Hi David I found the blogging great fun last year and a good way of keeping in touch with everyone. Will you publish links to this year's blogs so those of us who still check the blogs can watch the progress of the new bloggers? Thanks Jackie
Question: do you listen to music while you design? Are you the kind of person that cracks open a party pack of Bud and sticks on your favourite Extreme Noise Terror CD or are you more likely to be sipping red wine accompanied by some Debussy chamber music? OK, so it's not just music is it? Somehow, design, music and alcohol just seem to go together like Tomato, Mozzarella and Avocado. In fact, toss in a Tricolore Salad to the mix and you're in heaven... right? Or does none of this mean anything to you? Are you sitting, quietly absorbed in your own thoughts, painstakingly redrawing that masterplan for the nth time, listening only to the scratch of your felt tipped pens echo off the walls? So, here's my hypothesis; designers like listening to music while they work, especially when accompanied by their favourite tipple. It helps those creative juices to flow, it frees our minds and it makes us more daring. I like to listen to music I know well when I'm doing creative stuff...
Look out for the next issue of the Garden Design Journal. Our Blog experiment is described in the "Pass notes" section of the magazine, along with a link to this page. I guess you'd better make sure that your own blog is ready for public inspection.
I don't know if any of you have been watching Robert Winston's "Child of our time" programme on BBC1 but it has been fascinating. The final programme was all about the various strategies that the human brain employs in order to give and receive information (communication). It turns out that one of the most useful strategies for communication and memory is the creation of a narrative. The most impressive demonstration of the power of narrative was the guy who memorised a random arrangement of 3,000 binary digits (ones and zeros). He was given 30 minutes to set it to memory and then he recited the entire sequence back perfectly. His technique was to build a story around the sequence. It turns out that narrative is also incredibly useful when it comes to oral communication. If you want people to listen to you and understand what you are saying, you must deliver your communication as a story. This strikes a chord with me because I often listen to students describing their...
Comments
I found the blogging great fun last year and a good way of keeping in touch with everyone. Will you publish links to this year's blogs so those of us who still check the blogs can watch the progress of the new bloggers?
Thanks
Jackie
Glad you're still blogging and enjoying it.