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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.

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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

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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.

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Lead indicators for heat stress resilience

Up until now, my discussion about lead and lag indicators has focused on classic building performance factors. But regenerative designers are concerned with creating wider system thriving. So we need lead indicators for things beyond buildings — indicators that can tell us how well a place is likely to adapt to future challenges.

At a workshop earlier this week, I was discussing predictors of how well my street might cope with extreme heat in the future. For example, a short-term lead indicator is the quality and age of the housing stock. Poorly maintained Victorian terraces are far less likely to keep residents cool during heatwaves than newer, well-insulated buildings. This gives us a near-term view — how is the street likely to perform this year, or in the next few years, in response to extremes of temperature?

But what about the long-term capacity of a place to adapt? Here, we need to look at other factors:

Absent landlords — High numbers of absentee landlords who neglect their properties are a lead indicator of declining housing quality. Poor maintenance means homes will become less resilient to heat stress over time.

Street trees — Whether or not there are mature trees in a street is a good short-term lead indicator for local heat resilience. Trees provide shade and urban cooling, helping reduce both air and building temperatures. But for longer-term resilience, we need to ask: Is there a plan for maintaining these trees? Are new trees being planted? Are existing trees diseased or in decline? Tree planting programmes and maintenance plans are long-term lead indicators of a community’s capacity to adapt to rising temperatures.

Residents’ associations — The existence of active local groups can be a lead indicator of a community’s ability to organise for resilience. These groups might campaign for street greening, lobby for insulation grants, or even collectively purchase retrofit services—actions that build systemic capacity to cope with environmental stress.

And that’s the heart of regenerative design: looking beyond immediate outputs to understand how places can build long-term capacity for thriving. With so many conditions changing — from technological to environmental — the question becomes, does the local system have the capacity to change. That’s a key lead indicator for future thriving. 

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Crowd-sourced building-performance data

Here’s an idea that I would like to throw out into the solar systems and see if anyone can do something with it. 

I was writing yesterday about post-occupancy amnesia — how little attention we, as an industry, pay to how buildings actually perform once they’ve been built. And this got me thinking: what if we could crowdsource that data?

Think about how Google Maps works. It aggregates large amounts of data provided my millions of users to understand traffic flows and levels of occupancy of different location. All from data that individuals give Google permission to aggregate. 

What if we could do something similar for building performance?

Many of our devices already capture data on location, movement and temperature. I imagine they can also collect data on noise and light levels. If enough people opted in it might be possible to gather data on how buildings are actually performing, eg: 

  • How many people are in a building, in what areas and when
  • How they move through spaces
  • What temperatures they experience
  • Light, sound and air quality. 

Triangulated with health data (with the right safeguards) we might see new patterns emerge. Patterns of how the complex systems of people in buildings actually behave. What we learn from these lag indicators can become lead indicators for the buildings we propose for the future might perform. 

Of course, there a big questions. What’s in it for the user? Why would people opt in?

And there are precedents. The Zoe Health Study in the UK gathered huge amounts of data from volunteers who signed up because there was a clear, public health need. Energy use and building performance might not feel as immediate, but as the energy crisis deepens, and we become more concerned about whether our buildings make us healthier or not, this might change. 

And maybe it can start with a smaller group. Maybe a community of building nerds using such an app would give us much more insight than we have now. 

Every building is an experiment. It’s up to us whether we pay attention to the results.

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Post-occupancy amnesia

This week, I’ve been thinking about lead and lag indicators. About how a designer’s job is essentially to predict the future. And about what factors we choose to use when making those predictions.

Where we have precedent, we can use past successes guide what we think is possible in the future. But when we’re working in new territory — unprecedented scenarios, or changing environments — we need new lead indicators to inform the models we build for tomorrow.

Take structural performance. We know a lot about how buildings stand up. That field is well established. But when it comes to energy performance, the field is less so.

It’s only in the last few decades that engineers (and other humans) have paid serious attention to how much energy a building uses to stay warm or cool. More recently still, we’ve started worrying about embodied energy — the energy used in making the materials and building the thing in the first place.

Of course, we now have increasingly sophisticated modelling tools to predict how new buildings will perform. But they are just that: predictions. What I find fascinating is how little attention we seem to pay to what actually happens after the building is built.

I call this phenomenon Post-Occupancy Amnesia.

One of the key ideas in regenerative design is that design is continuous. We don’t just design and disappear. We don’t just predict and leave. We stick around — to learn, to update our models, to deepen our understanding of the systems we’re working with and how our decisions change what they do.

The good news is that every building that currently exists is an experiment already running. Every one of them is producing data on how it actually performs. If we can gather that data, learn from it, and feed it back into our design processes, we’ll stand a much better chance of making smarter predictions for the future.

Maybe it’s time to trade in post-occupancy amnesia for the post-occupancy evaluations we should be doing as a matter of course to improve our models.

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Designers tell the future (part 2)

Yesterday, we looked at how the Gothic cathedral architects of northern France used precedent to guide what could be built next.

But what happens when there’s no precedent?

When Antoni Gaudí was designing the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, there was no precedent for the complex geometries he wanted to build. So, he created a model: using hanging chains and sandbags to mimic the geometry and loading of the cathedral’s roof.

This physical model acted as a lead indicator, giving Gaudí insight into whether his structure would stand up. When there’s no precedent, you can’t ask “does that look right?”—because you’ve never seen it before.

The reliability of this kind of lead indicator depends on the accuracy and appropriateness of the model. Selecting or creating the right model improves with training and experience.

Engineers build models all the time. In fact, every engineering calculation is a model of the future. A structural stability calculation gives us a lead indicator about whether a structure is going to stand up. Engineers work very hard to make sure these models are as accurate as possible.

But they are still just models. The truth comes after the fact: did the building actually stand up? That’s the lag indicator. And in those rare cases where something goes wrong, this new knowledge gets fed back into better models for the future.

Thankfully, very few buildings in the UK fall down due to bad modelling. That’s because this feedback loop—between model, reality, and revised model—is quite advanced.

But what about the other areas of engineering where we don’t close the loop?

That’s a question for tomorrow.

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Designers tell the future

Yes, it’s true, designers tell the future. At least that’s what people employ a designer to do when they take them on.

Design takes existing situations and turns them into better ones. Given a design brief, a designer can say this is what the future can be like. This is what we could do here. 

Now you may think I’ve let myself off the hook here, by shifting from will to could. So let’s clarify. Designers are usually very discerning in saying what the future is for, say, a piece of land under development, or a product innovation.

Why? Because they are professionals and their reputation rests on how accurately they can predict what is and isn’t the future of a particular project.

So how do designers get this superpower? By using lead and lag indicators.

The gothic cathedral designers of northern France didn’t use finite element analysis calculations to work out how to construct ever taller cathedrals. Instead they looked at what worked on the last one, and said: we can probably go a bit taller, a bit narrower. 

And so starting with Noyon cathedral in 1150 to Beauvais cathedral in 1225, a sequence of six increasingly ambitious cathedrals were built, all in the same region of France. 

For each cathedral, is the structure standing is a lag indicator that it was a sound design. For the next cathedral design, does the design look like the previous one that worked is a lead indicator that the next one will stand up too. 

In this way, designers use precedents of the past as predictors of the future. Each one acted as a lag indicator for the next—a tangible proof of what was possbile. 

But there are limits to this approach. At Beauvais, the builders reached the edge of possibility at that time. The tower collapsed several times before construction was abandoned. Today, it remains a fascinating half-finished monument—the tallest Gothic nave in the world, abruptly stopping where the tower should have been.

Using lag indicators as predictors of the future can only take us so far. They show us what has been achieved. But they can’t tell us what’s next, especially if the next step reaches too far, or if the conditions are changing.

That’s where we need a different kind of lead indicator.

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Lead and lag indicators in design

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about lead and lag indicators in design.

Whether you floss is a good lead indicator of the health of your teeth. How many fillings you have is a lag indicator.

How many enquiries I have in my business is a lead indicator for revenue. What I end up invoicing is a lag indicator.

Lead indicators are predictors. You can influence them, but they aren’t guarantees. Lag indicators tell us what happened. You can’t change them, but you can learn from them.

We need both in design.

I have many fillings — that’s my lag indicator telling me I didn’t look after my teeth well enough in the past. I now floss — that’s my lead indicator suggesting I’ll still be smiling about my teeth in the future.