Visual and Creative Thinking:What We Learned From Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

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Visual and Creative Thinking:What We Learned From Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

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Could you do this in 8 Weeks?

“Remarkably this project was completed in only 8 weeks of starting the course.”

I’ve just finished marking, this years students first design project, and thought some of you might be interested in seeing what we do.

Your first project is based around a real client and site as are all the student projects, as I believe its important to give you as much real life experience as we can.

Your first assignment is a courtyard garden, approximate 100 square metres in size

This particular site is in Oxford and is part of a terrace of modern town houses with their garages on the ground floor and the living accommodation on the first and second floors.

The house has an existing balcony for entertaining, but the students have installed a flight of stairs giving access into the garden from the first floor.

The client brief was for no lawn, a substantial water feature and a secondary private sitting space for entertaining and eating out.

Remarkably this project was completed in only 8 weeks of starting the course.

The students have already covered 3 dimensional special design, they have been introduced to computer modelling, have been taught basic rendering techniques as well as studying garden history , art and planting design.

It’s no accident that our students are considered to be some of the best in the world.

I believe as a college we produce better designers in 8 week than many schools produce in one year.

This is down to 3 things

Our schools unique teaching style

The students hard work and dedication

And the fact that all are students are hand picked via a 4 day selection process so we only take the very best.

If you would like to know more about our courses, please visit our website or give me a call at my design office to arrange a personal chat about a possible career change.

Technorati Tags: Garden Design Courses,Courtyard Garden,Student,Garden Plan

Telephone Technique Pt II (Meeting the Client)

In the second part of this video tutorial on sales techniques for garden designers, I look at meeting the client. 

I discuss how to manage this meeting, what to say and when to say it and most important of all how to discussing budgets and design fees.

If you haven’t seen the first part,  click here and watch this  first.

In next months tutorial, we will look at design fees and how to calculate  fees based on both time and % based fee basis.

If you have any ideas on other tutorials you would find useful, please let me know!

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The importance of Telephone Technique!

Today’s video tutorial is on telephone technique and the importance of opening and closing a sale

FEE SCALE

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Is This Good Design?……..or Meaningless Scribbles!

It’s great that so many universities are jumping onto the garden design band-wagon because it not only spreads the word, but helps create interest in the subject.

The problem arises when what is being taught, amounts to little more than ‘meaningless scribbles’. I appreciate what I am saying is controversial but this Video to me, represents everything bad about garden design teaching.

This is not supposed to be a personal attack on Dr. Ann Marie VanDerZanden, but why did she choose such a dreadful design example?  What she is passing off as a ‘typical residential design’, shows a fundamental lack of design appreciation.

The pattern is anything but simple, looking more like an angry jelly fish attacking a building.  Rhythm and line remain unexplained and she then goes on to say that proportion can’t be seen in a plan view….may be not in this design, but it should be there!
Balance was tackled next and asymmetry and symmetry introduced, but to suggest that this ‘amoeba’ is a symmetrical design makes me wonder if we are looking at the same drawing, as there is nothing formal about this plan.

The building looks like it has just landed from space and been 'plonked' onto the landscape.

The organic shapes used, show a total disregard for the geometry contained within the building and to my mind the house and garden quite simply clash.  

I think this design is Awful!!!!! ……….Yet this is the design style being taught to thousands of would-be garden designers around the world every year, by teachers who should stick to horticulture but  never venture near a drawing board!
I appreciate that design is subjective and I would love to talk to these people to understand where they are coming from, however, 70 years after Thomas Church and 40 years after John Brookes why is this mediocrity still being taught?

Technorati Tags: Garden Design,Bad Design

Announcing the World’s First Professional Online Garden Design Course

Online Garden Design Courses.

There's a lot misconception regarding the word online. Our new course is not a correspondence course you download from the web; it truly is online.

All lectures will be watched as on-line video tutorials. There will be interactive online exercises and students will talk to their tutors using web chat and classes will be given via webinars.

This is the closest you can get to being in the classroom attending the lectures in person!

Unlike other colleges, we have refused to offer a correspondence course in garden design as we didn’t believe you could teach art through the post.

Statistically only 3% of people who start a traditional correspondence course, finish them and most courses are little more than very expensive books with telephone support.

Our whole design program has been specially rewritten to make the best use of this new technology and consequently you benefit from a 50% increase in course content.

You will be allocated your own tutor and will follow the course timetable along side the other full time students, participating via the forum, online gallery, monthly webinars and with 1-2-1 tutor feedback.

Our interactive online garden design course is also available to existing classroom taught students, allowing them to revisit lecturers online all the time, as well as overseas students, or those unable to travel, giving them the next best thing to live studio lectures via interactive video tutorials delivered via the internet.

You will be able as listen to your lectures as many times as you wish so as to maximise your learning potential, and you will even be able to listen to the lectures on your iPod/phone/MP3 player while out and about or in the car.

Lectures will be time released to co-inside with the classroom taught program, so both online and face to face students will learn together.

You need to consider your online garden design course as a full time course, requiring a minimum of 25 hours of study a week.

Hand-in dates are strictly enforced. Student who fail to submit work on time are subject to the same rules and regulations as the full time students. (see terms and conditions)

All online material including tutored support is available to students for a period of 24 months from the course start date, after which students have the option a paying an annual subscription if you wish to maintain access to updated course content.

Next Course Start date
30^th September 2010
Click here for further information

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Would you be a better Landscape Designer if you were Dyslexic?

Like most people who find something difficult, I dislike writing intensely, but with my job, it’s an inevitability that has to be endured.

I must confess to being very Dyslexic.  I can’t spell for toffee; never could; and probably never will!

So why  am I so grateful to be dyslexic  and why would that make me a better designer?

First you have to ask your self, are you a left or right-brain person?

As an artist, you might think right, if you're an accountant, you might think left.

In reality, it's not really an either/or situation. Because each half of the brain tends to control certain kinds of thinking, its easy to categorise people as either one or the other.

Left Brain characteristics tend to be, Logical Sequential, Rational, Analytical, Objective.

While Right Brainers’ are considered Random Intuitive, Synthesizing, Subjective and Holistic

But while some people tend to use one side of the brain more than the other, the reality is that the two sides are dynamic and interactive.

When most of you are thinking and learning at your peak, you use your whole brain, switching freely between the halves.  Dyslexics however tend to favour the right side over the left.

Traditional education has been overly focused on left-brain modes of thinking. Logic, sequences, and rote learning have been pushed, and the more creative "big picture" has been marginalized.

This is true for design teaching as well and may account for the sorry state of most student end of year exhibitions. 

Look in most design/architecture books and you still see the old Survey, Analysis, Design or SAD method of teaching predominate.  SAD because it often produces  very SAD looking work .

At the Oxford College of Garden Design I teach the way I would have wanted to be taught myself. We study two styles of Design. The traditional SAD process and John Brookes’ Pattern Analysis.

Pattern Analysis is the polar opposite to SAD.  It looks at shape and pattern based on geometrical theory and allocates the paces and lines with different materials.

As a dyslexic designer i don’t think about space allocation but art and pattern.  I visualise the site as a whole, while creating a series on interlocking geometric shapes, then allocating each with one of the following materials: paving, lawn, water, or planting.

Pattern Analysis could easily be mistaken in the early stages of the design process, for a piece of modern art, such as that created by the 20th century French artist Mondrian. 

The following video is an series of extracts from some of our lectures on design.

You will see the importance of understanding pattern and how shapes link together. 

Finally we will reverse engineer two courtyard gardens to discover their underlying patterns and how they were created.

You may wish to watch the 800x600 version of this on Vimeo to fully appreciate the lesson

Please leave feed back here or feel free to ask questions.

(Sample) GD205 Geometry of Space from Duncan Heather on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: Design Teaching,Survey Anaysis Design,Pattern Analysis,Oxford College of Garden Design,Dyslexia

Can People Find your Website? See our new video tutorial to maximise your business in 2010

Masterclass for Oxford College of Garden Design - Building a Web Presence for Garden Designers from Elspeth on Vimeo.

At the Oxford College of Garden Design we believe good business is as important as good design, so from day one, we start preparing our student to set up and run their own design business (see DG700).

This video, (part of our new interactive online training program), is really useful, for anyone who wants to improve their web page rankings. Called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by following these simple steps you can significantly increase your web presence.  We explain why its important to blog, Twitter, and use social media like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.  

This is probably the most important video tutorial you will watch this year! so if you have found it useful please tell other people where to find it by clicking on one of the social networking links in the top right corner of this blog.

LiveJournal Tags: Oxford College of Garden Design,Master Class,SEO,Web Marketing,Twitter,LinkedIn,Web Stats,Facebook,MySpace,Flickr

Video Tutorial: Understanding Section Elevations

 

Sections are a vital tool in landscape design.

This video lecture explains what they are, how to use them and also shows examples of plan drawings and elevations, showing how they deliver additional information to the viewer, which is otherwise unavailable in a 2D plan.

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