Author: Oliver Broadbent

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Compound aggregating regenerative food extrusion device — for 25 pence.

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

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The Map Room – mapping systems, horizons, and change

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:

  • The Systems Bookcase model: a tool for organising system layers, from what gets built through to the values and paradigms that shape it.
  • The Three Horizons framework: helping participants spot signs of long-term change—and understand their own role in it.
  • The Library of Systems Change: a way of recognising how future practices are already quietly present in today’s systems.

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.

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In the interests of health and safety…

That’s how the sign started its instruction. But health and safety is not a person. It has no interests.

But people do. 

They have interests. They are interested in staying healthy and safe. 

And we are interested in them, because we are empathetic. We want other people to stay healthy and safe.

So why not start with “to help you stay healthy and safe…”?

Or, warmer still, “because we care about you.”

(Or even, because we love you, as fellow human beings?)

What “in the interests of health and safety” really signals is “in the interests of us having discharged our responsibility to tell you’. Which is empty of empathy. 

And love.

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Unlocking thinking – try out all the colours in your palette

This week I’ve been writing about how artists, engineers (and other humans) build up a professional palette of techniques and forms from which they can develop new ideas. These are the colours they paint with

Having assembled our paint set, this palette lends itself well to a reliable technique for unlocking thinking. 

What people tell me time and again in workshops is that it isn’t having the first idea that they struggle with. It’s coming up with the second. Or having a new idea when the first one gets rejected. That’s when thinking becomes blocked. (There’s reasons for this blocking, which we can explore in another post).

That’s when I suggest systematically using the colours in your palette. 

If we were using a real paint palette, it would simply involve doing a quick sketch with the red paint, then the orange, then the blue, say. A quick doodle to see what the thing could look like in each of these colours.

For a structural engineer designing a span: what would this look like if it were a simple beam?

A cantilever? 

An arch?

A truss? 

Or what would the structure look like made from stone?

Timber?

Concrete?

Steel?

Each material and form has its own affordances — what you can and can’t do with it. 

If you know your colours, the cognitive load of doing five two-minute sketches is low. And that small effort can unlock the second idea. And it allows you to see your first idea in context — as the first in a family of possibilities. 

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Structural poems

We’re going on a bear hunt

I’m not scared, etc.*

Oh no — a gap.

We can’t go around it.

We can’t go under it.

We’ll have to…

Build a simply supported beam,

Or a continuous span,

An arch,

A suspension bridge,

A cable-stayed structure,

A cantilever,

A propped cantilever,

A truss…

Not as poetic as Michael Rosen’s version, but it serves to illustrate one of the palettes of the structural engineer: structural form.

And there are other palettes too…

Concrete, steel, timber, masonry, stone, glass, composites, straw bales — just some of the colours in the material palette.

Footings, rafts, deep piles, mini piles, caissons — the foundation palette.

These are some of the colours from which structural engineers paint their ideas.

Some of the vocabulary from which they write their poems of structural form.

The wider the vocabulary, the more options for the poet.

*From We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen.

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The interface between our inner and outer worlds

If we use the professional palette as a metaphor for the collection of tools and colours we use to interpret the world, then we can see it as more than just a toolkit. It’s the means by which we capture what we see and render what we imagine.

I see sketching — whether in pencil, code, words, paint or notes — as both a away of seeing the world and also showing the world what we see. Just as in child development, the ability to listen, imagine and speak all develop together, I see sketching as doing the same thing. The sketch is is both a way to listen and to speak. The more time you spend sketching, the more you see, the more you can imagine and the more you can make in the world.

Sketching is a kind of model making. A way to distill the essence of what you notice to internalise it, and a way to distill what you imagine in order to send it back out into the world. 

Learning to make conceptual models — sketches, sequences of code, prose, paintings or music — becomes a way to breathe the world in, the imagination is respiration, and we breathe it out again.

The tools we master — our paints, our pencils, our programming languages, our music theory — are the interface between our inner and outer worlds. The more familiar we become with these tools, the more they become an extension of ourselves. The more fluently the world flows into us as designers and can flow out again modified by the unique perspective that we each hold.

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Cobalt blue and cadmium yellow

One of my highlights of my year studying engineering in France was a module I did on Impressionist painting and engineering. We explored how the artists of that period were fascinated by the new railways that were arriving in cities—the light, the smoke, the transformation of the cities and the access to the countryside, where they would ride to and paint. 

But before they could catch a train, they had to assemble their paints.

The Impressionist period was time of innovation in paint technology. Alongside traditional natural pigments — ochres and siennas, derived from iron-oxide rich clays — new synthetic pigments became available in vibrant colours like cobalt blue and cadmium yellow.

For me this idea of creating your palette is a necessary precursor to creative work. It is both an enabling process and an ongoing one. 

The metaphor applies wherever we make something from something else. A jazz musician creates solos from the scales they’ve practised for years. Those scales give the music its flavour. A swing dancer practises individual moves so that they can weave them in when the moment is right in the music. A building designer chooses from a palette of materials, developing confidence in how to work with them, combine them, and bring out their best.

The more colours you have in your palette, the greater the number of combinations you can create. The better you know the colours in your palette, the more confidently and creatively you can work.

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Exploring Ecosystem Intelligence in Design and Critical Thinking

This week, we delivered the next module in our Critical Thinking series: Ecosystem Intelligence.

As we navigate ever more complex systems—whether in infrastructure, urban development, or organisational change—we need better ways to understand what helps systems thrive. For this, we can look to the living world itself. Ecosystem intelligence invites us to learn from nature’s patterns of interconnection, symbiosis, and adaptability.

In this workshop, we explored:

  • What thriving looks like in living systems and how these principles can inform design and decision-making.
  • How to recognise patterns of flow, exchange, and feedback in the systems we work with.
  • The importance of designing for continuous learning and adaptation, rather than static solutions.

Using the Living Systems Blueprint as a guide, participants reflected on how these ideas apply to their own projects and professional contexts. The session offered a chance to step back, rethink projects and approach complex challenges with a systems-thinking mindset.

This workshop builds on the ideas from The Regenerative Structural Engineer and forms part of a broader journey through critical thinking for design professionals.

Critical Thinking for Engineers (and other humans)

This module is part of our critical thinking programme. Find out about other modules in the programme

Find out more
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Join us for the London launch of The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design

We’re delighted to announce the London launch event for The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design — happening on Wednesday 19th June, 6–7.30pm at the Society Building in Clerkenwell.

This is an evening for engineers, designers and other humans who want to help shift the construction industry, one project at a time.

Oliver Broadbent will give a short talk about the book: how it emerged from the Regenerative Design Lab, why it matters, and how you can use it in practice. There’ll be copies available to purchase and sign.

The event is free to attend — but places are limited. Feel free to bring a friend who would enjoy this work.

Register here – and bring a friend too!

Come along, connect with fellow practitioners, and celebrate the next step in this growing community.

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Tools for telling the future

What began as a conversation this week on the blog about how designers predict the future has unlocked some deeper reflections on how we approach regenerative design.

Let’s rewind.

As designers, we are always concerned with the future. Our job is to imagine how things could be and shape the conditions to get there. To do this, we rely on two types of indicators:

  • Lag indicators — evidence of what has already happened. The results of past design decisions. 
  • Lead indicators — signals in the present that suggest how the future will unfold.

When conditions are stable, precedent (ie lag indicators) can be a reliable guide to the future. But in changing, complex systems, the past is no-longer such a reliable guide to the future.

In these situations, rather than predict the future directly, we can try to assess the capacity of the system we are working with to successfully respond to change.

Capacity to change — a key regenerative lens

In regenerative design we use the living world as a template for understanding how to create systems that thrive. Thriving ecosystems adapt continuously to shifting conditions. This capacity to change is a key characteristic of living systems — and is a guiding principle for engineers (and other humans) thinking about how to create thriving systems. 

In the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, we go on to define four factors that indicate a system’s capacity to adapt:

  • Building blocks that can easily be recombined.
  • Coexistence of diverse variations to allow for different responses. 
  • Feedback loops that reinforce adaptations suited to current conditions.
  • Mechanisms for retaining and repeating what works.

From analysis to a design brief

These four factors are both analytical prompts and design levers.

When we encounter a new situation, we try to establish the extent to which each of these is present and use this as a measure of the system’s capacity to survive and potentially thrive through change.

And they can be used as design requirements, giving us factors that we can build into a design brief to create a brief for thriving. 

In a complex situation it is hard to predict the future — instead, regenerative designers seek to make things better by building in the capacity for people and ecosystems to respond together to changing situations in a way that creates thriving for the whole system.