A YOUNGER ME (ZIMBABWE 1985)

 

In January 1985 I was working in the Curriculum Development Unit of the Ministry of Education in Zimbabwe. We were producing teaching materials for secondary schools. Pupils had a choice of practical subjects. Some schools offered woodwork and metalwork, some offered agriculture and building.

 

 

My subject was building. Traditionally this had been a course for less intelligent students and restricted to bricklaying practical work. When I joined, the decision had been made to broaden the subject and offer it to all ability levels. We wrote a booklet for teachers to suggest practical work for the new course. This included a schematic breakdown of the course into modules and units with ideas for practical work, problem solving, drawing etc developed in parallel.  Note the hallucinated words generated during AI cleanup. 

 

The booklet was duplicated on poor quality paper from a stencil. Years later I wanted to rescue this work. The digital scans I had were terrible and attempts to enhance them with Photoshop patchy and time-consuming. Now that AI tools have become commonplace, work like this becomes much easier to handle. I have access to AI on my Samsung phone and for this purpose I stumbled on tools built into Microsoft One Drive. The OneDrive “fix” option with “enhance clarity” does a remarkable job, even restoring headings that were clipped in half.

 

The Samsung tools are useful for enhancing the remastered artwork with spot colour. Possible to do this with the bucket fill tools in traditional software, but it takes a while. This was one click (maybe two) and threw in a very attractive variegated brick colour as a bonus. I still have reservations about the use of AI, but bit-by-bit is starting to find its place in my workflows. Nothing too dramatic, but with this booklet I think I can do something that otherwise would never had come to the top of my task list. The amount of manual rework had just become too daunting.

 

One of my ideas was to make a simple training rig that simulated a foundation trench, the process of plumbing down to mark corners, and building up to match a datum peg.  During Covid I decided to retrace the artwork with a digital stylus. The next step would have been to recreate the pages using InDesign or similar. Never happened.

I decided to run this through some of the Samsung options. Quicker than using Photoshop but results are highly variable.  The remastered artwork is bottom right, as created while stuck at home in pandemic mode. Bottom left is “anime.”  Nice and clean. Extra pop from the colours. Top right is “watercolour.”  Even more pop, but perhaps a bit less clarity. Top left is “crayon.”  Positively bizarre but I have found it useful in some cases.