doing something ourselves, but thinking about how to set the conditions for a certain desirable quality to arise. The second is it doesn’t always feel close to structural engineering. But with our writing, we are not attempting to fully resolve the picture, rather to show what the arguments are and how they might intersect with structural engineering.
The question I keep coming back to to guide the writing is, how can we move away from seeing the design of buildings as the ends in itself, and instead as the means of creating a society that thrives within ecosystem boundaries.
In the built environment context, this idea of self-learning in the system could manifest itself as communities being better able to design and adapt their own buildings. And that that process can put them in greater harmony with their supporting ecosystems. The barriers to this process I wrote today were:
A design process that starts too late and stops too soon
Specialist knowledge not being distributed in the system
Lack of local systems knowledge
Discomfort with uncertainty
The challenge of hearing our nature responds to our plans.
Tomorrow I will be writing about how design can enable the emergence of a healthy socio-ecological system structure.
Hair Engineering
I have a phenomenal amount of hair. When ever I get it cut, it renews at an astonishing rate. You could say it is an abundant natural system. I am impressed with how tall she was able to make it. You could say I have a High Barnet.
Idler Festival Day One
For the first time in two years it feels great to be back teaching at a Festival. This time it is back with my friends at the Idler, for their Idler Festival at Fenton House.
This evening I was second on the bill, teaching a group of about 30 a solo taster Charleston class. On the playlist:
Around the World (Daft Punk)/I’ve Got That Tune (Chinese Man)/A Cool Cat in Town – Aerophon Mix (Tape Five)/Booty Swing (Parov Stelar)/Lone Digger (Caravan Palace). Link here to playlist.
Halfway through the class I spotted someone who had been there in the classroom when I had my first swing dancing classes 18 years ago.
I was happy to see my friend, dancer Constructivist collaborator, Peter Ayres. Looking forward to spending more time together on the Idler lawn over the next two days.
On the programme at the Idler Festival, by workshops are simply listed as ‘Dance Teaching with Oliver Broadbent’. One participant came up to me at the end and, after thanking me for the class, said I was looking for you online, but I couldn’t find anything about you, but I did find another Oliver Broadbent who writes about engineering… She was surprised to find we were one and the same.
I spend most of my time designing creativity training for engineers. In this episode we flip the format. Alexie Sommer, Independent Design and Communication Director and collaborator on many of my projects interviews me about why I set up Eiffel Over and Constructivist Ltd, and what our plans are for designing creativity training for engineers in 2020. We get into:
Techniques for teaching creativity
Our programme of training support people tackling the climate emergency
I’m writing this on the train home from Towersey Festival to which I had been invited by my friends Nat and Sophie to help out with some swing teaching and performing for the Shooting Roots line-up. Towersey was my introduction to folk festivals, and it felt like a gateway to a fascinating world of music and dancing to discover. Nat and I were there to teach a 1 hour Lindy hop class and to do some dancing with a band in the evening (see the gig notes below for info).
Towersey felt quite unlike any festival I’d been to before, and I think the main difference is the way in which people are engaged with the music and dance that is being performed. The crowds are attentive; they really listened in our lesson; they were really paying attention in the band performances. People are having a great time but there is none of the rowdiness, (except for being kept awake by a choir singing in four part harmony at 1am in the campsite). I love the way people carry around instruments, and there is space for people to jam. There was also the largest selection of real ales I’ve seen at any festival. And what’s more people walk around with their own tankards, which as far as I’m concerned is the best way yet to reducing festival waste.
