Category: For engineers (and other humans)

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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. 

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Cabin in the woods (a preview)

Tucked between Douglas Fir and regenerating birch, there’s a small green oak cabin at Hazel Hill Wood. From its windows and door, all you can see is woodland. 

The cabin was gifted to the Trust by our founder, Alan Heeks, and yesterday I worked with a group of volunteers to give it a spring clean. We’re hoping to bring it back to life — maybe as a writer’s cabin, maybe a solo retreat space.

I can vouch for it as a place to write. This is where I drafted the Critical Thinking training for Useful Simple Trust (some of which made it into the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design). It is also where I have written many blog posts. 

In time, I’d love to see team leaders or designers using the space — staying a night or two and putting their plans through a series of regenerative prompts. And they might not even need the prompts, as the wood seems to ask questions of you the more time you spend there. 

The cabin still needs a few upgrades, and we’re thinking of launching a crowdfunder to help make it happen. If a solo professional retreat in the woods sounds like your kind of thing, let me know.

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Don’t scale up — scale right

There are no factories in the living world. Or at least if there are, they are very well camouflaged. 

Humans, by contrast, are very attached to factories. By reducing variation and tightly managing the handover between every step of the process – in other words, the relationships – assembly lines can be optimised for throughput.

Profit is often linked to throughput. Both in terms of the per-unit mark-up on a manufactured item, and in terms of dividing fixed costs, the more you make the more money you make. 

And so standardisation becomes the driving factor. Standard inputs, standard processes, uniform outputs. Each variation brings costs and lowers profits. 

Looking out across the understory here at Hazel Hill Wood, I see a certain degree of standardisation. The only plants I see are birch, holly, Douglas Fir, bracken and bramble. But go to a different part of the wood and the variation and balance of species will be different, depending on the specific variations of that location. In each location, the wood finds the best way it can to grow harmoniously. And in each location, that is slightly different.

The regenerative designer seeks to work with that specific variation, not because of some nostalgia for smaller scale construction, but because they recognise the greater potential value that can be unlocked from working with variation. 

Variation does not work at scale. When large teams need be kept up-to-date and coordinated around changes, then the admin overhead quickly balloons. 

All this points towards construction models built around smaller, agile teams—able to turn the specific variations of place into an advantage. Creating designs that are more harmonious (and therefore with fewer hidden costs). And unlocking local, positive feedback loops that strengthen the local economy and ecology. 

If your goal is throughput, scale up. But if your goal is to maximise value across business, ecology and community — then find the scale that lets all these systems flourish.

Scale up for throughput, but scale right for thriving.

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On scale, specialisation and life beyond pins

One of the commonly-cited benefits of scaling-up an operation is to enable individuals to specialise

Adam Smith famously argued that a pin factory, where each worker focused on specific step of the pin-manufacturing process, far more pins could be made than if each worker made whole pins on their own. 

This example has become one of the key doctrines of classical economics. But I find the example disingenuous. 

Firstly, because it is not like before Adam Smith came along there were halls full of pin makers unproductively making pins on their own. More likely, there were people who could make pins — and they could also make a host of other ironmongery — because they skilled in metalwork and a broad range of related skills. 

Life doesn’t just need pins. 

Second, his pin factory only works under a specific set of conditions. 

To make the most of each specialised worker, there must be no bottlenecks from one step to the next. Workers must work in shifts to maintain flow. There can be no variation in output. Input materials must be reliably supplied. Environmental conditions must be tightly controlled. And there must be a constant supply of customers, all buying pins.

But meeting all of these requirements, this now large-scale enterprise starts to exert a gravitational pull of its own. It shapes when, how and for how long people work. Like a giant magnet, supplies of iron are sucked into it. And it shapes what people consume — more pins. 

Scaling up does enable specialisation. And specialisation can increase productivity. But we mustn’t leave the wider costs of specialisation out of the denominator on the productivity equation. 

The regenerative designer asks, not how can I scale up, but how can I find the scale of operation that enables the most parts of the system to benefit?

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The maths of too many meetings

Do you ever feel that all you do is sit in coordination meetings?

If two people work together, then there is one relationship to manage.

By manage, I mean checking in with each other, setting goals, coordinating activity, giving feedback etc.

If three people work together, there’s three individual relationships to manage.

If four people work together, there’s six relationships.

If ten people work together, there’s 45 relationships to manage.

You get the picture. The number of relationships in a group of people quickly blows up as the group size grows.

For a group of n people, the number of individual relationships is n(n-1)/2. In other words, it’s a squared relationship.

And if the number of relationships goes up, so does the number of coordination meetings.

Of course, the reason for growing the number of people in the team is usually to gain productivity. But the gain in productivity has to outweigh the admin burden of coordination.

Doubling the team size means quadrupling the amount of coordination. But does doubling team size really increase output by a factor of 4? If the admin overhead is going up quicker than the output, then productivity is going down.

It’s no wonder that people complain that they are in back-to-back meetings and can’t get any work done.

Perhaps the system has got too large — the means no-longer justify the ends.