Creativity training and teaching for engineers
My recent food harvesting metaphor keeps on bearing fruit!
I arrive at a workshop to see a buffet of fruit.
Tasty, but I wager none of it is local and most only half of it is in season.
So what we have is a system that is very good and delivering out of season fruit from far away while local, in-season fruit wilts on the trees.
If you were to start from a blank sheet of paper you wouldn’t design this.
A system that is efficient and scaled up in every step.
And absurd in its outcome.
In Friday’s edition of the Glastonbury Free Press I saw a cartoon by Oliver Jeffers that simply said ‘leave things better than you found them’. Like yesterday’s ‘zero negative externalities’, it is another clear and sobering benchmark for our work.
This week, we delivered Session 3 of our Introduction to Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers, part of the ongoing programme we run with the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE).
In this session, we explored what happens when design thinking gets stuck. When initial ideas run out, when the first solution doesn’t quite fit, or when you hit a creative block — what do you do next?
The answer: you turn the Kalideascope.
Turning the Kalideascope is about deliberately shifting perspective to unlock new ideas. We introduced two practical techniques:
• Ask What If — to reframe problems, imagine alternatives, and expand possibilities.
• Professional Palette — using familiar structural forms as creative prompts for rapid ideation.
We also explored the distinction between conceptual design and detailed design, recognising that the early concept phase is the time for quick experimentation and testing, even when information is incomplete.
The session closed with the key question:
How do you know if an idea is a good one?
The answer lies in defining clear tests linked to the brief — giving designers a structured way to evaluate their early-stage ideas.
We’ll wrap up the series next week with Session 4, where we’ll bring these tools together into a structured design process.
On February 4th, our current cohort of the Regenerative Design Lab returned to Chatham House London. In this session hosted by our delivery partners, the Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator, our aim was to deepen understanding of system change, policy change and the Ambition Loop model.
Continue reading “Designing experiments in policy change – lessons from RDL Cohort 4 Session 6 hosted at Chatham House”
On 30th January 2025, Oliver delivered the keynote for Hawkins Brown’s Regenerative Design Research Week, bringing together ideas on how regenerative design can reshape architectural practice.
As the final session in a week-long series of talks and workshops, this keynote helped tie together discussions on regenerative approaches in architecture. The session explored how organisations can map their activities against larger systems of change and provided practical frameworks for embedding regenerative principles into design practice.
Continue reading “Exploring Regenerative Design with Hawkins Brown”
On 29th January 2025, we ran our ‘How to Have Ideas’ workshop with DYSE Structural Engineers in Manchester, exploring the creative process in design and how engineers can generate and test ideas effectively.
The session focused on:
Today, Oliver was in Cambridge delivering his workshop “Things to Think and Feel about a Brief,” as part of his teaching on the Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment (IDBE) Masters programme.
Continue reading “Unlocking the Power of Design Briefs: Workshop at the IDBE Masters Programme”
With the launch of our fourth Regenerative Design Lab cohort next week, we’ve updated our regenerative design reading list.
Interestingly many of the books don’t even mention the phrase regenerative design, but what they share in common is an alignment with the a holistic world view, within which regenerative design sits.
Continue reading “Just updated, our regenerative design reading list”