Drunken weekend

IMG_0793.JPG, originally uploaded by artistry.

Last weekend I played host to Matt and Shaun for a calm weekend of, ooh, drinking, pizza, Xbox, bitching, lewd conversation and - ultimately - dreadful hangovers.

Matt and Shaun are graphic design graduates of mine from Brighton (well, I say 'mine', clearly my input was marginal).

Friday night I showed them the Dundee Contemporary Arts centre, though no art was consumed, it has to be said (I mean, they're not students anymore, they don't have to pretend - and nor do I) and over pizza and Stella Artois we watched Tom Baker in The Pirate Planet, a rather strange Doctor Who story from the 70s written by Douglas Adams.

On Saturday I showed them Edinburgh and we completely failed to make it to the Pixar exhibition. We did, however, stand outside the castle (third time I've been there, still not been in, thanks to the extortionate entry fee), go to 'World of Whisky' in the hope of a free tasting (sadly denied) and find a comic shop five minutes before it shut. (Which was quite handy as I found a couple of collections of PvP (my favourite comic strip) but couldn't remember if I had one of them or not (memory like a small metal thing with holes in it) so being kicked out potentially saved me a few quid (oh yes, I'll pay £7 for a comic book but not for entry to one of Scotland's most historic buildings!)

Saturday night, back in Dundee, we drank, ate too much Indian, and staggered back to watch a recording of that night's Doctor Who episode during which Shaun fell asleep and I wondered what makes Russell T Davies fool the world in to thinking he can write drama...

Anyway, a full 'safe for work' pictorial record is available if you are so inclined.

'David Hume could out-consume...'

IMG_0787.JPG, originally uploaded by artistry.

Growing up a Monty Python fan I learnt more about philosophy and the great philosophers than you could ever wish to know (if you're not a Python fan the title of this post will mean nothing).

Anyway, this is David Hume's old house in a little close off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. (Actually, his house could have been the less picturesque one on the other side, but I doubt it).

I read Hume as part of my degree - a very interesting and readable man, still highly relevant today.

That person there completely failing to be impressed is Shaun, an ex-student of mine up for the weekend.

'You can see the sea, it's over there between the land and the sky'

IMG_0967.JPG, originally uploaded by artistry.

It's worth the climb to the top of Balgay Hill behind my flat in Scotland. One minute you're in a post-industrial landscape, the next you're in the second best scenery in Britain (after Yorkshire, natch)

If you really want to see the rest of the photos from this walk, head over to my Flickr set

Buddy

IMG_0945.JPG, originally uploaded by artistry.

Weird-looking buds on the trees...

Daffodils: it's spring at last!

IMG_0924.JPG, originally uploaded by artistry.

Spring arrived for real this week in Scotland - real t-shirt weather. So off I went up the hill behind my house to take a few shots...

User interface design and airports

Here's a really interesting blog entry from Andy Budd* that looks at user interface design compared with airport design. Well worth a read.
One of the interesting things to come out of it is that BAA, who run UK airports, booted McDonalds out because their customer surveys found people thought they were unhealthy. The last time (first time too!) I was at Gatwick I noticed, as does Andy, that the food on offer was much better than at, say, Heathrow (I've also only flown from there once - I don't get around much).

Anyway, it's worth looking at if you're one of those designers that thinks asking the audience what they think is a waste of time...

If airports were built like most modern websites, finding your way around would be a nightmare. In order to extract the most money from visitors, the airport would be littered with signs for shops and restaurants. These would take priority over less revenue generating signs for gates or toilets, which would be placed wherever there was space. The marketing department would insist on huge banners advertising their latest offers, and the maintenance men would hang them wherever it was easiest to reach, often covering up existing signage.

However, as Andy will no doubt discover, Edinburgh airport is a different matter. Sure, healthy(ish) food options and clear signage, but a bugger to get away from, seeing as it's built a convenient 30 minute bus ride from the station, even though the train actually passes right by the airport. And finding that bus, whether coming or going, is not the easiest thing in the world. Certainly if you're catching it from outside either Haymarket or Edinburgh Waverley, you pretty much have to guess where to get it out of the many stands available.

*Four years I lived round the corner from him and we never met. It may be a small world but Brighton's clearly a big town...

I'm moving to New York!

Click on the image for a larger version.

Via Richard Florida

Rejection hurts

I got an email today to tell me that a paper I submitted to a journal had been 'rejected'. This is a major blow and I'm sure any student I've ever failed will take great delight in my feeling of utter, well, rejection when I read the word.
I wondered why the paper had been dealt a terminal knock and I reluctantly logged in to read the reviewers' comments. I thought maybe one had rejected it, but the other might have accepted it (it's the worst one which always counts).

I was stunned to see that both had 'rejected' it. Several strong cups of tea later I got hold of the anonymous feedback and saw that, in fact, my paper had scored quite well in all the important areas, but quite low in ones that didn't matter ('theory' for example - it isn't a theoretical paper, but a descriptive one on design education policy). The problem is, the reviewers had scored me low on that and factored it in to the overall percentage (which you're not supposed to do!) leading to the equivalent of a 'C minus'.
And they hadn't actually rejected the paper but given it a 'resubmit with revisions' which is pretty normal, so I was a lot happier than the original email had made me (cue short reply suggesting a more tactful way of telling me the news in future!).

But then I had the pleasure of reading the actual remarks. These were interesting.

One said the paper was too general, the other said it was too specific.
One said it lacked references to other literature, the other said it relied too much on it.
One said it was of no interest to an international audience (but had obviously not been in the presentation where it was deemed to be of great interest given that similar issues are happening everywhere).
One said it had no conclusion, the other said it had too strong a conclusion.

So you see the problem...

Reviewing a paper is difficult. I did one the other week and rejected it outright but spent about an hour providing a lot of very detailed feedback to the author on why. These two reviewers didn't go beyond short statements that occasionally made sense but often made me wonder if they'd actually read the paper at all.
But I have to be honest - I hated the damn thing. It was good in its first form but was about three times as long as was allowed. After the editing process it read like a lump of crap and I wasn't happy. So in a way I'm glad I have to rewrite it, which is what I was going to do anyway until the deadline hit me. In a way it's like I've got a two-week extension on my essay!
One bit of feedback was useful in that it confirmed what I knew: the structure was all over the place and that's another consequence of the editing process - I normally write without much editing and the structure develops itself, but here I'd move things around so much the argument got lost.

So a rewrite beckons, though I don't plan on spending my Easter break on it as I really need a work-free holiday. I'm okay about it because, as I said, I thought it needed a reboot. But the experience has raised a lot of questions for me about the refereeing process, especially as the journal (like many) has a policy of not reviewing reviewers' comments. There are some that I really could go to task on, and a couple that are just silly.

Given the amount of checks and balances that go in to marking undergraduate dissertations it's odd we don't do the same to ourselves. One of the reviewers appears very knowledgeable about design but ignorant of British policy towards design education, the other doesn't seem to know some of the key pedagogical theorists; consequently both made comments that struck me as extremely odd. I'm not impressed by the seeming randomness of the process - if I were asked to review a paper in a field I didn't feel expert enough, I'd send it back.

If I'm wrong, and the reviewers do know their stuff, it's not clear in their comments - I once read a review a colleague received and the reviewer had made it very clear they were an expert in the area, and the criticisms were well-taken. In this case I got nothing from the reviews at all. I hope when I review work, whether it's a peer's research or a student's essay, that my critique is informative and constructive. I think that should be a rule.