Oliver’s daily(ish) blog on creativity, regenerative design and practical philosophy drawn from across my teaching, writing and collaborations. Sign up for his weekly digest by clicking here and choosing the appropriate button.
- Stacked multiple ‘beanifits’Beans. Fix nitrogen in the soil when they grow, increasing soil health in the process. Are a useful replacement for more carbon-intensive protein sources such as meat Require a third …
- The simplest embodied carbon calculationBuild less.
- Complete idiomAs the idiom goes: Jack of all trades, master of none. But did you know this is only half of it. The full idiom is: Jack of all trades, master …
- I’m so glad I came to your meetingWhat would make someone say this? How you greet them? The thought you put into the structure? Checking what they need to participate? The care in deciding who attends? The …
- Does power support change?Earlier this week I wrote about designers needing to understand the conditions for change. What enables change and what blocks it? If we understand organisational culture as how things get …
- Never mind the aurochs…here’s the Tauros. I read last week that Aurochs were the third heaviest mammals to wander Europe, after woolly mammoths and their sartorial companions, woolly rhinoceroses. Aurochs were like giant …
- What’s holding the current situation in place?Design is about making change. Our aim is to turn an existing situation into a better situation. Sometimes that might be about designing a new thing. But other times it …
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- Where we make but also where we takeThis has become one of my catchphrases in regenerative design*. To think of design as being for ‘where we make but also where we take’. The role of the regenerative …
- Just build lessMore and more people are asking: how do we move from sustainable design to regenerative design? In these conversations, we often talk about system change. We talk about strengthening the …
- Seeing the latent potentialAs Rob Hopkins points out in his wonderful book From What Is to What If, the climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the imagination. If we can’t …
- I’m an engineer, I feel your pain and I have a planThis little refrain is my version of Aristotle’s three artistic truths for making a convincing argument. Aristotle proposed three things were needed to win people over. The first is ethos …
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- Think of a world without any emailThis came up in a workshop yesterday so I am sharing it today. There will be a time in the future for a longer set of posts on how engineers …
- Designers as outsiders… and insidersAs designers we are outsiders. The norm is the middle lane. But we want to make things better. To change the direction of travel. To advocate for something different. Choosing …
- The signal and the coincidenceYesterday at a workshop I am attending (more on this soon), I was given a slip of paper with a question to reflect on. It said: How do we make …
- The wrong (moment to put on your waterproof) trousersThis is a post for the cycling decision-makers among you. It may resonate even if you don’t cycle. Variations on the question of whether, if it starts raining when cycling, …
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- You only learn when you do difficult thingsThis is my catchphrase for the start of workshops: ‘You only learn when you do difficult things.’ It is a reminder to expect things to be difficult when we try …
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- The past, present and future at the same time
In conversations about regenerative design we draw heavily on Bill Sharpe’s Three-Horizons Model because it allows us to make sense of a complex situation. In any group of people collaborating on a …Continue reading “The past, present and future at the same time”
- On the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and teaching designIn the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics that people could …
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- Design versus shoppingI’ve said it elsewhere, and so now I’m saying it here. If the client knows exactly what they want at the start of a design process, then it isn’t design …
- 340-degree visionI read on a fact sheet that guinea pigs have 340-degree vision. On a horizontal plane they can see almost all around. Imagine! Their only blind spots are directly behind …
- Mindset leverageAre you excited about the possibilities of your next project? Or worried about the unknowns? Do you see the possibility for competition or collaboration? There is not a part of …
- The ScheduleI am sharing today a schedule I use in my work every time the noise from distractions gets too much and/or I don’t actually think I am making any progress …
- Start with your scalesI was taught to start my music practice by playing my scales. Starting with your scales: Starting with your scales doesn’t just apply to instruments. It applies to any work where …
- Field notes from chaos(This is another archive post from September 2024 — re-reading it, I realise there’s potential to create a new pattern book motif on chaos, how we work with it, and …
- Harnessing Waves in Our Work
(This post from the archive originally appeared in September 2024, and became a motif in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design) Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s theme of riding … - Riding the waveI spent most of yesterday afternoon up to my middle in waves learning to surf [this is a repost from the archive, so this didn’t actually happen yesterday!]. I’ve got …
- The Great FlatteningJim Crace’s book Harvest provides fascinating portrait of rural life in England just before the start of the Industrial Revolution. What is so striking is the way the pattern of life is …
- Clash of system goals
I took this photo at Étampes station. It shows a nineteenth-century roof that spans four platforms with no internal columns. And then, right in the middle of that column-free space, … - Smoothing things outOne of earliest childhood memories of travel is riding in the back of the car driving along a motorway in mountains in the north of Italy. To traverse a terrain …
- Go (notes on complexity)My favourite board game is Go. A 19 by 19 board. White stones versus black. You win by surrounding your opponent’s stones before they surround yours. The game has just …
- Machine workInputs Outputs KPIs Tools Models Performance Quantitative analysis Scaling up Accelerator Dashboard Timesheet Human resources Bottom line When we think of our work as the work of a machine, then …
- Metaphorical measure expressionsIn a recent workshop, I heard someone say, I wouldn’t touch that with a barge pole. While I kept my game face on, my pedantic, literal inner voice started wondering, …
- A full basket of regenerative design learning opportunitiesThere’s a lot of ideas in this week’s blog posts, which if you are reading this in the weekly digest you can scroll down, but before you do, lets quickly …
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- Visions that abstract us/ visions that ground usMany vision statements float in the abstract. To be a global leader… To minimise store-to-door time… They sound clear, but they ignore the ecology and community that make the work …
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- Get on the ground and start moving aroundIn the early days of the internet, you had to know a website’s URL in order to visit it. Companies like Yahoo! set themselves up as way-finders. Visit their site …
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- Teaching theory versus the inconveniences of realityTheory is abstraction. It is an understanding that is distilled of the inconveniences of reality to allow us to make predictions about that reality. Most engineering degrees start with the …
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- Overcoming the status quoA system rests at equilibrium because that is its most likely position. Any spare energy is used up by processes — feedback loops — that keep returning the part of …
- Ripe learning opportunities from moments of transition Transitions are ripe moments for reflection on action. When we’re in the flow of delivery, we rarely have the chance to pause and ask what we’re really doing or why. …
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- Capitalism/woodalism
Some days I get to work in the big city; others I get to work in the woods – lucky me! The feeling I get in approaching these two venues … - Getting on with regenerative designEarlier this month, the Structural Engineer magazine published a review of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design by Eva MacNamara, Director at Expedition. What I loved about Eva’s review was …
- Exposed ironwork
Spotted yesterday. Beautiful cast iron brackets for a cantilever roof outside Taunton Station. - Pattern book field notes – action learning and continuous place-based design
This week I took my copy of the Pattern Book to Cambridge. (Its second visit: in July I dropped it — and my laptop — in a puddle. Both recovered, …Continue reading “Pattern book field notes – action learning and continuous place-based design”
- Learning as a design process
In a flip of yesterday’s post — if design can be a learning process, then learning can be a design process too. What would it look like to approach learning … - Design as a learning processMany projects treat design as a problem with a fixed answer. But what if we treated design as learning journey? In a complex world, design needs to be a responsive …
- The dream walk experiment at Hazel Hill WoodLast week at Hazel Hill Wood we ran a ‘dream walk’ with staff and trustees. The aim was to tune into our long-term hopes and aspirations for the site, as …
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- Consult your hopes and dreams — part of what a place is trying to doThe first stage in continuous place-based design is observation. It is a beginning that says before we do anything different here we need to try and understand this place. The …
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- Core tools for regenerative design now online
I am happy to announce that we have now published online our set of free-to-use core tools for regenerative design. These nine tools are central to our teaching in the …Continue reading “Core tools for regenerative design now online”
- A process for processing processesProcesses make life easier, help us involve more people, guarantee quality and conserve our attention for other things. But only if they work. The first time we do something, part …
- Emergent marketing – the RDL Cohorts for 2026I’ve noticed recently how often a controlling mindset can creep in when I think about how we spread the word around the regenerative design lab. That controlling mindset seems to …
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- Fluorescent creativityFluorescent colours look brighter than the colours around them. That’s because fluorescent materials absorb light from the ultraviolet spectrum — which we can’t see — and re-emit it in the …