Notebooks have been a huge part of my personal and working life for as long as I can remember. Almost everything I do, whether it’s writing, designing, planning, or thinking, begins on paper in some way or another. I find the immediacy and freedom of pencil and paper to be something that’s completely intertwined with the way that I think and see things.

"Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride."

- Anthony Bourdain

I really do try and find moments of joy in my every day life. It’s not easy, often, with the way the world is and the usual pressures and demands, but it’s still important to me to try.

When I was in Berlin last week the breakfast room had an automatic pancake machine. Reason enough for a moment of joy in the morning, all by itself. Even better, though, was my first time using it.

I used to do quite a bit of graphic design, especially when I was at university. I remember teaching myself basic photoshop from online tutorials in my late teens and then spending a lot of my time, once I got to university, designing posters for plays, college balls, club nights, charity events and things like that. I’ve still got a reasonable eye for good graphic design, I think, but it seems like my decades old skills have pretty firmly rusted up and - shocking as it may be - photoshop has changed a little in the intervening years.

I've been designing some 1 day online workshops lately and I've been having trouble with one particular workshop. It just wasn't clicking for me, and I couldn't "see" the design as I could with the others. I like to think about the workshops I'm designing for a little while and let my subconscious go to work until things fall into place - and usually, that works pretty well. For some reason though it just wasn't working for me this time. I spent some time noodling away at it but wasn't really making any progress.

When I was a teacher, and had all the space of a classroom, it was very common for my students and I to be working away on huge sheets of A1 paper - drawing out some idea, or mindmapping a text we were studying, or collecting our thoughts together on some topic. We’d then tape them all up on to the way to have an even bigger frame of reference for our thinking.

I’m not a graphic designer by trade but graphic design does mean a lot to me and I’ve always had an eye for, and appreciation of, great design. Much in the words of that brilliant Ira Glass aphorism, I’ve got good taste in graphic design but my own skills… well, they’re not quite so developed yet.

Yesterday I caught a video on the Awwwards YouTube channel by Aaron Draplin of Draplin Design Co.

Draplin is an incredible, and prolific, graphic designer working out of Portland, Oregon in the US. His designs have punchy power, big colour, and vintage sensibilities and I’m a huge fan of the graphic design work he does for a whole range of impressive clients. He also does amazing work for friends, family, small-league businesses, start-ups, and, as he likes to say, “little guys and underdogs.”

Over the last few days, I’ve been making my way, slowly and intermittently, through Rick Rubin’s incredible book “The Creative Act”. A gorgeous, well-crafted, and thoughtful object in and of itself and a collection of short essays, even sometimes just a few paragraphs in length, all exploring the nature of creativity, the life of the creative person, and the act of creation itself. It’s been a deep pleasure to drop in on the book at different times and in different places and meander through these delicate, reflective passages. 

I am fortunate enough to have a home office in which I do most of my work. It’s set up to be a space that works well for me and that I like spending time in. It’s got 1000+ books on the wall, a sofa, pictures and art that I enjoy looking at, a big desk with a big monitor, lots of stationery tucked away in drawers, and lots of technology stored in nicely labelled crates in cupboards. It’s a great space for all kinds of things. Writing emails? No problem. Having Zoom meetings? Fantastic. Doing technical design work? Go for it! But it’s not a great space for creative thinking and for a long time I was struggling to figure out why.

In a classroom somewhere a student is asking their teacher, is this English we are studying or history? What a strange question to ask in the middle of a class on Shakespeare - but these are the divisions our school systems build into the minds of students. Are we doing music now or mathematics? Is this a physics class or philosophy? We do both a disservice to learners and to the knowledge and disciplines we love when we hold fast to the boundaries erected around us as teachers. Boundaries are built, not for the benefit of teachers or students, but for efficiencies of organisational models, labouring under the weight of the status quo.

A small group of participants are gathered around a table. The conversation is curious, urgent, and probing. A large piece of paper covers the surface of the table - heavily drawn upon. The participants consult their notes, plans they’ve been making, and various documents. They suggest strategies, and possibilities, and brainstorm ideas. There are flashes of inspiration, realisations, and questions. They’re chewing on a significant challenge that will take all their skill, experience, and resources to resolve. Finally, they come together, having settled on a way forward.

In the Ancient Greek city of Miletus, there lived a philosopher named Thales. It is said that he was asked by the people why, if he was so wise, he was also poor. Surely if he were truly wise, they said, he would be a wealthy man. He may have knowledge of science and philosophy, they said, but he seemed to have no skill for using them in the real world. Thales sought to prove these critics wrong. Using his knowledge of meteorology, economics, psychology, and his sharp, analytical mind, Thales devised a plan…

My manifesto outlines the big six principles I follow to achieve powerful, innovative, and transformative learning experiences. Everything happens within a relationship. Only authenticity is sustainable. Listen, Ask, Speak. Be what you are looking for. We walk the journey together. And, Let the learning emerge. Taken together these six principles can transform your workshop facilitation, learning and development programme, and learning experience designs.

Asking just the right question, at just the right time, in just the right way is one of the most powerful ways to facilitate any learning experience. A fantastic question can be disruptive, revelatory, inspiring, and even re/disorienting. A great question can be a thought grenade. Asking great questions can be tough though, so how do you handle questions in a way that enhances the learning experiences for your participants?

In workshops and training, I have often used the Design Thinking methodology and Problem-Based Learning in conjunction, both in developing workshops and structuring and facilitating them. I have even run workshops that have taught these processes and approaches to teachers and educators which has always proven to be a transformative experience. In those workshops, I’m very often asked to give an example of these at work and so I took some time to write up one of my favourite case studies for Design Thinking and Problem-Based Learning in schools.

Skeletal, alien creatures roam wild on the beaches of The Netherlands. Tubular bodies and an array of legs skitter along the sand powered by great sails of white cloth and stomachs of plastic. These creatures have not come from some crashed meteor or alien spacecraft but from the mind of a Dutch inventor, artist, engineer, and creator - Theo Jansen. 

We might then ask ourselves, as educators, how can our students approach a challenge, a task, or a puzzle “as if for the first time”? When we set work for students, plan our lessons, and give them assessments, are we teaching them to really pick locks or just to be great at picking one very particular lock? To do this would emphasise skills and tools over memorisation and repetition. We would be looking at a much more holistic approach rather than the targeted learning so many education systems rely on.

This year, much of my reading has been led by a desire for comfort, reassurance, and escape as, I suspect, is the case for many avid readers. I have been revisiting favourite authors such as Ursula Le Guin, John Scalzi, and Stanislaw Lem, as well as particular books like The Lord of the Rings, The Tao Te Ching, and The Odyssey. Much of this is well-trodden territory for me and the familiarity offers consolation as well as the usual pleasures of reading. Alongside these favourites, there have been many books new to me, or newly released from authors I already know well, that have particularly struck a chord over the last 12 months.

Over the past few months I, and a team of colleagues here in Milan, Italy, have been participating in Project Zero’s online course Creating Cultures of Thinking. Along with my responsibilities as a department head I spend most of my time teaching philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge, so the notion of Cultures of Thinking seemed to make obvious and appealing sense to me. Of course we need deep and rich thinking cultures in our schools, I thought to myself. After all, as a philosopher thinking is at the very heart of what I teach . What I came to see, over the months of working with my team and other colleagues in teams around the world, was that there were wider dimensions to building that kind of culture than I’d yet realised.