Through The Looking Glass

“You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne

Like a lot of you, perhaps, I grew up with A.A. Milne’s stories of Winnie the Pooh. I never imagined that the ‘Hundred Acre Wood’ was based on somewhere real, nor that one day I would live nearby when raising a family. But the magical landscape of Ashdown Forest in Sussex provided the inspiration for the stories of Pooh and his friends, and is clearly a direct inspiration for the classic illustrations by E.H. Shephard.

So whilst Ashdown Forest is rooted in the past for me, it suddenly took on a whole new dimension when I first started talking to Jess Jorgensen of Sporesight, after being connected by Uri Casademont of Future Days.

Jess uses the world of mushrooms and fungi as a metaphor for leaders and teams to think about what needs to end in order for new life to take hold; “to decompose what needs to rot, and grow what regenerates from the parts.”

And it turns out that Jess runs a lot of this workshops in Ashdown Forest. It sounded too good to pass up as an opportunity for a STEPS Collective field trip, and so this Friday 11th September, we are off into the woods with Jess for a taster workshop.

There are a few spots left it you want to join us - it is free, and all you have to do is make it down to West Sussex to join us. You will take home a mycelium building block, a mini Sporesight booklet and stickers, Decomposition methodology/ toolkit to apply in your practice.

In short, this is more than just a day in the woods looking for Eeyore…

STEPS x Sporesight - Decomposition Day · Luma

We've been talking to Jess Jorgensen about her brilliant research endeavour Sporesight. "Sporesight is a way of thinking, inspired by nature’s intelligence.…

Sign up above, where you’ll find lots more detail about what to bring, when to arrive and so on. It promises to be a very special day.

The future is so hot right now

The future is so hot right now. You see it, feel it, in the present. A reservoir empties, a train rail buckles, one crop limps to half its usual height whilst another enjoys record yields. A beach is full all summer long, rivers and seas become a tempting source of relief. The homes people have saved half their life to afford become sweatboxes all summer long.

Renewable energy production booms whilst emergency services struggle to reach the people who can’t cope. Schools close early, sports teams change their long-standing seasonal habits. Communities and neighbours share necessary new ways to keep cool in the climate crisis. No matter where you live or work, travel or relax, what you call home, eat or exercise, this year’s record high temperatures have changed how places work and how people connect.

Later this month, Rob Phillips, Gem Barton, Elise Hodson, Maria Joseph and myself will run the third edition of our three-day Futures Through Design course at the Royal College of Art in London.

This time we will use 'Heat' as a theme, to employ design methods and techniques to understand the impact of temperature on scenarios, situations and stuff, with a focus on what that means for the places where we live, work and learn.

The course starts on Monday 21st September, and runs for three days. There are a couple of spots left, and after that the next edition will now run in Spring 2027. In either case, please sign up here to learn more and express interest.

Working In Space

Back in May, I was delighted to give a new talk at Watch Me Think at the Conway Hall called Working In Space.

It is about workplaces, notionally, but through the lens of the portrayal of workplaces throughout the cinema of the 20th century - you’ll have to watch the talk to see why.

After I’d finished writing it - and this is a DVD extra for you folks - I remembered that one of the first videos I ever made was for the IPA Excellence Diploma back in 2008, as part of the Brands and Creativity module.

In short, it was a call for people to get out from behind their desks, and find moments of creativity out there in the world. This is something I’ve considered a mandatory part of my working process for the past two decades. You have to go and see what’s going on somewhere.

There’s a great part in The Big Short (2015) where a couple of the protagonists head down to Florida to see if the speculative housing bubble is real.

The scene really lives up to the opening promise by the narrator at the beginning of the film

“These outsiders saw the giant lie at the heart of the economy, and they saw it by doing something the rest of the suckers never thought to do: They looked.”

Related, this piece from Jay Hasbrouck talks about what he sees as a growing demand and critical shift for ethnography in an age of AI:

“Field immersions are forms of experiential learning designed to open up thinking and prioritize action to help teams make impact by developing informed and inspired insights. Many borrow from ethnographic methods such as participatory observation, contextual interviews, or exploratory excursions (sometimes referred to as “safaris” or “missions”). This is often paired with other experiences designed to intentionally foster social connection or facilitate business relationships. Regardless of methods, the focus is on embodied learning through real-world experiences that are memorable and meaningful.”

This gets into why I think The Obliquiscope is such a valuable prompt for sending people out into the world - we give everyone one to keep on the RCA course - because it really quickly begins to make people question together things they have have taken for granted sitting in an office.

I also like to use a variation on Richard Buchanan’s Four Orders of Design with the Obliquiscope too. Look at the surface appearance of things, then the materials they are made of, then the interactions they create, and finally the systems that support them.

When do you need to shift from thinking about workplaces to thinking about working in places? If you’re interested in what how we might be able to help you and your team with this, do get in touch.

Glasses half full

Finally, all this ‘looking at looking’ makes me think of what else arrived in Smithery HQ this week. After 48 years of seeing things clearly, I have finally had to… get a pair of glasses.

They’re reading glasses, not very strong at all, but I should wear them for a lot of screen stuff too I’m told. I’m still getting used to them, obviously, and I have misplaced them once already. And I keep forgetting when I should put them on.

Anyway, I thought here would be as good a place as any to talk about it, just in case we turn up on a zoom call together and you do a double take.

Right then, on with the Autumn…

John V Willshire
08.09.26