Blog

Posted on

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

Posted on

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. 

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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. 

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

What to Do When You’re Stuck – Turning the Kalideascope in Conceptual Design

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.

Read more about our Introduction to Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers course.

Find out more