CDTlog

Since I started working at the Royal High in August we have had 4 or 5 visitors to the school mostly ex pupils who are now studying or working in the Design Industry. As a new teacher here I have been really impressed by the links that have been maintained between these people and the teachers and also the insightful and creative presentations that these former pupils have given.

On Thursday,  Scott Salter – who was in the first ever Advanced Higher Graphics class (a claim to fame indeed) – visited to talk to our fifth and sixth years about his journey from making his choices at school to where he is now working as an Industrial Designer.

Scott’s presentation was a frank, thoughtful and insightful description of his life from sixth year to the present date. He made some challenging points and had a clear message – choose your path for the right reasons.

He questioned the sixth years as to how they are getting on with their UCAS forms and recalled his experience about the huge emphasis placed on filling in the form correctly and making the ‘perfect’ personal statement. He then challenged this, saying that it’s not the codes and words that are important, it is about the student knowing what they want to do. He encouraged our students to reflect about this, to make sure that they are taking the right steps in their future education. He encouraged them to take a gap year, a valuable time in his own life where he was able to reflect and change his mind from studying architecture to Product Design Engineering at Glasgow University. He took a year out working at Benmore Outdoor Centre and felt that it helped him prepare for the reality of university which needs a lot of maturity and independence to be successful in. He also emphasised the importance of vocational courses, particularly in terms of getting a job after qualifying.

From my perspective as a teacher, I learned a lot about Scott’s frank recollections of university – in particular the ability to be able to stand up and present your ideas to your tutors and peers and importantly be able to take criticism about your work and build from it. In my opinion the school environment makes it too easy for pupils to be spoon fed or always praised about their work especially in the Design environment where there are not black and white solutions to a problem. Nick Hood, a teacher from Fife  blogged about this a few months ago, using praise effectively for students to develop. I hope to incorporate more opportunities for pupils to stand up and present their ideas to their classmates and also to be able to offer constructive critisism.

Scott recommended for prospective university students to challenge university tutors at the interview stage, particularly asking about the details of first year coursework and not to be seduced by glitzy final year projects. He explained that the first three years of his design course were years of solid groundwork where he studied maths and physics in detail giving him the skills and knowledge needed, for example to be able to conduct stress analysis on materials. It was only in his fourth year that he was really given the creative freedom to design a solution to a problem, spending four out of five days at the Glasgow School of Art.

Scott’s experiences of working as a Product Designer first at Benedetti’s and now at Bell Isolation Systems, a small company which designs and manufactures its products on the same site. Scott has had a wide range of experience and talked to our students about the good, the bad, and the ugly points of being a designer. He emphasised the importance of being able to decide ‘when good enough is good enough’ explaining that for companies to be productive they need to put products on the market to be sold. It isn’t effective for a company to be developing a product, for example, the i-phone for seven years, instead they products need to always be developed and released to the market at appropriate stages of their development. He also talked about the importance of the design cycle and good management of a design team.

We would like to thank Scott both from the pupils and staff for coming up to spend some time with us and hope to be working with him in the near future with our Higher Product Design classes. Having someone external to education who is knowledgable and relevant in their field is of huge benefit to our pupils and our own development – so thankyou!