Tag: ProfessionalPalette

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Building my regenerative professional palette

I don’t really have a professional palette for regenerative design like I do for structural design. Or at least I don’t think I do. But what I realise is that whereas in structural design I often talk about material and form, in regenerative design, we are interested in systems. The elements of the palette therefore are not shapes and materials but system characteristics and functionality. 

I spent most yesterday thinking about how I was going to follow on from this sequence of posts about professional palettes — how I was going to describe a regenerative palette. 

Then, this morning, fresh brained, I looked at the tiny courgette plant on my garden table and started thinking about it from a functional perspective. As a series of processes and relationships. The result was yesterday’s post about the Compound-Aggregating Regenerative Food Production Device. 

Now, having written that piece, I can distill some underlying questions that enabled me to write it. Questions for investigating systems in the living world, that help us distill how they work and think about how we work with and design systems. Questions like:

  • Why is it the shape it is?
  • How does the system scale?
  • How is information transmitted?
  • How does the system grow from simple elements to complex functions?
  • Where do the resources come from and go to?
  • What happens at the beginning and what happens when the system is no longer needed?
  • What roles do humans play in these living systems?

These questions help us discover the paints for the regenerative palette. 

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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.