Creativity training and teaching for engineers
My recent food harvesting metaphor keeps on bearing fruit!
I arrive at a workshop to see a buffet of fruit.
Tasty, but I wager none of it is local and most only half of it is in season.
So what we have is a system that is very good and delivering out of season fruit from far away while local, in-season fruit wilts on the trees.
If you were to start from a blank sheet of paper you wouldn’t design this.
A system that is efficient and scaled up in every step.
And absurd in its outcome.
Yesterday I wrote about the seven levels of a forest garden. I learnt about these at a talk given in the forest garden at Coed Hills Rural Arts Centre. The forest garden there is a flourishing, food producing space, but it hadn’t always been so. We heard how in 2009 the garden had been a field. And so how did the field become the thriving place we see today?
I’m interested in this question because it tells of taking active measures to create flourishing places. Left to its own devices the space would have brambled over, trees would have taken root and eventually the field would have become wood. But through active intervention, the team have created a space that is more flourishing than dense woodland would be — productive and in balance with its ecosystem.
Key early moves include designing the space for the way the light falls. Forest gardens have lots of openings to let in the light, and so this structure needs to be thought about from the start.
Another key factor was slowing down water that would run across the site in a storm and directing it through a series of swales. This was another dramatic intervention but one that has protected the soil from erosion and created ponds and multiple habitats.
And finally, the team spoke about the work of holding things in balance until a natural balance could be achieved. For example, until the high trees grow tall, there can be too much light and the ground level plants grow out of control. Again this speaks to an active intervention needed in the transtion from a monoculture to a thriving polyculture.
Most of the time, when humans build stuff, we have a negative overall impact on the world. Some say the best thing we can do is to stand back and let nature do its thing. But models such as forest gardening show how we can actively work with ecosystems to meet our needs while creating greater flourishing. We need to find the analogous models in construction, for example, for sourcing our construction materials. And we need to recognise that creating these supply chains will take many years of work before they can exist in harmony.
The following I learnt from Steve Watts, permaculture expert, during a talk he gave about Forest Gardens at the wonderful Coedfest, which he co-leads.
In a forest garden, plants and trees are layered over one another to create a growing system that is far more productive and diverse than farming a single crop on an area of land.
By stacking layers of complementary plants and trees over one another, you increase the amount of carbon that is being locked in, you increase the leaf litter that falls and so you increase the richness of the soil.
As Steve describes we can think of a forest garden has having seven layers:
Each of these layers can produce food at different times of the year, and each of these layers provides a complementary role to the others. It is a beautiful model for a stacked system that is creating life. And it is a reminder that when we bring different systems together in complementary ways we can create much greater richness and diversity than we keep things separate.
Earlier this month, we unveiled the Pattern Book project, an innovative workbook designed to guide professionals in the built environment towards regenerative design principles. The Pattern Book is the next evolution in the development of the Regenerative Design Lab.
The Pattern Book aims to be an emergent, collaborative resource, offering a collection of tools, techniques, and resources under Creative Commons.
Continue reading “The Pattern Book – a new collaborative project in regenerative thinking”“We see in patterns, we recognize patterns, we create patterns. To create a world in which construction brings about thriving rather than destruction, we need new patterns for thinking about how we design and build,”
Oliver Broadbent
The Regenerative Design Lab community is growing. In 2022, the first 20 people began their journey through our pilot of the lab. Now over 50 people have completed the lab programme (and some of them have been through twice!).
So now our work as conveners of the Lab is as much about nourishing this existing community of regenerative practitioners as it is about recruiting more. And so to help support and further the work of this group of change-makers, we are holding our second summer research workshop.
Continue reading “Announcing the Regenerative Design Lab Summer Research Workshop”
Continuous place-based design is distinct from its opposite: short-term design from anywhere.
Engineers and architects often design buildings, but their true impact is on places—the communities and ecosystems that inhabit them. If we want our work to create genuinely positive outcomes for both humans and the wider living world, we need to move beyond an isolated focus on buildings and shift towards a deeper understanding of place. So how can we evolve our design philosophy to support the creation of thriving places?
Places are complex living systems, full of people and other species, shaped by relationships and constant change. In such systems, we cannot fully predict the impact of the changes we introduce. Instead, we learn by doing—by making small interventions, observing their effects, and adjusting accordingly. Long-term engagement with place is essential for truly understanding how it works.
This gives us our first clue: design must be an ongoing process, not a one-off intervention.
A second clue comes from recognising that every place is unique, and that uniqueness becomes even more pronounced the deeper we look. How can we possibly create designs that embrace such diversity? The living world offers a model: evolution. Nature doesn’t rely on rigid masterplans—it works iteratively, testing variations, adapting over time, and responding to changing conditions. The result is a best-fit design for the specific ecological, cultural, and environmental context.
If we take these two starting points seriously, then instead of asking “What do we want to do to this place?”, we should begin by asking:
From this foundation, design can emerge gradually—guided by the dynamics of the place itself. Small interventions can be tested, refined, and expanded, always with an eye on how the system is responding. This shifts design from being a one-time act imposed from outside to an ongoing process that works with that place, learns from that place, and evolves alongside it.
We call this Continuous Place-Based Design (Broadbent and Norman).
Traditional design often begins with a design brief—a predefined problem to be solved. But Continuous Place-Based Design, with its focus on working with the existing dynamics of a place rather than imposing change from outside, begins with observation.
Observation means more than a desk study or mapping exercise. It requires time spent in a place—experiencing it from different perspectives, noticing rhythms, interactions, and patterns of change. But observation isn’t just the first step. It is something we return to again and again, each time we make a change.
From observation, we begin to sense what is needed. The brief emerges as a way of distilling these needs into a set of design requirements.
In traditional design, the brief is often seen as something to resolve upfront—reducing uncertainty as quickly as possible. But the Designer’s Paradox reminds us that a brief is never fully known at the start; understanding of the brief unfolds through the act of designing itself.
Continuous Place-Based Design embraces this reality. The brief evolves over time, but it doesn’t necessarily converge to a single, finalised solution. Each iteration is the best response for now, while recognising that every intervention changes the system—and with it, the design brief itself.
The creative phase of the process is deeply influenced by the place itself. Ideas are not imposed from outside but emerge from the system we are designing within.
The designer’s role is not just to generate ideas, but to facilitate the emergence of ideas from place—to see what is latent, what is already forming, what might be supported. At the same time, by embedding ourselves in a place, we too become part of its system. Our ideas are shaped by this connection, rather than being external impositions.
This is where we intervene—where design moves from thought to action. We begin making changes to the system.
Interventions can range from small-scale tests to large-scale changes—though an important principle stands: start small, learn, then scale out. Through making, we begin to see how the system responds.
For example, in a housing development, instead of building an entire estate at once, we might start with a few houses, observing how the place changes and adapts before expanding further. The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to work with the unforeseen consequences of our design decisions—using them as feedback to refine and update the brief.
Having made our changes to the system, we go back to observation. But we are not back where we started: the system we are designing in has changed and we too are changed by that process. We become a more integrated part of the system we are designing in, better able to facilitate change that will bring forward thriving in that place.
We cannot learn if we simply hop from one project to another, designing in isolation. The longer we stay with a place, the deeper our understanding grows—and the better we become as designers. Over time, this commitment to learning allows us to create thriving, living places that are much more in sync with their human and ecological context.
Broadbent, O. and Norman, J. (2024) The Regenerative Structural Engineer. London: The Institution of Structural Engineers.
Continue reading “Continuous Place-Based Design”
The goal of regenerative design is for human and living systems to survive, thrive and co-evolve. Understanding what this looks like is challenging when so much of how industry currently operates does the opposite. In this post we explore the best guide we have to thriving – the living world itself. We call this the Living Systems Blueprint.
Continue reading “The Living Systems Blueprint”