A mostly photos post – Dalgety Bay

 

Dalgety Bay is just outside of Edinburgh; across the water from it, actually. There is a quite famous bridge there that is on one of the one-pound coins. I will show it to you…

But first – train ride!

Ah sheepy hills.

 We took the train to Edinburgh before continuing on by car. It is nearing Christmas, and BY GOD if I thought Edinburgh was busy last time I was there…
Yeah, whew, the place was mobbed*. But we didn’t stay there long. We just popped into this one domey building to wait for our ride and maybe have a drink (we didn’t, thanks to the massive queue). It was quite the place. Edinburgh sure knows how to do Christmas.

*New British word usage: means ‘very very busy’.

And it smelled like cinnamon.

 

ooo. Sparklez.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the time we got there, it was dark, surprise surprise, so naturally my next photo is of dawn I was quite determined not to waste that day.

 

 

Sun on Suburbs

The area had lots of good walking, and even a beach or two!

That pointy thing is some sort of WWII communication device.

 

This was also a remnant from WWII. It had a turny gun-thing.

A ways down the beach, and you come to this old Kirk. We could go inside and everything, up to the second floor and into the main hall area below. There was also a really cute cemetery around it (yes, I can call a cemetery cute) whose gravestones often had the peculiar fashion of almost cartoony skull-and-crossbones decorating them. 

 

 

 

 

The Kirk.

And from the side...

 

Now tell me that's not just the sort of skull you would expect to find in a Flash video, eh?

 

 

 

 

Inside the Kirk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And out we go again.

On a completely different note, the last day of school was yesterday.

People have already started to leave and I’m pretty sure the time from here until Thursday (my date of departure) will be one big goodbye party/photo-taking fest, so I’m likely to be pretty busy. Also, I’ve got to get my Christmas presents and cards together and pack my stuff and get my files from school. Oh my.

I don’t really want to leave.

Wait, scratch that.

I really don’t want to leave!

It’s been so good here… and I can’t really bring any home with me. After I go, there will be nobody in my physical vicinity that I can reminisce with about my stay or talk to about how different/the same it was. This makes me sad. I hope when I get home that there will still be some sense of permanence; that I don’t feel like I just dreamt it all.

 

 

 

 

 

Schoolio and periphera

So what on earth have I been doing i school this whole time? The GWR project ended weeks ago and I’ve said nothing on the subject since. I apologize (in the general direction of whom, I am not sure) for my negligence.

So, first off, I don’t think I’ve really described how Design School works around here – it is a different system. For one thing, saying “school” means Highschool. Specifically. When people ask what I do, I have to remember to respond “Uni” not “school”, or I really weird people out in bars and such. But I would say the main difference between here and home is the lack of a credit system. I am in one class. In this class, the try to cover topics like ergonomics, sociology and such kind of on the fly. We’ve had several presenters from various companies come in to do workshops with us on how they do things there. So far we’ve had three: two on organizing data and working in larger teams, and one that I will get into in a minute as it is very relevant to our current project. Art History/Design History is kind of broken off from the main studio class. It is held on Tuesdays and is presented in lecture form. I just handed in our first (and only, for this term) short essay assignment. It was a book review. Why? Because next term everyone is going to have to start on their dissertations for their degree, and this was really just practice for the rather massive document that everyone here will have to produce to earn their degree. I should really do a post on the book I read though. It was awesome. “Culture Jam” by Kalle Lasn. If I can figure out how to do attachments on this blog, I am so attaching my homework :P.

So – current project.
Right now we’re doing a sociology project. We’ve had to go out and do our own field research, after doing a workshop on how to conduct field research in the first place and how to design effective tools for gathering information from people. The general public is a slippery fish to question.

Working at GSA always, for some reason, results on a profusion of sticky notes. Now, don’t me wrong, this method of working as a group works better than any I have encountered at ECIAD, but it took a bit of getting used to. Every time we had to get together to work in a group, someone would cast about for a giant piece of paper to take notes on and, more recently, a bunch of little portable stickies to populate it.

For our last project, we got to work with Glasgow Wood Recycling, a small social project surviving on grants with a budget of approximately £100. We did our best.
For this project, we are working with Skills Development Scotland: a sort of merger project between four large government services that aim to provide a range of career services to various areas of Scotland. As an indicator of the difference in scale between this project and the last, SDS has a budget of several million pounds. The have hired us as a supplement to other research firms, but still, it’s cool to think that we can make a difference.

A couple of employees from the consultancy company Red came in to work with us this week to help us get meaningful results out of our data. We learned how to use the program ATLAS, which is used to store and categorize and access qualitative data. It’s really a very cool program, even though the interface looks like something from the 90’s. I have never seen anything like it before. I liked what Red did so much I think I am going to apply for an internship there for summer. What’s the worst that could happen?

I will post again on this subject when I have more photos, but this time I compiled the PDF, so even if I don’t have jpegs, at least I have our latest presentation. Before I leave, I will gather all our files from both projects into an area of ether that I can access at home. Right now, they are all loafing about on the PD shared server.

Wow, that was a lot of text. If anyone read through all that, you have my congratulations. I couldn’t even write it the whole way through without stopping twice for tea.

 

Football first

chair-on-a-point

The other day (well, evening) I got to watch my first football game in Glasgow. It was the Celtics versus Manchester (not the Rangers, but a hot game, nonetheless) and, of course, I had the luck of arriving with the only ManU fans in the whole bar. Andy risked his neck cheering for the wrong team, and collected dirty looks the way pockets collect change, but also made a good point when he said that having *nobody* from the other team in the same room for a game can make for a very stale atmosphere in a bar. So he was just keeping things lively. And yes, also managed to keep things friendly; good on him.

 

A cool thing about going to bars in Glasgow is that I keep seeing bits of design that have popped up in my research for other projects at Emily Carr. Take this chair, for example; I’ve seem pictures, but I never thought I’d actually run up on one in my everyday life. PS. the word “shit” has an ‘e’ on it here, and the word “rubbish” can actually be the more offensive of the two. “Shite” can often be used jokingly or sarcastically, but rubbish always refers to something genuinely crappy.

Like pallets! But we’re having some fun with them anyway.

Just checking, but yes, they are utterly unsuitable for decking.

 And we’re building giant wooden frames to display the GWR products in: quite an undertaking.

Posing as a wooden product. (Sorry for the sideways, got lazy there)

 

 

 

It's 2m long, and Jenny and I were in charge of building something to keep the things upright.

 We decided on some metal brackets, which we had to make in the metal shop. So I got to learn how to weld! Yay! We wore all the right eye protection, but Jenny managed to get a sunburn. Lol. I suspect my other Jennyfriend would have been similarly afflicted. Jennys + UV = pinkness.

welding practice. Blob. Bloblob.

And these are our lovely supports. And they worked! Tomorrow I will post a picture of their working-ness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now for a random photo of a blue alley:

The alley outside the Buff Club.

ciao!