Creativity training and teaching for engineers
Something that feels like magic is happening. This week I’ve been shipping pre-orders of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design to
Canada, the USA, Switzerland, Denmark, Lithuania , Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Australia , New Zealand, Italy, Netherlands , Germany, Sweden.
These are seeds that are spreading, thanks in large part to the people reading this blog telling people about these ideas.
And so for that, a very big thank you from me.
In this sequence of posts I’m collecting questions that can help me build a regenerative design palette. In regenerative design we use the living world as a design guide. This goes beyond mimicking living forms — beyond biomimicry — to understanding how underlying systems work, the processes that give rise to form and that enable living systems to thrive in balance.
Next on my list: how is information stored in this system?
We often think of information as facts or data — something that can be written down or recorded. The invention of computer memory, which stores information in sequences of ones and zeros, exerts a powerful influence of cultural understanding of what information is.
But the Oxford English Dictionary entry for information includes other definitions that can broaden our understanding and what we look for in living systems. Information can also be what is expressed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.
DNA is perhaps the living world’s most impressive information code, with a base of four rather than our binary two. But this is only the starting point for thinking about natural memory.
Tree rings store the story of rainfall and prevailing wind. Wider rings correlate with wetter years; asymmetric ones show the dominant direction of wind. And at a larger scale still, information sequences are also expressed in the shape of the hills, storing information through their form about the sequence of geological events over hundreds of thousands of years.
At the Regenerative Design Lab, Bill Sharpe offered a beautiful way to think about this. In any system with flow, there are structures that shape the movement — like a river’s banks. But the flow is also shaping the structure — the water gradually re-sculpting the path of the river.
I think of the river as a stylus. The banks are the groove of an LP. Together they play the song of the river. A record of what has been played before — one that is updated with every performance.
Our ecosystems are a rich record library of everything that has happened in a place. What happens, what used to happen, what no longer happens, what could happen again.
Information in genetic bases, in strata, in layers of growth, in physical form, in ways we are only beginning to notice, and I’m sure in many more that we haven’t.
I get asked this question all the time. I present an example of a scheme or an initiative in which engineers have developed a glimpse of the future — a way to work with reclaimed construction materials, to work with place, to create a system of working that demonstrates how to build a thriving future.
And then the question — how does it scale up?
This question of scaling makes sense in our parallel human-superimposed world of extraction, refining, manufacturing, distribution and assembly. In which the way to scale up is to build bigger, systems of supply.
But it doesn’t make sense in the living world.
In my garden, slugs are enormously successful. Somehow they have found a way to tough out the winter, and wait until the moment when the ground is wet enough, and then zoom up the stems of my runner beans and strip them.
Love them or loathe them, slugs are a great design.
But in the living world, there isn’t a venture capitalist saying ‘lets 10x these slugs. I see the potential for 6 foot slugs’.
Instead, over time, living systems tend to grow in number and variety of systems. In other words, more slugs and more of lots of other things too.
It’s not so much a scale up but a diversify up. Each of these elements in relationship to each other.
The question for the regenerative designer shifts from how do we scale up to: how can we allow the number and variety of local elements to grow and evolve?
In other words, from scaling up to creating a widening mosaic.
The faster trees grow, the straighter they tend to be. Compare the straight spears of fast-growing bamboo with the twisting boughs of old oak in ancient woodland. The former grows quickly skyward in a single season, whereas the latter slowly develops, year on year.
In the twists and turns of an old tree’s branches we see captured in its geometry the changing environmental conditions it has experienced — the availability of light, direction of wind and even how much water it had to drink. A partner dance fixed in its branches.
This is construction of a sort that responds to the changing conditions. That adapts. That is the best structural response to what happened next.
The shapes we find in the living world are built up on site, layer by layer, ring by ring, branch by branch. Each a best-fit response to what happened that season.
Engineers don’t grow things. Not in this sense of contextual layering up and extending.
Instead, we cast, extrude and slice. It’s easier to design and cut things in straight lines, cast flat shapes, pack things that are regular cuboids and transport things that all look the same.
Whereas the living world evolves shapes to suit the site, we’ve evolved our designs to suit the factory, the quarry, the motorway and the drawing board. We make in one place and take it to another. Ready-baked forms with few of the specificities of place built in.
More fundamentally, the living world designs in context and engineers tend to design in the abstract.
Abstraction is helpful! It makes things simpler, easier to calculate, define, arrange, and scale up. But it also separates us from context and the consequences of our decisions.
Given nothing in the landscape, nor in the living world is straight, everything we make straight is an imperfect fit, an inefficient response.
A wobbly table on the non-flat surface of the reality.
Straight lines are sign that things have been done to a place. That variations have been ignored or cut off. That something has been abstracted and rendered easier — but at what cost? What has been flattened? What has been undervalued? What has been overlooked?
Nature does so much so little. And we can learn to do the same. But this asks more of designers.
Design that layers.
Design that experiments on site.
Design that is a long-term response to place.
I believe we would recognise this kind of design straight away. And we would find it intrinsically beautiful.
This week we ran an online session in our Critical Thinking series exploring a topic not usually found in professional training agendas: sleep and the subconscious.
We often ask the question: When do you get your best ideas? Unsurprisingly, no one said “at my desk.” We usually use the question to explore idea generation, but here it opened the door to a deeper conversation about how insights often arise when we’re not consciously trying—on walks, in the shower, while dozing off.
We introduced the idea that our subconscious is always working, quietly filtering, sorting, and remixing our experiences. But like a party next door, we can only hear it if we turn the mental volume down.
We looked at:
Perhaps surprisingly, we started with a short guided meditation—done in the middle of a busy office—helped participants notice just how noisy their minds are, and what might be waiting underneath.
Sometimes our best thinking begins when we stop.
I rounded off last week’s posts with a number of questions for investigating systems in the living world. Answering these questions can help us develop a palette of systemic design principles that can help engineers (and other humans) create thriving with limited resources. The living world does it so well, and we might rely on it for our survival as a species, it is worth spending some time on it.
My first question, why is that the shape it is?
Sitting where I am, I can see a lot of straight lines. The awning above the cafe, the tiles of the floor, the lamp posts, the window frames, the balconies, the scaffolding, the road leading into the distance.
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
A mathematician once told me that a straight line is the circumference of a circle of infinite radius. That one has caused lots of debates in the pub.
The path of a beam of light (unless there’s a particularly heavy star in the vicinity).
To this list of definitions of a straight line, we might add ‘a shape made by engineers (and other humans) in their manipulation of the physical world’.
Whether by scoring into, connecting together, extruding from our driving through the substrate of the earth and its derivative materials, we tend to make a lot of straight lines.
There are straight lines in the living world, but you have to search for them. A spider’s web is straight line between the nodes of its structure, until the wind blows. At a microscopic level, crystaline structures contain straight lines, and occasionally these are translated to the macro scale, as in the basalt extrusions of the Giant’s Causeway.
Visitor’s from another planet would easily be able to spot the systems on planet earth where humans have been the chief engineers by the abundance of straight lines.
This week marked the final session in our Introduction to Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers series, where we moved from generating ideas to something more demanding: whether the ideas are any good or not.
The focus of the session was modelling and testing—but not in the technical-detailing sense. Instead, we explored how early-stage models can help test key assumptions, communicate design intent, and show where the design needs to be improved.
We introduced the concept of the key system — in other words, the one factor that in the design the shapes how all other factors will follow.
Sometimes that’s the structural loads. Sometimes it’s the construction sequence. Sometimes it’s something more unexpected.
Participants explored different types of models—sketches, physical forms, mood boards—and reflected on how the right model depends on the audience. A key idea here: this is not about models that you need loads of compute to execute, these are quick sketches for the journey home from site on the train.
This session closed with a review of the whole process, from brief to idea generation to modelling and testing.
Up next: We’re developing a follow-on course, Advanced Conceptual Design for Team Leaders, which will take the conversation further—looking not just at individual creativity, but how we approach conceptual design as a team.
I don’t really have a professional palette for regenerative design like I do for structural design. Or at least I don’t think I do. But what I realise is that whereas in structural design I often talk about material and form, in regenerative design, we are interested in systems. The elements of the palette therefore are not shapes and materials but system characteristics and functionality.
I spent most yesterday thinking about how I was going to follow on from this sequence of posts about professional palettes — how I was going to describe a regenerative palette.
Then, this morning, fresh brained, I looked at the tiny courgette plant on my garden table and started thinking about it from a functional perspective. As a series of processes and relationships. The result was yesterday’s post about the Compound-Aggregating Regenerative Food Production Device.
Now, having written that piece, I can distill some underlying questions that enabled me to write it. Questions for investigating systems in the living world, that help us distill how they work and think about how we work with and design systems. Questions like:
These questions help us discover the paints for the regenerative palette.
The device comes in a tiny package, no more than 1cm long and less than that wide — a hundredth of its final size. No buttons. No charging ports. No Bluetooth connections. It can wait on standby for months or even years, waiting patiently to be activated.
Activation is simple. You dig a borehole with your little finger in some humus medium, place the package at the bottom, backfill, and irrigate.
Nothing seems to happen for about a week, the start-up sequences has begun, powered by an internal chemical battery. The first job is put up a tiny solar panel that can fuel the next stage in development.
Above ground, you see the pilot solar panels pop up, a tiny pair of wings that capture radiation from the sun, and use it to convert an ambient gas and the liquid irrigation into a powerful internal fuel.
This process fuels the next stage. Below ground the device constructs a network of feelers that seek out more moisture and also trace compounds needed to build its more substantial substructure and superstructure along with its food-generating apparatus.
With its supply chain capacity upgraded, it sends up two more substantial solar panels — these ones a hundred times the size of the first. The device is now really increasing its chemical energy generating capacity and this flow of energy, combined with its increased underground compound aggregating ability enables the device to build its edible output module.
The code for food generation is preloaded into the device’s ROM. However not every device is the same and some have different sets of code. Not being connected to the internet, it has developed an ingenious method for peer-to-peer firmware exchange.
The device produces colourful landing and refuelling stations which attract tiny drones, which circulate from device to device, trading code for fuel. This symbiotic relationship enables tiny the device to assimilate tiny snippets of code and test alternative combinations.
The code received, the device closes the landing pad and devotes its compound-aggregating overground underground regenerative capacity to producing edible extrusions. Not only do these long, green, cylinders make tasty food for us humans, they also contain dozens more devices that can be used to start the process again.
Forward-thinking consumers will eat 90% of the crop of tasty tube extrusions, remembering to hold back 10% or so to harvest new devices for the year ahead.
The production phase ended, the entire system is dismantled by even smaller devices — too small to see and fully understand — and the component compounds are returned to the site that they were drawn from ready for another production cycle.
For someone starting from scratch these devices come in packets of 10 for £2.50 — an astonishing 25p each. But once you have started, you will have a constant supply of new devices.
You can find these packets in most supermarkets. Just look in the seed section for Compound-aggregating Overground Underground ReGenerative Edible Tasty Tube Extrusion Systems, often more easily referred to by their acronym: C.O.U.R.G.E.T.T.E.S
This week we ran The Map Room, the second workshop in our Critical Thinking for Engineers (and Other Humans) programme. If the Observatory was about looking outwards, this session was about making sense of what we’ve seen—mapping the system, tracing its logic, and finding out where we might start to make change.
We explored:
Some of the most powerful insights came when participants started applying the tools to parts of their work they hadn’t considered “design” before—like internal policy, comms strategies, or team culture. It was a reminder that systems thinking isn’t just for buildings or infrastructure—it’s for how we work, organise, and evolve.
We also talked about system boundaries, shifting roles, and what it means to design something that doesn’t just meet a brief, but changes the system the brief sits inside.
The Map Room builds on the Observatory, taking data and analysing it in readiness for the Decision Engine, where we decide on the next course of action to take. That will come later in June.
