06. GM Weeknotes 27 Aug ‘21📅
Hello, Welcome! 👋
6 weeks of writing weekly notes and reflecting on the week. I have to say it is really helping me to find patterns, connections, remember achievements and feel satisfied by the week. Sometimes the week feels sporadic but actually doing this brings a sense of understanding of how all the projects, meetings, doodles, conversations etc etc. connect and add up.
If this is your first time reading my weeknotes, welcome! If not thanks for coming back.
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This week’s context 📌
This week was my last official week as “Service Design Intern” at the CCI in Glasgow and mainly consisted of wrapping projects up, pulling together opportunities for the team to take forward and presenting back to a few different teams on the work I had done.
As I eluded to in my previous week notes last week it has also been a great way to reflect on the last 12 weeks and find connections between projects. It was brilliant pulling the presentation together because I saw the vast array of work I had done and the sheer volume of things we did as a team in such a short space of time.
I also got some gorgeous flowers from the CCI team. This team has been such a great bunch of people to work with and create with. I have to say as my first design role it’s been really great! They have been so welcoming and even though we have worked remotely the whole time it feels like a great place to be when I am on calls with the team.
In a great twist as well, they have invited me back as a part-time junior designer whilst I go in to my 4th year at Glasgow School of Art. I could not be more chuffed and excited.
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This weeks format is a little different as most of the week was presenting and wrapping up — as I moved forward through my weeknotes I will not necessarily be working on specific projects so am going to try and think of a different format that suits!
Final Presentations
My final presentation was centred around the work I have done with the CCI over the last 12 weeks. I presented to two teams including my own plus two of my lecturers from Glasgow School of Art.
It’s great to see so much work achieved in such a short space of time.
It also gave me the time and space to think about my value in this role and the type of designer I have been as part of the team.
Other Projects 💻
Pottery News!
I don’t use my weeknotes to talk too much about my “extra-curricular” projects, but one of them is learning pottery. Not necessarily connected to my day job although it exercises a creative muscle, I have now been learning pottery for the last 12 weeks (I took a month off in August). This week was a great week for seeing three mugs side by side, made at separate points in my learning. From left to right — you can see the progress.
Dissertation
As the year starts to draw in for my final year of studies, I have been focusing more on my dissertation work. At the end of 3rd year we created a source review and looked at texts, articles etc. that would be useful for our dissertations. I have spent this week and a bit of the previous re-looking at that and thinking about texts I have read since that point.
My dissertation — although not completely finalised is shaping up to be around “Participatory Practices / Futures Thinking as a methodology for change in a decentralised food system”.
I have been using a number of interesting apps in my stack to collate information that will be good for writing my dissertation — the first is Are.na and the second is Highlighted. Both are great at saving what you are reading & particularly Arena is great for making connections between thoughts and texts, like your brain!
