Month: July 2019

How one pupil’s work experience helped open our eyes to the challenges of inspiring people to join our industry.

A few months ago, we were fortunate enough to be approached by a passionate pupil asking whether she might be able to engage in her work experience with our practice. Being huge advocates of the landscape industry, we of course, jumped at the chance to showcase the landscape architecture profession and last week she joined us for the week.

It was an experience with lots of learning on both sides. We tried to give her the best insight we could into the day to day life of our unique landscape architecture practice whilst she helped draw our attention to some of the challenges facing young people in making informed choices about their career pathway.

We have to admit that we were surprised by being approached by someone at such a young age who actually knew what landscape architecture was. It is our experience that many of even the most seasoned of industry professionals found landscape architecture by chance. That is something that campaigns like #chooselandscape and the landscape institute’s apprenticeship scheme are trying to change. However, our student’s presence with us helped us to see that we’ve a long way to go before landscape architecture ranks as a career of choice for young people.

Careers like architecture, engineering and veterinary science, feature heavily on school careers education programs and are readily discussed in day to day society, where landscape careers are more stigmatised and less well understood. Our student told us of careers talks featuring all the above professions but not one landscape or nature related one. This got us to wondering, is this the norm across all high schools? How then did she come across landscape architecture?  The answer was google. She googled careers where she could combine her passions for geography and design and landscape architecture appeared. And whilst it’s great to know that google is beginning to rank our profession higher and recognise the assorted skills within it, we can’t help but wonder, is there more we can do to encourage young people into this most wonderfully diverse of professions. Should we not all be inundated with requests from young people inspired to do their work experience in this profession?

We were approached by more than 10 separate young people at a recent exhibition, all wishing to be architects and our response to them was this “why not landscape architecture?”. Not one had heard of it.

Having our work experience student in the office, helped us to see the real value of what we do as both a practice and a profession. Being forced into explaining our processes, practices and policies made us really take a step back and assess the value that we add to place and to nature through our sustainability and health strategies as well as through the creativity of design itself.

Trying to cram all the different aspects of our practice alone into one short week was a huge eye-opener to the endless possibilities landscape architecture offers as a wider profession and the need to inspire, educate and inform young people about its place in this precious world. We are place making for the future, for their future and surely, they should be a part of that.

We feel privileged to have had the opportunity to make a (hopefully positive) impression on just one talented person and humbled at her impression on us and are now busily engaged in working out how to inspire more…

Finding solutions where only impossibilities are found 

Hope. It’s the reason why we buy lottery tickets, enter all those Instagram competitions and rebut medical diagnosis in favour of being the one in a million-miracle cure. It’s the reason we chase impossible dreams and above all it’s the catalyst for change.

I have believed for a long time that hope is a more powerful tool than fear and as a practice, it’s a philosophy that runs through the veins of Studio 31. Increasingly today, we live in a world of soothsayers who predict the end of life on earth and point out the imperfections and immorality of our most imperfect of race’s. I don’t doubt the importance of their role in our society and our future; indeed we need the journalists, scientists and academics to help us understand the level of catastrophe we are causing and the depth of the repercussions of our actions. However, we also need solutions.

Enter the X prize. This was recently brought to my attention by a colleague, a hypothesis that in the midst of all the wildly diverse minds on this planet, lie the answers to all the world’s problems. A vision that solutions are collective; born of collaboration, togetherness, community and a firmly optimistic belief that “there isn’t a problem that cannot be solved”.

Yes, it is an organisation born of space travel and yes, there are those that could, perhaps rightly, argue the unsustainable motivations of its past, but that first seed of hope has sparked true innovation, creativity and technological advances that have the power to change the world. Its mission now is to create a ‘future for this planet that we can be proud of’ and it seeks to provide people with the motivation (financial and otherwise) to seek solutions where only impossibilities have been found before.

Peter Diamandis said “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea” and that’s true. It’s hope though, that transforms that crazy idea into a reality and organisations like the X prize that seek to bring together the hopeful with the “crazy ideas” to a common cause and greater good…as landscape architects maybe there are synergies there.

 

Photo by Nagara Oyodo