has found a new life drawing class that has a bar 50 yards from it.  Life drawing and red wine - things are looking up!

If it were that easy everyone would be doing it.

My Achilles heel throughout the degree has been my presentation. If the winds blowing in the right direction and the gods look favourably then I can usually come up with some OK ideas but trying to convey this to clients has always been immensely frustrating.

Every pin up we have I get ( rightly) criticised for my presentation. At that point I go away and come up with another style and enter the same vicious circle. It culminates in me feeling fairly despairing and Jamie firmly instructing me to sketch more. My reaction to this is the same as when you tell someone you want to loose weight and they tell you to eat less. If it were that simple everyone would be doing it!


This week however I've had to develop yet another presentation style that doesn't look like my 5 year old niece has done it. We were also given old students research documents and among them was Joh Bates. His design identity seemed fairly similar to mine and his presentation was incredibly simplistic. I'd always struggled because I was trying to present a style that was a bit more refined. However it got me thinking about developing a more rustic style and ladies and gents I may just be getting somewhere with it. I've completely redone my sequential sketches and sections this week and they seem to be looking a little better. They certainly show some perspective and depth - maybe Jamie was right ( for goodness sake don't tell him)

We'll see at pin up on Monday...........

If there's one thing this degree is teaching me.....

If 

IF you can keep your head when all about you  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise: By Rudyard Kipling

Second, third and fourth paragraph are irrelevant but the first seems to hit the nail on the head!

Jamie's work load for Master planning is staggering and testing for most of us, especially those of us who juggle home, job and uni. It also seems incredible that so much energy is initially put on Metis and then we break up at Christmas without a resolved masterplan to draw up. 

There's a group consciousness within the class of competition that can verge on quite martyred.  Everyone wants to appear to be doing well and in that want sometimes I can loose sight of the end goal. I signed up for a Garden Design degree and sometimes it feels like a Graphic Design degree rather than Garden Design.  If I spent as much time talking with my lecturers about design layouts as I did font styles and layout I might be a great designer by now. As it is I'm becoming a much better graphic designer. 

Yesterday morning in spite of the snow we had our pin up and Jamie was quite emphatic that we all attended. His exact words were 'I am planning on being there and as I live 60-70miles away I think it reasonable that anyone living closer should be there, however things change and the Uni might make the decision to shut the school (unlikely I think) and we might have a huge amount of snow overnight. I have to leave at 7.30 to get there for 10am so I will know then, I will email you by 8am to confirm whether it is on or off. Currently its on, so anyone with a no show needs a very good excuse (including photographic evidence) if myself and Julia get there.'  

I parked facing downhill, filled the tank up and left Brighton at 6.45am.  Do you ever start a journey and hear the 'Casualty theme tune' in your head.  Yesterday I did. However with Jamie's words ringing in my ears I set off. I managed to get out of Brighton fairly easily as we don't get much snow settling due to the increased temperature and salt in the air.  I then hit the motorway and tucked into the slow lane and pootled up the A23/M25 and A20.  I arrived at Avery Hill to see half the class and them to tell me that Jamie had cancelled. It was cancelled an hour and a half after I left but driving was so treacherous that I didn't check my mobile phone. By the time I'd driven home I had spent 5 hours on the road!

On the long journey there and home I had a lot of time to think!  I got to thinking about ego and control. As a designer clients need to believe in us and our ability to design.  Unfortunately nowadays that seems to be instilled by having an ego that you can barely get in the room and a show garden under your belt. 

Control also must be part of our character as we want to design we will be controlling how people circulate and receive our designs. Jamie undoubtedly has our best interests at heart and wants to teach us how to be a good designer.  However sometimes the pressure he puts on us can be excrusiating.  For me I don't do my best when I am white with panic and fear.

By the time I'd got back to Brighton I was in such a foul mood I decided to take the rest of the day off.  I went to the flicks, walked the hound on the downs and cooked a beautiful dinner.  Then I slept for 13 hours (I'd not slept the night before) I've got so much more done today for not feeling panicked and stressed. 

When I hear Garden Designers talk they either come from a place of huge ego or huge modesty (no, I'm not going to name names). I remember hearing Tom Hoblyn talk at the V and A. After every large commission at the initial brief stage he goes on holiday.  Only round England but the impression I got was that he needed to regroup, relax and see the brief with fresh eyes.  Maybe he feels that without that distance and hitting the refresh button he can't see the job in perspective. Being around such big characters and with such an unrelenting work load at the moment I think that is important for me to touch base more often before I get taken away with the adrenal tide!

The Fun Theory

http://www.thefuntheory.com

This is a really interesting unitive.  Another example of design trying to adjust societies choices.

I particularly like the musical staircase. I have a feeling that may be going into my children's play park.

Having the bravery to specify the simple things

There are little things in life that make me very happy.  One of which is taking my dog (a 14 year old cross breed called Amos) for his quarterly check up and the vet saying he is in mighty fine health for a dog his age. The second is a walk at dusk along my local bit of beach during a spring tide to celebrate Amos's good health.

For the past few days and nights my computer has been a flurry of Illustrated Notebooks for Tom Turner.  In these I've been exploring the principles and influences behind garden design in history, whether societies have taken inspiration from travel, science, religion belief or art.

This got me thinking on my wander.  I should explain, Brighton is a pebbly beach and the only time that Brightonians get to feel sand under their feet is during new or full moons when the tides are more extreme.  It completely changes a sunset as you get the reflection of the horizon in the water and the sand and then you get the very gentle turning of the tide and the gradual loss of the exposed sand. It's quite magical to behold if you can be still and grounded enough to focus on it.

This got me to thinking about living in the moment.  My dog entering the winter of his life means I appreciate my time with him.  He may go on for many years to come but it's unlikely.  I therefore try to enjoy our time, walking him without the constant distraction of a mobile phone and taking the best care of him that I can.

Then it got me thinking about my designs and how bold I will be in trying to get people to earth in whilst in my designed spaces. I know from hitting my 30's that the more time I can spend living in the present moment the happier I tend to be, but I am a sucker for punishing myself (maybe I'm not alone there). When I view my brief's for my designs I'm busy trying to think about the users and how my design will please them. I'm also quite ego driven in that I want to create something unique that will get me lots of attention and praise. When I look at designs by very Zen designers who force you to slow down I always think it's very brave.  But is it brave or necessity, in a society where we have less time than ever do we need more peace in our public spaces. How brave am I prepared to be?

Working with Creativity

This evening was the 21st December,  one of the biggest nights of the year, and the last Friday before Christmas. I'd had a big night planned for quite a while as it was my first weekend after breaking up. The evening started with a chaotic journey home but soon felt better after my first glass of Vino. I find in life the nights where you only plan a quick drink after work turn out to be the best evenings, whereas the evenings in the diary for a month tend to be an anti climax. 

This evening out had followed a pin up on Monday, working physically from Tuesday to Thursday in some fairly adverse weather conditions and then on friday driving to the arse end of Kent on the busiest traffic day of the year for a private lesson with an ex BA student for hints and tips for the next five months. In between work I'd also successfully food shopped, present shopped and done all my cards - all in all, a busy busy week.

The gig we went to see was 'south coast soul revival' at the Brunswick. Their lead singer Ruby knocks the socks off any X Factor finalist (inspite of not watching X factor but having to tolerate Simon Cowell's monopoly on Christmas number ones. If there's a firing line for him I've got the first shot).  Its also clearly something that Ruby loves doing. 

In turn, in my drunken overtired fuzzy, state got me thinking about passions. Ruby obviously does this as she's passionate about singing. I travel 140 miles a week as I'm passionate about design and learning from some really great characters. 

Given my last blog about education and creativity, what would the world be like if everyone followed their passions.  Would we have a glut of over excited over emotional creative either running very high or very low?  I know that if I had an office job right now things would be a lot calmer on the home front - but goodness they'd be boring.  Although I'm really challenged by this degree I am loving it and growing in leaps and bounds both as a person and a designer. 

South Coast Soul Revue photo by James Pike

I guess it comes back to life not being a spectators sport but equally having some balance in that ride.  Bring on 2013! 

Being distracted from Edward de Bono by Ken Robinson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Ken Robinson's talk on Changing Educational Paradigms

Jamie was giving feedback in tutorial about education.  He talked about how it was tending to branch into two directions.  There as the broad vocational based education and then the specialist.  If one wants to design an educational park then one needs to decide whether it's going to specialise or be broad reaching.

This got me to thinking about education as a whole.  I hated my schooling with a passion and it took a lot of courage to return to it in my 30's.

It helped me last year to go for an initial dyslexia screening and discover I'm borderline dyslexic with my word formation.  My memory and problem solving are really strong to compensate for my word formation which is weak.  This therefore means that if I read anything I don't take it in but if I hear it, it's remembered forever!  Very handy to know.

I therefore got to thinking about modern education. When I taught English, I used to do a study skills lesson with my students during the first week of the academic year. All the students I taught were adults and without exception none of them had never learnt how they learnt i.e. auditory, visual etc.  It fascinated me that they'd spent so many years in education without realising how their brains received information.

Once you've then worked out how you learn how do you decide what to include on a modern syllabus. Ken talks in his fascinating lecture about modern educational syllabus's being laid out based on an old fashioned Victorian model.  I find it interesting that children are leaving school as I did with no teaching on how to handle your own finances or a rough outline of politics. Jamie criticised his daughter's school for having a regular Skype chat with 2 schools around the world (I guess the modern equivalent of our pen friends). However I feel this is really important for children to learn that the UK isn't the epicentre of the world and others have very different lives than us.  When I left school at 15/16 I bundled myself off to India for 6 months to travel on my own.  It was a bit scary but I learnt more about life in that 6 months than I did in all my education.

I've decided to put Serious Creativity by Edward De Bono down for a while and replace it with The Element by Ken Robinson.  I'm quite keen to introduce Education and Creativity to my Calverley Ground design, so I need to make some decisions about how I'm going to do this effectively in a public space.  I'd also like it to be a place that inspires rather than preaches.