Category: For engineers (and other humans)

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.