Tag: kalideascope

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The dream walk experiment at Hazel Hill Wood

Last 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 we continue the responsibility of creating a thriving place for care and learning.

Hopes and dreams are part of what a place is trying to do. They arise from our relationships with place and help steer the flow of change.

We began with Zuma Puma’s Box-Clearing warm-up (a technique I learnt from one of my clown teachers —more on that in another post), then set out into the woods. The rules were simple:

  • Walk to a place in the wood.
  • Walk with your gaze slightly raised to invite in fun and curiosity (another technique from another clown teacher, Robyn Hambrook) 
  • Share what you’ve always hoped for this place.
  • Imagine how it could be, how it might change.
  • Speak until you’re done.
  • The next person picks up — not to challenge, but to add their own dreams.

We captured dreams in audio and notes, later mapped across the site.

What I learnt from facilitating the process

  • The temptation to say why not is strong — the delivery mindset of Horizon One is never far away. With reminders, we shifted into a more open Horizon Three frame.
  • Some dreams resonated and compounded — one voice building on the next until a vision took shape.
  • Some spots felt dream-silent, as if they were low-energy places. Others flowed with possibility, hinting at where change energy gathers. This was a real ah-ha moment for me.

This dream walk supported three things at once: observation in Continuous Place-Based Design, imagining Horizon Three in the Three Horizons model, and adding inputs to our Kalideascope. 

You could consider carrying out a dream walk where you are: walk, notice, and speak your dreams of place aloud. You might be surprised by what takes shape.

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Fluorescent creativity

Fluorescent 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 visible spectrum.

So while regular colours just reflect light from the part of the spectrum we can see, fluorescent colours borrow light from an unseen realm and shine it back at a frequency we can perceive.

The term highlight feels apt — they really do seem to hold more light.

And it gave me an idea: fluorescent creativity — the kind that brings in ideas from spectra that others on the design team can’t yet see, and makes them visible for the rest of us.

These ideas can shine brighter than anything we’ve encountered before, not because they’re louder, but because they carry energy from unexpected places.

Fluorescent creativity speaks to inviting in different perspectives, and tuning our own sensors into frequencies we hadn’t previously explored.

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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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How to Have Ideas: Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There

Photo of Oliver Broadbent delivering the How to have ideas workshop - standing in front of a slide that says where do ideas come from

Last week, we were at the Institution of Structural Engineers delivering our ‘How to Have Ideas’ workshop to graduate engineers from Ridge Consulting.

Creative thinking is often the gap in the formal education and training of engineers. Yet, in the context of the climate emergency and a rapidly changing economy, creative thinking is crucial for developing designs that meet the needs of people and our wider ecology.

Continue reading “How to Have Ideas: Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There”
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Buying Bags of Kaleidoscopes: reflecting on how far ideas in teaching can travel

Photograph showing the sign outside the Cambridge university department of engineering

Today, Oliver concluded his series of six workshops as part of the Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment (IDBE) Masters program in Cambridge. In this final session, participants reviewed the material covered over the last five sessions, spread out over two years, and set objectives for their continued professional growth.

The series of six lectures aimed to integrate collaborative design skills into the Masters program, focusing on both creativity and collaboration.

Continue reading “Buying Bags of Kaleidoscopes: reflecting on how far ideas in teaching can travel”
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Lunar Sprint: Aligning Work with Living Cycles

The regenerative designer uses living systems as a guide for how to live as part of and contribute to the wider thriving of our living systems. The Living Systems Blueprint is our rough guide to thinking and designing like living systems.

Understanding living work rhythms

One of the dimensions we need to consider is how we relate to rates of work. Very few living systems work at a constant rate; rather, they go through cycles of production and restoration. These cycles of work often mirror the larger physical cycles that we all experience: the passing of the day, the lunar month, and the turning of the seasons. By aligning periods of work with times when there is more energy available, living systems can be more energetically efficient.

Humans in the Global North once lived much more closely in tune with natural cycles. But the availability of cheap energy has decoupled many of our activities from these living rhythms. Yes, we still sleep every day, but the length of the working day does not necessarily reflect the amount of light available. Our system of weeks and months is decoupled from the living world, and there is very little variation in our patterns to reflect the seasons.

The Cost of Constant Output

The invention of the production line in the twentieth century created the ideal of producing constant output. But this requires a large amount of energy to maintain, and in the case of humans, that includes mental energy.

If we want to live and thrive within our ecosystem’s limits, it makes sense to think about how we too can return to more cyclical rhythms of working, ones that relate to the large-scale physical cycles that dominate the living world. This is where the concept of the lunar sprint comes into play.

Benefits of Cyclical Work Rhythms

Working in a more cyclical way offers several benefits:

  • Human Thriving: Creating a balance between periods of work and nourishment that enable that work.
  • Better Tuning: Helping us better tune in to what the living world is doing, allowing us to listen to its feedback and learn from how it works.
  • Energy Alignment: Giving us the chance to align our work with times when there is more abundant energy available in the system.
  • Inclusivity: Honouring and tuning into the rhythms of many people who menstruate, acknowledging their natural cycles.

Introducing the Lunar Sprint

Working with cycles is already familiar to people who use agile ‘sprints’—short bursts of activity to deliver a specific output followed by a period of rest, mirroring how living systems operate. The concept of the lunar sprint is to take the agile sprint one step further and map it to a physical cycle—the lunar month.

The lunar sprint operates between two poles: the new moon, when we think about what is possible, and the full moon, which is showtime, the day when we present our work. Here’s how the cycle of design work could map out:

  1. New Moon – The time of greatest darkness. Time to gather stakeholders and imagine what is possible, what the next phase of work could deliver.
  2. Waxing Crescent – Starting to turn ideas into plans. Lining up the resources to do this cycle’s work.
  3. First Quarter – Focus on producing output. Peak production. Turn off the critical voice and amass ideas. Fill the Kalideascope.
  4. Waxing Gibbous – Starting to edit and improve.
  5. Full Moon – The time of greatest light, when there are no shadows on the moon. This is the time to go live, present your ideas, launch the product, etc.
  6. Waning Gibbous – Harvest, write up, share the outputs, gather feedback. Pay and get paid.
  7. Third Quarter – Give back to the system that enabled you to do the work. Teach, mentor. Sharpen the tools and tidy up.
  8. Waning Crescent – Nourish yourself, read, reflect on what you have done. Rest in readiness for the next cycle.
  9. And repeat.

Living in Tune with the Living World through Lunar Sprints

The lunar sprint includes many of the usual parts of a project process, balancing these with paying attention to nurturing the parts of the system that enable us to do our work. By linking this work to a physical cycle, it allows us to step into living in tune with the living world. It enables us, in the words of Daniel Wahl, ‘to live the question’ of What if we were to live like the rest of the living world?