Cognitive Debt – Smithery
“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts| Smithery
I am delighted to announce that Futures Through Design, the three-day course I designed and led with with Rob Phillips and Gem Barton at the Royal College of Art in London this summer, is returning in late February 2026. There are lots of reasons I’m really pleased we’re able to run it again, but right […]| Smithery
I went to a brilliant event last night at Arup in London. After a talk from Michael Pawlyn for the launch of the third edition of his book Biomimicry in Architecture, he joined a panel (Charlie Warwick, Jo da Silva, Andy Chalmers & Tom Lloyd) to discuss how to push beyond a ‘sustainable’ building industry […]| Smithery
Mark Zuckerberg has trouble performing. And I’m not just talking about his ongoing, stilted stage appearances at announcement events (Steve Jobs, he is not). It’s his AI Performance. At the 2025 Meta Connect event, the demo of the AI glasses glitched pretty badly not just once, but twice. Firstly, Mark hands over to chef Jack […] The post Zuck has a performance problem appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
Last Friday (12th Sept), Pins Brown and Sam Jarman led a Deep Time Walk for The STEPS Collective around Devil’s Dyke on the South Downs near Brighton. A Deep Time Walk is a 4.6km walk through 4.6bn years. Each one metre step, therefore, represents a million years. Thanks to the UK weather, it certainly felt […] The post Deep Time Walk with The STEPS Collective appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
Calling Arno Penzias I want to talk about Arnos Penzias and his idea about the Surface Area of an organisation. I’ve been an EE (“Everything Everywhere”) customer for years now. I was an Orange customer before that, so just drifted over in the rebrand. I probably stayed because of inertia, but an inertia rooted in […] The post Organisational Surface Area appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
I received a really interesting email from Radko Kovachev at the Institute for Circular Economy in Bulgaria, asking about how to apply the Regenerative Design Field Kit which they had bought to a fascinating project they are working on. Rather than just email back, we agreed to put this up as blog post, so others […] The post Creating place-based regenerative explorations appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts| Smithery
Ten years ago, I came across this story online – somebody had rescued six large reading desks from the demolition of Birmingham Central Library. And that person lived locally to me down in Sussex. I arranged to get two; one for me, and one for Carlo too. For about seven years or so, I used […] The post A new home for an old desk appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
Last month, I ran a ‘workshop about workshops’ for the good folks in Nesta’s Discovery Team. We played the world’s best warm-up game of Mundane Superhero, through the core theory of Information as Light, not Liquid, some hands-on mapping and clustering, a spot of LEGO Empathy Mapping, and more besides. In a way, it was […] The post Kaleidoscopes – Mechanisms for Meaningful Meetings appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
Back in summer 2023, I wrote a post on an idea I’d had called Regenerative Triangulation. It was the first time I’d expressed it publicly, yet Lizzie Shupak asked me nearly immediately to do a talk on it as part of a London Climate Action Week thing she was hosting at the RSA. And from […] The post An introduction to Regenerative Triangulation appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
I am running a one-off elective, called Design Innovation: Venture Creation as part of the Design Futures programme at The Royal College of Art over the next nine weeks. I wanted to set out a particular angle on this elective, to push further into the sort of ventures we need more of in future. This […] The post Design Innovation: Venture Creation appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
I’ve been using Bluesky quite a bit, now that I’ve deleted Twitter. And trying out what it’s like to craft micro explorations there. The following was a series of five ‘skeets’ (no, seriously, let’s not call them that), that I thought was worth sharing here too. A thing @nicksherrard.bsky.social said this morning has been nagging me. “Maybe we’ll just […] The post Writing in the age of AI appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
