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Six foot slugs

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 tough out the winter, and wait until the moment when the ground is wet enough, and the tear 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. 

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A wobbly table on the non-flat surface of the reality

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.

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Sleep, subconscious and napping at work.

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:

  • The role of sleep cycles (NREM for data sorting, REM for pattern generation)
  • The value of unstructured time in creativity
  • Whether we should actually be paid to nap at work
  • How all this supports critical thinking at every stage of the OODA loop

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.

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The circumference of a circle of infinite radius

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. 

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From Ideas to Evidence — testing early concepts in structural design

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.

Recommended products

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Building my regenerative professional palette

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:

  • Why is it the shape it is?
  • How does the system scale?
  • How is information transmitted?
  • How does the system grow from simple elements to complex functions?
  • Where do the resources come from and go to?
  • What happens at the beginning and what happens when the system is no longer needed?
  • What roles do humans play in these living systems?

These questions help us discover the paints for the regenerative palette. 

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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.