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Use the water on its way downhill

Use the water on its way downhill

Gather the feedback before everyone leaves.

Capture the waste heat before it disappears up the exhaust.

Better to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Hold the nutrients back before they are washed away down the mountainside 

Learn the lesson straightaway 

Reuse before you recycle

Sort it on the doorstep rather than at the dump.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

When in doubt take the high road.

You can’t stop the waves but you can surf them.

When something concentrated disperses, it loses its potential. Dispersal is inevitable. The skill in regenerative design is to catch the potential on its way down, and cycle it into new life before it’s gone

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On packing cubes and better fit

Fold everything up and put it straight in the bag? Or fold everything into packing cubes first, then put these in?

Not an important dilemma — but useful for thinking about utility and fit.

Packing cubes make it easier to find your stuff. That’s a win for utility. But they make it harder to use space efficiently. That’s a loss of fit.

When you pack directly into the case, clothes can mould to the contours of the bag. With cubes, you’re first fitting clothes into rigid boxes, then trying to fit those boxes into the bag. The bigger the chunks, the less well they fit.

Even cubes designed for your bag add extra cell walls. It’s more work to get everything in.

Why does this matter? Because it’s all about equilibrium. The more options a system has, the better it can settle into a state that fits its surroundings.

Of course, both bags — with cubes and without — are at equilibrium once zipped. But cubes trap the system in a constrained equilibrium: ordered, but with wasted potential (unused space). Without cubes, the system has more freedom to find a messier equilibrium that actually fits better.

And there’s entropy at play: to keep clothes in neat cubes takes extra work. Left free, they tumble into arrangements that fit themselves.

From a regenerative point of view, sometimes it’s worth adding structure — boundaries, hierarchies, rules — to make a system function. But structure always reduces adaptability. Keeping a system in a fixed order takes work, and wastes some of its potential to respond.

So the design question is: when is it worth doing the work to hold things in order, and when is it better to let the system find a looser, but better-fitting arrangement?

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The Entropy Bus

When strangers get on a bus, they almost always spread out. Few people sit next to each other unless they really have to.

Partly that’s social norms. And partly it’s probability — and entropy is the name we give to it: the measure of how many possible configurations a system can take.

The social rules push people apart, but entropy makes the scattered state the most likely outcome.

You could put an extra conductor on the bus to tell people where to sit, filling rows neatly from the front. But that takes energy. Take the conductor away, and inevitably everyone spreads out again.

The lesson of the entropy bus is that order is costly, disorder is cheap — and dispersal from order to disorder creates a flow.

The art of regenerative design is to shape systems so that the most likely outcome, and the flow in that direction is also the most life-giving.

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Boltzmann laughter distribution

This week I’ve been playing around with a way to explain the Boltzmann distribution — a mathematical function that predicts how energy is likely to spread out in a volume of gas. 

Imagine you have an audience of 100 people. Imagine there is a fixed amount of laughter to go around. What’s the most likely way the laughter will be distributed in the audience. 

Now, already I can see this analogy breaking down. But let’s just go with it for a little longer. 

We could arrange things so that one person does all the laughing. As there’s 100 people in the room, there’s 100 different ways we could do this: one for each possible solo laugher. 

Now imagine  we have two people laughing each with half the total available laughter. There are now 4,950 ways to pick those two people — in other words 4,950 ways to pick two people from 100.

The more we spread the laughter around, the more ways there are of distributing that laughter. 

The equation is for an audience size of n, and the number of people laughing in the audience, the number of ways of arranging laughter is n!/(k!(n-k)!).

This number of combinations gets very large very quickly. For half the audience laughing, there are approximately 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways of doing this.

This idea — the some arrangements have more ways of being achieved than others — is what underlies the Boltzmann distribution. 

Introducing some more formal language:

A macrostate is the overall situation (eg half the room laughing)

A microstate is one specific way of achieving that macrostate (eg exactly which 50 out of the 100 are laughing). 

Now, energy in a system doesn’t decide which microstate to be in. It just jostles around between different microstates. Some energy here, some energy there. But since there are far far more ways of achieving the more distributed macro states than the ones where energy is concentrated, the system almost always ends up in a highly distributed macro state. 

The macrostate with the most microstates is overwhelmingly likely.

This is why energy spreads out in a room. It isn’t a plan, it is just the macrostate that is overwhelmingly more likely. Like billions and billions of times more likely. 

This concept underpins ideas like equilibrium, itself an important underpinning idea in regenerative design. The goal of regenerative design is for humans and the living world to survive, thrive and co-evolve — in other words, thriving in equilibrium.

Of course, any physicists listening to this would laugh me off stage. For one thing, laughter isn’t a fixed quantity. And for another, one person’s laughter can trigger more. And…one person laughing amongst 100 is in itself funny. 

Now if there were 100 physicists in the room…how many would be laughing?

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Blowing hot air

One of my favourite design features at the Barbican Arts Centre is in the loos: a row of round sinks, set into polished concrete, with taps activated by foot pedals. It’s elegant, low-tech, and fun to use.

It got me thinking about bathroom design more generally — and how, every now and then, designers like to reinvent the tap.

Which brings me to the Dyson Tap. Water and hand-dryer in one. Sleek, modern, cropping up in more and more public toilets, and every time I use one, I get it wrong.

These newer designs are often accompanied by diagrams on the wall explaining how to wash your hands. That’s a warning sign. A well-designed object shouldn’t need instructions — it should feel instinctive, especially for something as routine as a tap.

We’re used to how taps work: anticlockwise for on, clockwise for off, hot on the left, cold on the right. This cultural code runs deep. And when a design ignores it, it has to work even harder to be intuitive.

But here, nothing is familiar. The shape suggests “dry now” before I’ve even washed. Then I trigger the dryer accidentally mid-wash. 

Then I try to find the soap. A different machine. Often it’s not working, and someone’s helpfully plonked a bottle nearby (you can just see the pink glow of one in this photo).

It makes me wonder: what problem is this trying to solve? Maybe a regular tap would be simpler, more durable, lower in embodied energy — and a better cultural fit.

Which takes back to the foot-operated taps at the Barbican. These were different but didn’t have a instructions. Somehow, this new design must have just worked.

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100 years old

Today my grandfather, Peter Cartwright, would have been 100 years old. He was a research chemist, but I always saw him as a Renaissance man, showing talents for a wide range of pursuits- creative, scientific, crafts, adventuring and telling a good yarn.

I have a lot to thank him for. But today this shines out. When I was about six or seven, I told him I wanted to be an architect. He showed me how to draw a building in cross-section and plan views. This blew mind. For the next few years I would spend my spare time imaging and drawing building layouts, laying the groundwork for career decisions I made much later.

He died when I was twenty, and he never knew that I went into engineering. I keep a photo of him on my desk, that way he can still see the projects I’m working on that I know would have fascinated him.

Happy birthday Gramps.

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Element design

There are over 250 chemical elements. But at a fooling workshop* today, I was reminded of the creative power of just four: earth, water, fire and air.

Each one conjures its own meanings and images. And like a metaphysical rock, paper, scissors, they exist in relation to each other.

In design, we can use them to ask: what qualities are present in this system?

Earth is structure, solidity, firmness. It’s hardware. It moves reluctantly, suddenly, with inertia.

Water is flow. Flow in rivers and in vessels. It transports. It’s soft and powerful, and can be relentless. It is life.

Fire is the spark. Energy. The compulsion to act. It crackles. It metabolises. It consumes. It needs stoking.

Air is breath. More life. We breathe it in and out. It’s reciprocal — inside me, then inside you. It’s sound, it’s information, it’s communication.

How do these metaphorical elements show up in the system you’re working in?

How do they relate to each other?

Which ones are missing?

What happens if you weave a new one in?

*The workshop was The Fool’s Body, led by the brilliant Holly Stoppit and Dominique Hester:

https://www.hollystoppit.com/workshops/the-fools-body
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Serious humour

Yesterday I went to Grayson Perry’s brilliant Delusions of Grandeur exhibition at the Wallace Collection. If you work in Central London and can get there before it closes in October then do. So much to take away, including this, which I grabbed me:

‘The opposite of serious is not humour….The opposite of serious is trivial…Humour is a seriously important quality…Humour is the vitally profound art of being human.’

Yes!

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Too long/too late?

“Due to short platforms, the doors in the rear carriage will not open at the next station.”

Whenever I hear this train announcement, I wonder if they could just as well say:

“Due to long trains, the doors in the rear carriage will not open at the next station.”

It’s a matter of perspective.

According to research published by the Get It Right Initiaitve, one of the most common root causes of construction errors is late design changes.

But I think it is important to ask: is the design really late — or did construction start too early?

With pressure to show progress and get contractors on site, many projects begin before the design is ready.

But then again, maybe that’s just a matter of perspective.

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Branching out (and clash detection)

I read this in the Hidden Life of Trees.

In a woodland canopy, if two trees of the same species are growing near to each other, their branches won’t overlap.  

But when different species of trees grow side-by-side, they do compete and overlap. 

This incredible. When the tips of tree branches approach one another, they somehow know, and take the most appropriate action. Without drawings, without meetings and with BIM (building information modelling). They sense, respond and coordinate — in realtime and and mid-air. 

Contrast this with a modern, multidisciplinary design team trying to avoid clashes between all the interlacing systems in a building. Even with powerful computer models we find it difficult for one building system not to bump into another. 

The living world makes coordination look easy.