MY DIGITAL JOURNEY - PART ONE

 

In 1987, I was seconded to the University of Zimbabwe to create a new course in the faculty of education. I devised an intensive one year course to upgrade secondary school building teachers to degree level. I had really been thrown in the deep end, but by staying up late every night, preparing for the next day, I was able to keep my head above water.

 

One thing that really helped was that I had my own computer. My dad had managed to pick up an Amstrad PCW 8512 In UK and bring it back to Zimbabwe. With this I could devise my own handouts at home ready for photocopying the next day.

The method was still basically the same. Devise the page layout on screen and print out the text. Add illustrations, either by drawing directly in the gaps, or by pasting ready-made images by hand.

 

I wasn't yet aware of Desk Top Publishing. At least it wasn't available for the home market. It would take another couple of years before I started to dabble in that world, with my first IBM compatible setup.

Here you see one drawing exercise, linked to a study of architectural styles in Harare centre, and one practical brickwork exercise. Oh for the days when my body had the flexibility and stamina to build something like this.

 

In 1989 I resumed my architecture career some 18 years after "dropping out". It's tricky to be a green "assistant" at the age of 40. People assume you have more experience than you really do. I knew lots about bricklaying and teaching. I had a keen interest in the history of building styles and technologies. But designing buildings, and thinking like an architect? Definite case of impostor syndrome there.

This was a little private job that the office passed on to me because there was no way they could make it pay, or wanted to assume liability. Leaky mess left behind by cowboy builders. I actually knew the client vaguely from my time in curriculum development. I don't know if my proposal was implemented, and I don't know if it worked.

I show it here as an example of my hand-drawing, builder-centric approach to rejoining the profession. I still had a computer at home and I wanted to keep writing building books, but time was limited. I played around with a primitive desk top publishing package. And eventually got my hands on a thing called TurboCad. But all the while, my day job for two years was spent standing at a manual drawing board. Parallel motion, adjustable set-square & Rotring pen on A1 sheets of tracing paper with pre-printed title blocks.

There was a physicality to this work that the digital desktop lacks. We had to scratch mistakes out with a razor blade. How magical the undo button seemed on first encounter. But gradually we were sucked into a virtual world, trapped in side a screen, one hand tethered to a mouse.

 

In 1990 I applied to return to university and complete my training as an architect. I had survived two years working at the drawing board, going to site meetings, writing up minutes. I almost got a scholarship to Australia, but that fell through. Luckily perhaps because Joburg was much closer, a 24 hour coach ride, including the border stop.

It was a non-standard admission. I prepared a portfolio/CV as an A4 booklet. This is quite normal today of course but something of a novelty at the time. The text was all computer generated but the illustrations were pasted in by hand.

 

I enjoyed the process of redrawing a selected group of projects, simplifying and abstracting to better highlight my design ideas. It gave me a chance to reflect on those two years of transition. Working in an architect's office, gradually distancing myself from the worlds of bricklaying and education that had been my rite of passage.

 

How did I imagine my future? It's hard to rewind the brain thirty three years. A young father with three wonderful children but a shaky marriage. Embarking on a new profession in a young African country, full of promise. Trying to fuse blues guitar with African rhythms and themes.

Life is a roller-coaster. Maybe that's the point

AFRICAN JOURNEY (DIGITAL DREAMS)

 

1982. Volunteer building teacher in Zimbabwe. It was a challenging experience. The only Murungu (white guy) in a community of 1000 souls whose first language was Shona. I was bubbling with ideas but also frustrated with my headmaster and a legacy of rote learning. Trademark white boiler suit, standing next to my my bed, two mattresses on a cement floor. Classroom "in the trenches" Trying to integrate learning and production.

 

 

 

I dedicated one school break to using my previous experience of layout and illustration to create a "workbook" It was a mish-mash of ideas, a statement of intent, using an electric typewriter, a Rotring pen and a small can of cowgum. Zimfep the umbrella organisation for six experimental schools, including Rusununguko where I was based, ran off a bunch of copies.

 

 

That was another pivotal moment in my journey. No hint of the digital onslaught here. I had been projected back in time to a world with limited access to electricity, but it was coming and this little project pulled would pull me into head office, the curriculum development unit and my first encounter with the BBC micro.

 

The workbook I produced with Zimfep was instrumental in my recruitment to the Curriculum Development Unit in Harare, where I stayed for three years. This was such a positive period of my life. I had enjoyed teaching "out in the bush" but there were also many frustrations. Living conditions were challenging and the headmaster's leadership style rubbed me up the wrong way.

 

The practical teaching experience was invaluable as I threw myself into the business of creating teaching materials. Now I could get my teeth into some serious layout and illustration, with no shortage of ideas for the content, structure and didactic approach.

At first it was all done by hand, manual cut and paste. Oddly enough the most tedious element was the text. Getting it to fit the allocated space, reviewing the phrasing for clarity and age appropriateness. Careless typos.

 

 

My coworker Malcolm was typing up the galleys and he was also an avid networker. He soft talked the science team into letting us borrow one of their "BBC micro" computers. I was an instant convert to word-processing and spreadsheet software, crude as they were at that time, with a tiny green-screen monitor and 360k floppy as the only storage.

Almost 40 years ago, my digital journey was beginning.

 

 

PUBLISHING PREQUELS

 

This was the cover of my grammar school magazine. It would be impossible to convey what a radical break with tradition it represented.

My last two years at school were quite bizarre. I wonder how much that influenced my trajectory in life. In theory my time was devoted to "double maths and art" in part because physics, maths and art didn't fit the constraints of the timetable.

In practice I encountered Mr Wood, a maths teacher with a difference. There were four of us, I think, doing the double. He had come through a rough school in Sheffield as I remember and embraced a radical approach to education of his own devising. The class who took roll call in his room were allowed to rearrange their desks!!!

Anyway, we covered the syllabus of maths and further maths in about three hectic weeks. Thereafter it was up to us to set our agendas and ask for his help where we needed it. The result was that I spent most of the next two years in the art studio, painting.

We also did photography and a couple of us were introduced to magazine layout (cut and paste in the original, literal sense)

Page layout stayed with me as a side interest and motivated my early adoption of digital methods. But that will be another post. In 1968, I had no idea what the digital transition was going to do to my life and to the human story. I was a precocious teenager, soaking up the visual arts and exploring the palpable spirit of freedom that was in the air.

 

Schoolboy pranks are generally harmless. I was a pretty quiet kid, but towards the end of my school career that morphed into "quietly rebellious" Blame Spike Milligan and John Lennon if you like.

So, as one of the main layout artists for the new style school magazine, I was able to slip in a fictitious member into the team credits. This was Brian Butchinson, an obscure in-joke. It got me into trouble, as did the decision of two of us to walk around the cross country course in protest. (Most boys ran the first and last hundred yards, in a show of conformity) We walked the whole thing.

You could call it "late onset teenage rebellion" perhaps. I opted to study architecture in London because that's where all the exciting new ideas seemed to germinate, grew my hair long and generally started to believe that we were creating a new and better social order. Make love, not war, all that kind of thing.

The magazine layout experience came out in various ways. One of them a publication called ACDC (amateur cake decorators chronicle) which lampooned architecture as little more than icing to disguise the property developer's nefarious agenda.

The technology used was a spirit duplicator (Banda machine) It was a bit like making carbon copies but using waxed paper and highly concentrated inks. You could run off fifty or so multi-coloured copies.

 

I hung around in London after my first degree, even though I had opted out of the next part of my "training" When did I tell my parents that I had abandoned the professional track in favour of some vague revolutionary zeal? Our world views had drifted apart with remarkable rapidity, with me doing all the heavy drifting.

The small scale printing and publishing theme continued to crop up. David Gestetner was a Hungarian Jew who set up shop in Victorian London with a breakthrough technology for office duplication. Faster than hand copying, simpler and cheaper than sending it out to the local typesetter and printer. In the sixties, Xerox copiers emerged, but by 1972, were not yet viable for larger runs.

The technology that caught my attention was the electrostencil. You put a paper original and a Gestetner stencil side by side on the drum and it produced a distinctive, slightly grainy stencil with both text and images. This is what we used for a subversive "coarse guide" handed out to new students entering the Bartlett.

The message is naive in retrospect, but I'm still quite proud of the drawings and layout.

 

During my "subversive year out" I got to know Roger, who was squatting in Islington and set up a small offset litho operation in the basement, branded as a "free press"

I was also exploring "free school" and "deschooling" ideas. I bumped into a group of teenagers who wanted to publish a magazine and decided to work with them. So this was another iteration of my layout /illustration/ ideological journey.

My views on the school system have oscillated over the years and I'm not sure there is a simple answer, or a one size fits all answer to education. For my own children I was happy for them to go to a government school with a fairly traditional approach, because there was a lot of positive energy, a diverse population and high standards. This was in Zimbabwe, and I wanted them to be prepared to deal with the realities of life there.

I have some concerns about ideological capture of schools in the west in recent years. Hopefully my grandchildren will not be too impacted, but I am conscious that my generation laid the foundation for some of the craziness that is taking place now.

But that's another story 🤔

 

 

After the school magazine in 1968 (and a few subversive student pamphlets) my next big venture into the world of page layout came in 1980, when Nick Wates and Caroline Lwin invited me to illustrate a book about squatting. We had all been students at the Bartlett school of architecture (school of environmental studies) and had squatted in the Tolmers Square area.

 

I just loved to draw. Fundamentally that's been a core motivation for almost 70 years now. The tools have changed, but the appeal of taking a blank sheet and letting my instincts go at it, that's been there since before my first day at school.

 

 

While working on "Squatting, the Real Story" from their home-office in Limehouse, I became aware of the looming digital incursion into the world of page layouts, newspapers, magazines and books. I had no access to computers yet, but I had done enough painstaking manual rework to understand the potential.

Strange to look back on those days of innocence...