Category: News

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Canvas and Twill — the patterns for two new short courses in regenerative design

More and more design teams are committing to regenerative principles and goals in their projects. This is very promising. But it also raises the question, how do upskill a team in a way that is both quick and meaningful?

The Pattern Book gives us two starting points:

  • Pattern 01: Canvas — for teams who want to start with observing real systems and move to theory.
  • Pattern 02: Twill — for teams who want to start with theory and move to observation of real systems.

I’ve used these two patterns to create two new short online courses.

Feeling the Future, and

Seeing the System.

Both are designed as a rapid introduction to regenerative design. They don’t do the deep work (you have to do that). But they will give you a strong foundation to build from, ground in the frameworks we use in the Regenerative Design Lab.

Pick the course that suits your learning style. And please tell your friends and colleagues. Thanks!

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Field notes: the Kalideascope meets the Ambition Loop

This week I was invited to run an afternoon session for the Engineers Without Borders UK Systems Change Lab at their event in Glasgow. This event is part of their wider programme to create system change in engineering education to build globally responsible engineering. 

My brief was to prompt some creative thinking as part of the ‘develop’ phase in their programme. The session was an opportunity to pair two tools that I have previously used separately in our facilitation at Constructivist: the Kalideascope and the Ambition Loop. 

For years I’ve been developing and refining the Kalideascope as a structured model for divergent thinking. It helps users move beyond one initial idea by gathering a wide range of inputs, capturing questions and creating the conditions for new connections to emerge. 

While the Kalideascope generates lots of ideas, we need a different tool for the convergent thinking that enables us to choose between ideas and improve on them. So here I brought in the Ambition Loop — a tool that Bill Sharpe introduced us to in the Regenerative Design Lab to help identify what ideas have the potential to create systems change. The Ambition Loop model helps us by going beyond testing our ideas against the brief to testing how ideas can be taken up by and amplified within a systems. 

This pairing of the Kalideascope with the Ambition Loop created a strong arc for the session. The first tool expands the fields of possibilities. The second homes in on the ideas that the system might take up. 

I am seeing that with the Ambition Loop model that it tends to draw out questions about who we need to partner with to make change. 

If you have a copy of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, I suggest, like me, you annotate the end of the Kalideascope entry to say that it works well paired with the Ambition Loop motif as a divergent-convergent pair.

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Two new short courses on regenerative design — launching next week

Over the last couple of months we’ve been preparing two new online courses introducing regenerative design, and we’re almost ready to launch them.

They’re practice-based introductions for engineers (and other humans) who want to understand the language around regenerative design and how to begin to start thinking regeneratively on projects.

Next Tuesday these two new courses will go live on the Constructivist website:

Feeling the Future — for people who prefer to begin with observation, story, and intuition, and build toward frameworks.

Seeing the System — for those who like to start with systems thinking, then explore how those models show up in lived experience.

Both courses will cover almost exactly the same content, but just organised differently depending on your learning preferences.

Both are four-week online courses. Both are rooted in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. And both are designed to enter more confidently into regenerative thinking.

More details (and booking links) coming next Tuesday.

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Pattern Book Notes: Kalideascope + System Survey

My intention with the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is that users can share with each other how they have used the tools and techniques within. So, kicking off this process, this is how I used two motifs two weeks ago to run a lunch for team at Elliott Wood to support an internal regenerative design competition they are running. 

Building a Kalideascope

If a group of people are working with a written design brief, then my starting point for creative thinking is to get them to build a Kalideascope. The groups write three headings on a large piece of paper: information, questions and ideas. I then get them to read the brief out very slowly and everytime something that comes to mind under any of these headings, they must shout stop, and write it down, before the reader can start again. 

The exercise is a quick method to generate lots of thinking. 

To add a regenerative lens to it, I prefaced the exercise by reading out the motif on Beavers. This motif primes listeners to think about the potential stacked multiple benefits of our interventions. 

Systems Survey

To tune the group deeper into regenerative thinking, I then read out the questions in the Systems Survey. These are questions that combine the theory of the Living Systems Blueprint with a civil engineering site survey perspective. 


The questions are:

  1. What is connected and what is separated?
  2. What is thriving and what is in decline?
  3. What is in flow and what is static?
  4. What is changing and is fixed?
  5. What stories does this place tell?
  6. What is the placing trying to do — and what helps or hinders it?

I read each question out and gave groups 3-4mins to populate their Kalideascopes with any new information, questions and ideas. 

Overall, it felt like a high-energy session and I think people went away with new ideas on how to bring regenerative thinking into their design process.

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Field notes: Book launch pattern sequence

This evening we held the London launch for the Pattern Book, hosted by our friends at Elliott Wood in the Society Building. 

I often describe the Pattern Book  as a build-your-own adventure practice guide for regenerative thinking. And as is befitting this format, the talk I gave was a build-my-own-adventure journey through my favourite short motifs in the book.

And that’s the point of the book. To stitch the motifs together to create a pattern for talking about, practising and bring people on a journey through regenerative design. 

My pattern sequence was as follows:

The Goal of Regenerative Design > Beavers > Short-term design from anywhere > Living World > Second Site > Carrier Wave > Harvesting Abundance > Fossil Fuel Friction Free > Practiiice > Systems Survey > Thriving.

In the Q&A there was a question around scaling, in response to which I talked about modularity and scaling out (see my recent post on six-foot slugs). There was also a great question about working with sceptical audiences, which gave me a chance to talk through  Pattern 07 Pinstripe — For Developers and Asset Managers. 

All of which gives me clues about how I can tweak my pattern sequence for future book talks. 

In case you missed the talk, this week on the blog I’ll be serialising some of my favourite short motifs from the talk pattern sequence. 

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Field Notes — The Agora

This week I facilitated the final sessions in our Critical Thinking series for the Useful Simple Trust.

The programme takes participants through four rooms in the mind of a critical thinker. We began by gathering data in the Observatory, analysing these inputs in the Map Room, and then deciding between courses of action in the Decision Engine.

This final stage is called the Agora, from the Ancient Greek for marketplace. This workshop is about stepping into the public square to speak persuasively.

We held the sessions in a real theatre—a technique I first experienced 16 years ago on a training course with Linda Meyer, when I began working at the Useful Simple Trust.

But before we stepped on stage, we began in Catalytic mode— a conversational style I learned from Nick Zienau on another formative course. Catalytic Style builds trust and empathy — two essential elements of persuasive communication.

The final piece in this persuasion triptych is clarity. For this, we used the stage itself—moving across it to physically map out our key points and structure an argument in space.

To conclude, participants gave short presentations that drew on key insights from across the programme, using techniques from the workshop to build compelling, well-structured arguments grounded in critical thinking.

With the final curtain drawn, the ball is now in the court of the participants. The real work begins in applying this thinking to daily practice. That’s when the hard work starts — but as we like to say at Constructivist, you only learn when you do difficult things.

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Field notes: operating the Decision Engine

I’ve written lots of posts this week on decision-making, and that’s because I have run three rounds of The Decision Engine workshop — part three in our Critical Thinking programme. 

The Decision Engine imagines decision-making as a production line that we build and operate. A decision travels through this system — starting with how the question is framed, moving through decision criteria, weighing subjective and objective factors, and arriving (eventually) at a decision.

It’s a model I first helped develop at Think Up during our 2015 collaboration with Arup on the Conceptual Design Mastery programme. Since then, I’ve developed it to account for everything from emotional data and gut feel to AI and emergent behaviour.

But the point is not to turn decision-making into a laborious stepwise process, but rather to build critical insight into our personal and group decision-making. 

Interesting questions that have fallen out of this week’s workshops include:

Should you start with developing ideas or agreeing your decision-making criteria?

Are we deciding — or are we building the mechanism by which other people decide?

What’s the role of subjectivity, and how do we get better at working with it?

When is a good time to decide?

And how do we continuously learn from our decisions.

Plenty to chew on, including whether we could run a day-long, stand-alone course on decision-making in future. Watch this space. 

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Sleep, subconscious and napping at work.

This week we ran an online session in our Critical Thinking series exploring a topic not usually found in professional training agendas: sleep and the subconscious.

We often ask the question: When do you get your best ideas? Unsurprisingly, no one said “at my desk.” We usually use the question to explore idea generation, but here it opened the door to a deeper conversation about how insights often arise when we’re not consciously trying—on walks, in the shower, while dozing off.

We introduced the idea that our subconscious is always working, quietly filtering, sorting, and remixing our experiences. But like a party next door, we can only hear it if we turn the mental volume down.

We looked at:

  • The role of sleep cycles (NREM for data sorting, REM for pattern generation)
  • The value of unstructured time in creativity
  • Whether we should actually be paid to nap at work
  • How all this supports critical thinking at every stage of the OODA loop

Perhaps surprisingly, we started with a short guided meditation—done in the middle of a busy office—helped participants notice just how noisy their minds are, and what might be waiting underneath.

Sometimes our best thinking begins when we stop.

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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

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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.