Not a 'Normal' Placement

We started off the week with an overview talk for the SGN project. The main question we were asked to address over the next few months was ‘How can we reimagine legacy fossil fuel spaces for good’? While we initially thought this project would be laid out for us in methodical steps and processes to arrive at our final design proposals we were very quickly reminded that this placement is not designed to help us arrive at something that ticks boxes and lets us walk away in May with a nice one-liner for our CV’s. This project is going to be part of something much bigger. With a pass for elevated creative license we were advised to go away and “Find out what you need to find out then find out how to find it out!”. While initially we found this statement frustrating and almost a disorganised approach to running a placement; after listening in to the speakers and lectures for the last week and a half we now understand what this means. There is no glass ceiling for this project, and only room for a ‘can-do’ attitude (thanks Andy Scott and Martin Valenti). If we lift any sort of rigid process and limitation from our thinking for what we want to achieve with this small site we have been given to design by SGN, we could arrive at important society shifting solutions for the future, and that’s not a normal placement.

Some Stand out Points Noted from the first two weeks of lectures were:

• Idea Generation: ‘What if I didn’t?’ This is a creative process tool that we can use to come up with alternative ideas for how things work or function:

• “Fail fast to succeed sooner”

• ‘Weltanschaunng’ of the designer o r perspective of the designer is to move beyond observation to intervention and participation. An example of this is ‘Sneckdowns’ or when snow hides pavement knockdowns forcing people to generate their own pedestrian paths in a city. This is an example of how intervention and participation can change design.

• 95% of SGNs Carbon footprint come from “shrinkage” ( a combination of leakage, theft and person use). Of these three shrinkage components the largest is leakage due to Iron Pipes. This is being tackled currently by SGN with a 30 year pipe replacement plan with also changes the pipes from Iron to PE (Polyethylene Pipes) which will also be compatible with their future plans of using Hydrogen to power Scottish homes.

• Every second the ocean is warming up at an equivalent rate of 4 Hiroshima bombs being dropped into the ocean.

• We are currently in an era called the Holocene but scientists believe we are heading for the ‘anthropocene’ - an era named after and age where significant impact on the planet’s surface has occured/ changed. And ‘anthro’ because its the era of impact due to human intervention

• “I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples”. - Mother Theresa

• The most effective carbon stores in Scotland are peat bogs which can store around 500 tonnes of co2 per Hectare.

• We are heading towards a 6th mass extinction

• Andy Scott spent 8 1/2 years working on the kelpies but dreamt up the pair of horse heads and persisted in making them a reality proving that change is possible anywhere no matter how you get pushed back.

• Martin valenti taught us to view climate change as a mountain not a cliff and to be a bold disruptive thinker.

Artwork created by: Jasmine Nicholson

We finished off the week with a lecture from Eva Malone who left us pondering two questions:

1. What impact do you want to have?

2. What is it that you want to achieve?

With a much bigger sense of purpose for this project, these questions are much harder to answer now, then they would have been two weeks ago. But the answers our team will give to these questions at our presentation on Friday will also be a lot more ambitious than they would have been two weeks ago, so the lectures have certainly had an impact.